Comical Musings

A few hours before writing this review, I was cleaning out a closet (the joys of moving and resettling) and got clocked in the forehead by an unexpected large decorative glass thing-a-ma-bob. It inspired a good deal of pain, dizziness, nausea, and nostalgia for all things that involve surprise attacks by somewhat softer things. Calvin and Hobbes, for instance.

So imagine my delight when I remembered the comic Sandra and Woo, written by Oliver Knörzer, drawn by Powree, and copy edited by Sarah Dunphy. This is one of the first officially multilingual comics I’ve reviewed, being also available in German. Seeing as my own skill with German only goes up to recognizing what an eszett is, however, I’ll have to limit myself to reviewing the English portion of the comic.

The combination of a German writer, an Indonesian artist, and an American editor leads to some interesting complications for the comic. Speech bubbles that would be fine for a sentence in German wind up being rather loose around a laconic English equivalent. And sometimes the translation doesn’t account for styles of speech, leading to the oddly charming “be damned!” moment or two. And the art is unabashedly Asian in style. That last part isn’t really a complaint, other than the big sparkly eyes and Hime Cut on a girl named Sandra North feeling strangely incongruous.

Another side effect of the multinational team-up is that the comic will occasionally take a turn for the political. Sometimes it’s part of a plot arc, but rather often it just sort of pops up out of the blue.

On the one hand, Sandra and Woo acknowledges the influence of Calvin and Hobbes quite openly–and does it twice, just to make sure. On the other, Hobbes’ token solo adventure didn’t end in a spin-off set of friends or successful hunting, so Knörzer is safe from any copyright infringement problems. (Granted, Bill Watterson would have to get past all those Calvin-defiles-a-logo truck stickers first anyway.)

Sandra does, however, share Calvin’s capacity for sophisticated sarcasm, as well as his strong eco overtones. Of course, she also lives in a world where just about all animals have proven human intelligence, so saving various wildlife species may be more an exercise in keeping the neighbors happy. Of course, given that people can legally (or at least openly) keep raccoons as pets in her world, I may be way off base.

Sandra’s precociousness may seem a bit strange at first, especially to those who haven’t read Calvin and Hobbes, but it makes a good deal more sense once you realize that Sandra probably had to grow up really quickly. Her mother is deceased, and her father doesn’t always pay her terribly much attention. (In fact, as one of my friends pointed out, it seems like all of the adults are video game addicts for one reason or another. At least it seems to come in handy sometimes.) And now she has to deal with a talking raccoon that could almost seem like an imaginary friend . . . or schizophrenic hallucination. An extensive vocabulary doesn’t seem like such a big deal now, does it?

So in the end, has Calvin and Hobbes found a weekly successor? You’ll have to answer for yourself, but this pun tips the scales for me.

Comic Rating: Three stuffed animals. They couldn’t eat another bite.

In the interest of making this blog seem more like a professional review site, I’m instituting a ratings system for the comic reviews. In fact, I’m going so far as to add ratings to my previous reviews just to maintain consistency.

What the ratings actually mean, however, is up to you to decipher.

Sad to say, but I’m going to have to skip doing a review this week, since I’m packing up my apartment and moving across the country. Seeing as I’m already exhausted . . . I don’t want to think how much more tired I’m gonna end up being. I’ll try and have a new review up and running next week.

Just so you don’t feel like I’ve left you entirely high and dry, check out Butterfly, by Dean Trippe. It’s sort of the antidote to all those grimdark antihero comics out there. (The archives actually start here, so if this were a full review I’d have to ding him for poor archive design.)

Have you ever had a friend who’s just a bit random and unpredictable? The sort of person who always cracks the weirdest jokes at the most inopportune times, keeps trying to do relatively dumb things just ’cause, and seems to live off of defying everyone else’s expectations, whether or not this is actually a good thing? As you can probably tell, I’ve had several. After a while, you start to notice something: for all the weird things the person does, you can actually see a pattern to it. Sure, it’s not what you’d normally expect from other people, but it’s just as easy to figure out what the person would do in any given situation.

I say all of this because it’s a similar condition to that of Rob and Elliot, a comic produced by Clay and Hampton Yount and part of the lineup at Boxcarcomics. The comic not only stars a character like that, but is itself like that. Nearly every comic makes one of four jokes: cheese-monkey randomness (sometimes with a literal monkey), inverted expectations (occasionally two of them in a row), labored puns, or Rob being flat-out bizarre.

