Comical Musings

The trouble with cold-and-flu season is more than just the fact that you can’t hear anything at parties or events, due to the sniffling and horking noises surrounding you. It’s more than the bottles of grody hand sanitizer becoming even more ubiquitous than ever. It’s more than those pesky Airborne tablets mucking up every other glass of water you drink.

No, the real trouble with cold-and-flu season is that at some point or another, you may actually come down with something yourself—which is about where I am right now. My sinuses are taking turns with which one wants to be stuffed up this time and which one merely feels like being dehydrated and triggering sneezes . . . and all the sneezing has my ribs aching (or rather, my intercostal muscles are, but that’s a bit of a nitpick). It’s not exactly the best state to be giving a fair review to any comics*, so I hope you’ll pardon the lack of a review post.

In the mean time, let me say that echinacea is a truly terrifying herb. Sure, it’s supposed to be useful for bolstering the immune system and all, but the warning text is tremendously off-putting:

Recommended for adults only. If you are taking prescription medication, or are pregnant or nursing, consult your health care provider prior to using this product. Persons with allergies to the daisy family may be sensitive to echinacea. For maximum benefit, do not use for more than 6-8 weeks consecutively. Take only when needed. Echinacea should not be used by persons with autoimmune diseases, AIDS, HIV, collagen diseases, leukocytosis, multiple sclerosis, systemic lupus or tuberculosis. Persons with gallstones should avoid eucalyptus products.

I personally think that “Echinacea will murder your family if you so much as look at it crosswise” would be nearly accurate and much more succinct. Maybe it works, not as a supplement, but as a threat.

Ah, well. At least it’s not a scorching case of lycanthropy.

* “Like that was ever a concern,” I hear you say. To which I reply, “Oh, hush.”

Blogger’s note: This is cross-posted from a few other places I leave my mark.

So there’s a copy-pasta meme going around people’s Facebook status updates right now. It reads as follows:

Shame on you America: the only country where we have homeless without shelter, children going to bed without eating, elderly going without needed meds, and mentally ill without treatment – yet we have a benefit for the people of Haiti on 12 TV stations.

I would like to offer the following rebuttal.

Shame on you, Facebook copy-pasters. If you just want to sit there and feel self-righteous, then by all means do so. But you’re not part of the solution.

On the other hand, if you want to DO something about America’s farsighted charity, then look up Covenant House, CityTeam Ministries, Homeless Voice, Domestic Abuse Shelter, AARDVARC.org, Nisa, DASH, Laura’s House, National Alliance on Mental Illness, Mental Illness Education Project, SoupMobile, St. Peters Soup, your local food bank, Daily Bread … See MoreMinistries, CHIPS Online, HandsOn, the FirstHand Foundation, Force for Good, Living Hope Food Kitchen, NeedyMeds, and many, many other worthy non-profit organizations that I found in less than five minutes on Google.

To all of you out there who might feel that America’s place as the most charitable nation in the world is somehow unearned: here’s some places where you can put your money and your mouth. Go to.

“Attention Deficit Disorder” gets bandied about rather carelessly these days, with the original medical diagnosis being tossed out the window in favor of general distractability. This fails to take into account the rest of the disorder—the mood swings, the frustration of always losing your train of thought, the way it can take hours to write up an essay that should be dashed off in no time at all because something else happens to

You’re still here? Oh, shoot, the whole review thing. Anyway, attention span can be a crucial thing for cartoonists, especially if they’re trying to write up something with a cohesive plot (much less a coherent one). And that’s where Nicky510, a comic produced by a guy called “Crow,” runs into a bit of a snag.

In some ways, Nicky510 seems to be trying very hard to set itself up as a successor to Calvin & Hobbes:

• Where Calvin spent a lot of time giving sophisticated reasons for his chalk drawings, so does Nicky.
• Where Calvin had his Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs, young Nicky Nickel has his BinkyCakes. (This gag gets revisited frequently.)
• Calvin and Nicky both have fathers who mangle bedtime stories.
• It’s a poor idea to take Calvin or Nicky to the zoo.
• Both kids tend to have photorealistic imaginations.
• Where Calvin has his stuffed tiger Hobbes, Nicky has The Great Gazoo . . . or, rather, ELF, an alien who can turn invisible whenever it’s inconvenient.

Nicky510 briefly visits the idea of a Suzie Derkins analogue as well, although she hasn’t been seen since. Unlike Calvin, however, Nicky has an older brother named Lex, who generally serves as a nerdy, sour-pussed foil to Nicky’s wide-eyed antics. As a cranky and rule-bound nerd myself, I almost feel miffed.

The art follows a simple style that spares a little detail for foreground figures and usually leaves the background as an assumption—it would translate well to a newspaper format, although it does occasionally color in one detail or two to aid the punch line. Following again in Calvin & Hobbes‘s footsteps, kids are depicted as being about a foot and a half tall, although Nicky is a lot more smiley than Calvin tended to be.

