Comical Musings

Mortality is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing to have to confront. Perhaps a friend develops cancer and has to go through multiple debilitating treatments, trading a few body parts so the whole can survive. Perhaps someone from school gets into a terrible accident, and the next time you see him, his reconstructed face is resting on a pillow in a pine box. Perhaps you find yourself trying to help your parents or grandparents as they slowly lose their old vigor. Or perhaps your barber or hairstylist innocently asks if you’ve been painting because that big blotch of gray certainly wasn’t in your hair last time. Whether the trigger is profound or vain, at some point most people come to realize that their lives have an inconvenient tendency to get cut short.

Some people spend their time bemoaning this fate. Others take solace in religion or other spiritual activities. And yet others do their best to get a good laugh out of things, because if they didn’t, they would probably die. Jin Wicked, cartoonist behind A Dollar Late and a Day Short, is one of these. In the FAQ page of her previous comic (Crap I Drew on my Lunch Break), Jin notes that her comics are a way to vent frustrations that would otherwise lead to unhealthy physical reactions (perhaps even lethal ones) and face mortality on her own terms.

So perhaps this is why I feel more inclined to give her a pass on being political. And a little raunchy. (Which is to say, not always work-safe). And kinda salty. Or even more raunchy. I mean, when you see Jin’s poor-little-urchin eyes melting into a woebegone expression or her desperate nostalgia, you just sort of want to hug her and make everything better. And occasionally someone does.

I am enamored of Jin’s drawing style. She’s deliberately simplified her artwork since the days of CIDomLB, giving her a comic she can save effort on and freeing up time for her other work. The result is a comic of thick lines and soft curves that somehow makes even death scenes strangely adorable. And of course, the contrast between wide-eyed Jin and her more down-to-earth boyfriend makes for a nice visual pun.

So on the one hand, DL&DS is pessimistic and frightening, and it hasn’t updated in close to a year. And on the other hand, it’s just so darn cute.

Comic Rating: Four kinds of gifts I know to be more careful about giving.

I hope you don’t mind the filler image for this week, seeing as I spent the past week doing a lot of helping out with food, decorations, food, singing, and food. Hope the past week was a merry one, and here’s to another good week while I work on getting more things ready.

I have something of a soft spot for science fiction. Some of this might be that I grew up reading “the good stuff”—my dad has an extensive collection of Asimov, Niven, Card, Heinlein, Clarke, and others, so I had a pretty steady supply of sci-fi as long as I could get past the bats in the attic. As a result, I managed to avoid the brunt of Sturgeon’s Law, and the tales of the improbable hold a special place in the stacks of my heart, on the other end of the room from the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett and just past the shelf of O. Henry.

So I was intrigued when a cartoonist named fluffy submitted her* comic, Unity, for review. When a comic starts with a purple-skinned amnesiac thinking in a computer font, you know that what will follow is either science fiction or ergotism. Or, as the case is for fluffy, synaesthesia. (A certain amount of this information is what I’m picking up from the “easter eggs” to be found throughout the comics; a lot of webcomic artists enjoy hiding bonus commentary in the alt-text of their comic images. This can be entertaining or frustrating, depending on how much text is suddenly revealed when you hover your mouse.)

The art of Unity is somewhat variable. At times, there are highly detailed character shots and backgrounds; at others, plucked emus in footie pajamas. From a print publishing standpoint, I’m intrigued by the choice for different characters to speak in different typefaces—a good way to differentiate between characters speaking, but sometimes irritating.

There is a lot of nudity, but when the nudity involves beings descended from the common platypus, there’s not much to be seen (no mammaries, no external privates). Sexuality does crop up a lot in Unity, however. Main character Juni is the neutered virgin-birth clone daughter of a lesbian witch-doctor, while her partner, Sam, is female in anatomy but male in pronoun. This becomes something of a plot hook, as it becomes revealed later that many members of Juni’s species are treated as prostitutes outside of their native lands.

It seems that Juni’s people, being electrically sensitive like their distant forebears, have the potential to recover the information left behind by the ancient creatures who created their world, if only they weren’t so primitive a culture. But it takes a lot of confusion, plotting, counter-plotting, and murder to figure all this out from square one. I have to hand it to fluffy for managing to tie so many baffling story threads into a coherent plot, in spite of the number of interruptions and random art pieces that get thrown in.

One final note: the animated 404 error page is strangely hilarious.

Comic Rating: Three or four recipes I kinda want to try now.

* Fluffy is a bit of an enigma. To my knowledge, fluffy prefers a gender-neutral pronoun, as does the protagonist of Unity. The trouble in this is that it gets hard to differentiate between an it referring to the comic, an it referring to the main character, and an it referring to the cartoonist. In the interest of clarity, then, and because fluffy appears as a human with breasts and a skirt in some of the early journal comics, I will be using her to denote the cartoonist. I offer my apologies to the alternate-gender community, as well as to the American Usage professor who tried to teach me inclusive language.**

**Though even she balked at the use of sie, hir, or coe as pronouns.

So I got home on Friday after a day of trying to print up newsletters with a printer that repeatedly broke down. I sat down to read some comics and soon found the NetSky worm ignoring the anti-spyware and anti-virus programs as it gleefully sank its teeth into the computer. Where malware is concerned, what you don’t know stands a really good chance of hurting you.