The art itself is really quite pleasing. The lines are smooth, the characters are easy on the eyes, and the backgrounds can be quite nicely detailed depending on the needs of the joke. Sometimes, the one-panel comics are things of beauty, hilarious to behold in their conciseness. Unfortunately, the good art is used as the setting for jokes about a guy making claims that would embarrass an eight-year-old.

This brings me to another example of the patterns that Rob and Elliot falls into: the four-man band that becomes integral to most webcomics. Rob is the wacky guy, existing pretty much entirely to be the person I described in the first paragraph of this review. Elliot, as Rob’s roommate, is obligated to be the straight man, ineffectually disapproving of Rob’s shenanigans time and again (unless, of course, the joke requires him not to be). Noel is the female, although she at least breaks the mold by being attracted to Elliot more than to Rob . . . and to her old boyfriend, Clint, even more so. And then there’s the iMonkey, who is the obligatory weird cute-ish thing.

The rest of the cast of characters exist to be even more freakishly bizarre, like the extras in an Adam Sandler movie. If you think I’m kidding, then take a gander at the story arc where Elliot finds out that somehow Rob is more normal than every other person in the apartment building, except for the guy who’s too heavily drugged to care. Satan makes regular appearances in the comic, and Jesus shows up once, too. Most of the other one-shot characters are little more than BLAMs.

I can’t say that the writing is naturally terrible. The Younts obviously know their pop culture well enough to make some very clever references, not to mention some truly obscure ones. But clever writing and insightful humor don’t get nearly as much screen time as poop jokes, especially if you factor in the numerous guest strips that are nowhere near safe for work.

So I can’t really call Rob and Elliot bad per se . . . just . . . disappointing. I can tell that the Younts really do have great artistic skill and a flair for witty writing, but it gets buried under so much puerile, predictable humor that I have to sigh dramatically for the ignored potential.

Comic Rating: Four *pie in the face!* Bet you didn’t see that one coming, huh?

One of the marvels of webcomics is that you can find a comic to suit your tastes, almost no matter what your tastes might be. Certainly the results are skewed toward video game wackiness, college wackiness, furry wackiness, and postmodern pretensions disguised as wackiness, but a variety of other comics will show up to cater to whatever interests might randomly come up. As an example of this, I present Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton, a comic that’s mostly about history, literature, and other things that people study in college without hoping to do anything with them.

I first found out about Kate Beaton via The Comics Curmudgeon, which linked to a parody she’d done of For Better or For Worse and how the characters were being railroaded into a happy ending. I can’t for the life of me find this comic anymore (and I don’t know if that’s because of any C&D from Lynn Johnston or simply because Beaton doesn’t use terribly intuitive titles for her comics), but it caught my attention enough that I’d go back and read her other comics occasionally. And since then, she’s picked up her own website and put the comics in a more navigable format, which is always a plus.

The art style varies between something resembling FBorFW and something vaguely 70s-ish, for lack of a better way of putting it. By the looks of it, Beaton pretty much freehands the entire comic, giving it a very light feel. Naturally, the rules of anatomy take a backseat to the joke. That’s not such a bad thing in this case, since the people are still recognizable as people.

Her hand-lettering is also legible, which I can tell you is no easy task–though I’m often left scratching my head and wondering where all the periods went. This is a stylistic choice that gets at me because of the whole editing minor thing. It shows up in Garfield, presumably as a way to show that the main character’s just too lazy for end punctuation, but it also shows up in AWKWARD ZOMBIE as shorthand for a character being particularly angry or ignorant. Of course, given the way Beaton depicts some of the historical figures, this just might be intentional.

The writing in the comic is as idiosyncratic as the art. The premise is generally to take historical and literary figures and humanize them by having them speak and act like modern people. Sometimes the result is hilarious, and other times the joke sorta falls flat. Be warned: with the blinders off, you get a lot of bawdy jokes and salty language from people you really don’t expect it from. This isn’t the most work-safe of comics.

The other side-effect of a comic based on random historical figures is that you’ll have to spend a good chunk of time on Wikipedia figuring out who the heck these people are. She also references Canadian politics a lot, but hey–she lives in Canada. She knows what she’s joking about . . . but because the comments section under each comic only gives the comment on the most recent one, her pearls of wisdom are sadly lost.

To add to the randomness, Kate’s younger self occasionally shows up, as does a Shetland pony. And there’s a stretch of some forty comics done in MSPaint for no apparent reason.

So there are things that could be improved code-wise, and perhaps Beaton could stand to focus on either the history jokes or the other random gags, but in all, Hark! A Vagrant is an enjoyable read that never stops finding a left field to come out of.

Comic Rating: Six happy wanderers.