I mentioned attention span as a potential hang-up for Nicky510, and I suppose I should get around to mentioning what I mean. Starting in October 2008, Crow began to post single-panel gag comics in the middle of the story. By July or so, he’d promoted the single-panel gags to a weekly feature . . . but they’re still plunked down in the middle of the story comics. I personally get a bit of a snicker from a lot of them (even if they show an odd squid fixation), but they’d probably be better served as a separate comic series in their own directory, rather than tossed pell-mell into the middle of Nicky’s storyline.

Those issues aside, Nicky510 is entertaining, and while it plays up the homage enough to border on discomfort, it’s still worth a good chuckle or two.

Comic Rating: 10 mg of Adderall per day.

Say what you will about J. R. R. Tolkien’s body of work*, it’s had its influence on just about every fantasy work created since his time. Whether people emulate him through sad-but-overbearing elves, hard-drinking dwarves with a brick-like language, and twisted monsters direct from old folk-tales—or assert that their fantasy races are nothing like his—it becomes almost a game to find bits and traces of Middle-Earth peeking out of other series. One reason for this, in my opinion, is the amount of work that Tolkien put into building his world. He sat down and named just about every location and landmark, developed languages and dialects and lineages and histories for peoples that would barely even see print. He was still building his world when he died, and his son Christopher has been keeping up the production of the History of Middle-Earth ever since.

Working in a similar manner is Evan Dahm, the creator of Rice Boy who is currently working on a prequel called Order of Tales. Dahm has set up a wiki on his site to collect all the information he’s put together concerning his work, including various names, places, and languages he’s set out to create. On the one hand, I admire the sheer amount of effort that must be going into this, and on the other hand, I’m left to wonder if he gets to do much of anything with his time other than design and lecture.**

If you’re well-enough versed in Tolkien’s work, you can definitely see a relationship between Order of Tales and The Silmarillion. Both deal with creation stories, both deal with great wars in prehistory, both trail after the search for lost items of power, and both are bewildering if taken out of context. Of course, where Tolkien had races borrowed directly from folklore, Dahm prefers to use robots, anteaters, animals, and horned creatures named for grammatical concepts. (The jury’s still out as to what species the protagonist, Koark, really is.)

Confusing species aside, the art style of Order of Tales is rich and surreal, lavishing detail on landscapes and calligraphy alike. And where Rice Boy was full of vibrant colors, Order of Tales is a story of grim shadows and terrible bleakness. It’s an interesting step that mirrors an equal maturation in the way that Dahm writes his dialogue, and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with in the future.

Comic Rating: Three silmarils.

* Granted, most complaints that I hear are along the lines of “The text just drags! It’s so boring …” or “This is nothing like the movie.”
** I think the insurance rates on my glass house just went up.

January is something of a doldrum time. The holidays are over, so the lights start coming down, but the night is no less dark and only shorter by a few minutes. There aren’t any other big events to look forward to (and with no family living by Lake Chautauqua anymore, that’s the Ice Festival gone), and the snow this year has been particularly relentless, leaving me somewhat down in the dumps. And to top it off, the amazing Lint came to a close, leaving me bereft of a wonderful fantasy comic about a dispossessed prince.

So to stave off a portion of that gloom, here’s Ebin & May, a collaborative effort by Christina “Smudge” Hanson, Ed Garcia, and Baron Engel.* While, in the past, I’ve expressed strong distaste for furry webcomics, Ebin & May has so far been a pleasant surprise. (For starters, there isn’t a single reference to fur or a species name anywhere in the title.)

The title characters are a usurped prince and the clever servant girl whom he loves. Living along with them are a pair of foreign mystic knights and a stablehand who you just know is going to be more trouble than she’s worth.

Perhaps the easiest way to describe the plot (so far) of Ebin & May is to compare it to a video game. The first few chapters serve as tutorial levels, establishing the characters and some of their motivations through easy quests and training battles. Another apparently easy task leads to the revelation of the overarching plot: a nefarious emperor who takes over kingdoms through unfortunate “accidents”.

(This does raise the question of why someone whose life and family are in danger would be announced as such during a ball, but perhaps theirs was a more innocent age. The analogy between species and ethnicity is left just a little hazy, as is the relationship between religion and magic. This might be expounded upon in the future, though.)

The characters and costumes are a visual treat; so is the scenery, when it comes into play. I’m not entirely certain how much of the garb is period-accurate, especially where the decolletage is concerned, but in general the art style of Ebin & May is a lively blend of comic book and fairy tale. Which, in spite of the careless spelling and punctuation to be found here and there, is a good summary of the comic as a whole.

Comic Rating: Three, since it comes up so often in fairy tales.

* I’m not sure what it is that Garcia and Engel do, exactly. They’re listed as “Art Assistance”, which sounds like the sort of job where you sit and ink someone else’s drawings, but I don’t have the full details. If you know what they do and feel like enlightening me, then by all means feel free.