This, of course, applies to most transactions in a magical world, such as the setting of Finder’s Keepers, by Garth Cameron Graham. The world of FK teems with all the myths and legends (and leches) that mankind can dream up . . . and a good portion of them are lethal.

The story follows Cailyn Asher, a jill-of-all-trades who finds that a few words spoken in anger have made her the keeper of Lord Cardinal, Aspect of Finding. And for reasons unknown, both of them are being hunted by agents of the Void. Their quest to figure out what all this means (and thus release Cardinal from Cailyn’s keeping) has brought them rather literally to Death’s doorstop, and things only look to be getting more difficult from there.

The art is nothing short of professional. Graham cut his webcomic teeth working on Comedity, a pseudo-journal comic with a very slick look, and has taken his style to print-comic levels of pizzazz. And he’s spent as much time designing backgrounds and props as he’s spent on figure drawing. (Alas, lechery happens, but it’s over with quickly enough.)

The writing is enjoyable, although the pacing is maybe a little too far on the quick side. In just shy of three chapters and a prologue, Cailyn and Cardinal have been through multiple chase scenes, combat, possible hostage situations, a leisurely tea, two near-death lacerations, a good bit of exposition about the world beyond the veil, and more UST than you can shake a euphemism at.

In all, FK has a certain air of Alice in Wonderland about it, except Alice is more belligerent than naive, the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat are hardbodies, and the Queen of Hearts is even more mannish. If you like your fantasy dark with a side of silly, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Comic Rating: One heck of a concealed weapons permit.

It seems I’m finally getting noticed enough that differing opinions are popping up. And this is a good thing. Respectful disagreement is how I learn new things and figure out whether I should change my opinions. Or, in other cases, where I should clarify my opinions so things make more sense. So in that spirit of clarifying, let’s get a saucepan, ask a few questions, and melt things down until the solids sink out.

What do you mean, my comic’s not safe for work?
I understand that not all workplaces are the same. My summer jobs included dishwashing, amusement park ride operation, minor web design, state park maintenance, and editorial interning. You can get away with a lot more salty language and dirty humor around guys who power-wash latrines every Tuesday than you can with interns on a Christian-saturated campus.

That said, here’s my standard for “work-safe.” In my current job (staff writer for a non-profit), my only co-worker is a mother of two in her forties. My boss is also a mother of two, and she’s known my parents since before I was born. Your comic is work-safe if I can safely imagine reading it with one of them looking over my shoulder. If sex happens on-panel, or if someone’s ripping someone else in half, or if references to the reproductive system make up half of your punchlines, then I’m going to call it NSFW. Or if I’m reading your comic and my five-year-old nephew wanders into the room and asks, “Unka Simey, what’s that?” and I can’t answer without using a euphemism, then I’m going to call it NSFW.

What do you mean, my comic’s tasteless? Are you some kind of prude?
Well . . . yes.

I’m the son of an erstwhile Latter-Day Saint bishop and a schoolteacher, and I picked up a certain amount of their sensibilities. A comic that aims for the lowest common denominator really doesn’t appeal to me. I haven’t been in junior high for more than a decade, and even then, that sort of humor wasn’t really entertaining to me.

This isn’t to say that I’ve never laughed at a dirty joke. What I’m saying is that dirty jokes have to be told with the same amount of finesse, the same skill in timing, the same cleverness of wit as any other joke. You can’t just use a reference to the reproductive or excretory systems as the punchline.

Here, let me give some examples. In one of my favorite movies, Clue, there are a number of bawdy jokes and ribald actions—but they’re only a part of the humor, and they’re not dwelt on. In Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a nude Wallace is forced to cover himself with a cardboard cheese box; if you blink, you’ll miss the warning on the side of the box that says, “May Contain Nuts.” The jokes are dirty, but they’re deft.

In short, you can have the artistic talent of Botticelli, the narrative skill of Homer, the allusory prowess of Terry Pratchett, and the electronic wizardry of the HTMLGoodies staff . . . and I still won’t read your comic if you have the wit of Judd Apatow.

. . . Oh. So why’d you give that other comic a better rating than mine?
Because the rating system has as almost as much significance to the review as my choice of font color for the title of the blog. My general philosophy is that if you aren’t able to glean my opinion of a comic from the review itself, then a number at the bottom of the review really isn’t going to help matters. The rating is pretty much an opportunity for me to make one last attempt at a witty comment about the comic I’m reviewing.

A higher or lower number doesn’t mean much of anything; if it did, then people might wind up thinking that Furthia High, with a review of eight kicked puppies and a restraining order, was my most favorable review. And that’s just wrong.

So having taken the butter of my blog and made it just a little bit more ghee-like, I hope this resolves some reader issues. I’ll be back to reviewing next week.