Comical Musings

Some people may have noticed that in the comics I’ve drawn, I tend to include anthropomorphic animal characters. Or werewolves. Or puppies. A cursory glance at my deviantART page will reveal even more cartoon critters. This would lead some to believe that my comic bookmarks are full of furry webcomics. And they would be wrong. Why, you ask? Because with few exceptions, furry webcomics are more about the furry than the webcomic. Just because your character has a muzzle is no excuse to skimp on writing a compelling story or a good joke.

Let me present Furthia High, by QuetzaDrake, as symptomatic of some of the problems with furry webcomics. The first thing you’ll notice is the title, which like many furry works, has “fur” jammed awkwardly into it. Fur some reason, everyfur who does a furry publication has this compulsive furge to furget common spelling and infurt “fur” into every word possible. As you can see, this tends to get on my furves. . . . nerves.

The title gets even more awkward when the plot is revealed: Kale Williams, The Last Human on Earth, is attending his first year of public high school in the furry world in which he lives. This means that the title of the comic is reduced to meaning something like “Humanopolis Academy.” As a veteran punner and armchair linguist, I am officially unimpressed.

The first ad I saw for the comic has (I hope) been lost to the ether, but it seemed to imply that the comic triggered homosexual make-out sessions and is read by a decent number of businessmen and fathers. Make of this what you will. In spite of this, my better judgment took a holiday, and I figured, “Hey, let’s give this a chance.”

The art, from the first page on, is rather heavily inspired by anime and manga. That is to say, The Last Human on Earth has a small, sharp nose that you could cut yourself on, and every character manages to have eyes large enough to take up most of the upper half of their skulls. Sara, the Female Gay Freshman Mouse on the first page, looks like she needs to cut her Adderall dosage at least in half.

Let me interrupt the art critique with this comment on Quetza’s random background character generator. The idea in itself is intriguing; being able to draw up a list of characters to throw into the background without having to repeat yourself is a useful tool for a cartoonist whose comic takes place in such a crowded setting. But Quetza takes this idea a bit too far, including the name, grade, biography, and sexual orientation of every character he draws in the background. When you realize that you will maybe see two or three of these characters again, and still only as window-dressing, it gets downright creepy that Quetza goes into this much detail. Especially considering the gay and bisexual population of the school that is surprising only to people who are unfamiliar with furries.

Back to the art, though: Bruce, the fox with Super-Saiyan hair, is supposed to be overweight, to the point that he affectionately refers to his stomach as “Gutty,” and yet you can’t tell until the obligatory swimsuit arc. A frog and a flying fox manage to have nearly identical faces, and this is not an isolated instance. And on top of this, the feline characters are shown with their foot claws permanently extended. I didn’t even major in biology and these things are standing out flagrantly. I’m frankly surprised there hasn’t been a blue hedgehog character whose spikes are all three feet long and coming off the back of his head, given his grasp on zoology.

As far as the writing is concerned, I will admit to being equally non-plussed. The main protagonists are Kale, The (feckless) Last Human on Earth; Bruce, the Super-Saiyan fox who spends half of his time being cheese-monkey-random and the other half giving LARPers a bad name; Ashley, a Type-A tsundere cat; and Campy, a narcoleptic, poetical, (un)ambiguously gay rabbit. (Campy the gay guy? You wound me, sir.) Kale ends up with these friends almost purely because Bruce is a spaz. After introductions are made, the minutiae are quickly breezed past so that Kale can meet his first cardboard racist antagonist.

This particularly grates at me. Considering how much thought Quetza puts into each of the background characters, why is Lupin the Wolf Guy (no, the uncreative pun did not escape my eye) made so one-dimensional? He exists solely to torment Kale and show the errors of racism and violence in one fell swoop, and the continue to just be a jerk. Also, he has a henchman with a crush on Ashley, with predictable results. Except the author insists that he’s not one-dimensional in his comments, so maybe we’ll see that proven in one of the later plotlines.

At this point, I really can’t say much else about the comic. I could go on about author inserts, self-referential breaking of the fourth wall, rapid-onset Cerebus syndrome, and–perhaps most egregious–depiction of flamboyant homosexuality as the result of post-traumatic stress disorder, but I think I’ve about reached my limit for this review. The comic obviously has fans a-plenty, but I’m not going to count myself as one of them.

Also, Quetza really needs to learn A) that LARPers will know what fencing is and B) how to not talk in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.

Comic Rating: Eight kicked puppies and a restraining order.

If you’re like most of the people online these days, you’ve probably had a job in one of the service industries, be it fast food, customer service, retail, or taking tickets at the local movie theater. And if you’re like most service employees, you probably agree that work would be so much better if it weren’t for the customers. You likely have a horror story or two about the Guest from Hell who used the wrong entrance, stood around in the wrong line for a good ten minutes, managed to get all the fliers out of order, and then went off on a five-minute rant when you politely let them know how many rules they were breaking, followed by a demand to see your supervisor. You know the type.

That’s about half of the content of Phil Likes Tacos, a very-long-running comic that spends part of its time commiserating about troubles at work, part of its time making odd-ball video game jokes, part of its time making gags about bachelor apartments, and nearly all of its time being worth a good chuckle. While it lacks the polish and shiny coloring of other comics out there, it’s enjoyable, dependable, and just plain fun.

The author, one Andrew Bilitz, just moved the comic from its previous home on ComicGenesis, and the coding is still a bit wonky on a few things (for one, the forward arrow actually takes you to the previous comic and vice versa), but that sort of thing gets taken care of in time. With an archive as big as his (a comic a day since May of 2002), any change to the coding of the site is going to take a long time to implement.

The comic is set up like a newspaper comic, wider than it is tall and generally told in three panels. It does, admittedly, start with the dreaded “Welcome to the comic” strip that’s been a convention since at least Garfield’s time, and then immediately sets up the main character Phil as the straight man to the antics of his roommate, the hyperactive gamer Doug. Phil works at a taco shop (hence the name of the comic), while Doug … plays video games, makes pop culture references, and generally seems to live in a world that only shares some borders with the one the other characters live in.

As the strip goes along, you meet other people in Phil and Doug’s world. There’s Phil’s nominal girlfriend, who doesn’t even get a name until much later; Mel, the literally demonic manager at Happy Tacos; Norvell, the mooch of a co-worker whose continued employment is a mystery; and Zoug, Doug’s evil arch-nemesis from the underworld and creator of his other arch-nemesis, Mecha-Doug, among many others.

I will be the first to admit that, as an aspiring editor and general nitpicker, the frequent simple spelling errors get on my nerves. And sometimes I’m not sure whether things are errors because Bilitz’s handwriting can end up very tiny.

Bilitz has apparently worked a long time in the fast food industry, based on his depiction of the customers who make Phil’s job difficult as deformed cretins . . . with three exceptions, the Taco Regular Cuties (as they’re called on his old cast page). Delores, Millicent, and Vivian hold a special place as regular characters, and Millie even goes so far as to become Phil’s new girlfriend when the previous one turns out to be merely a good friend.

The art is rather simplistic to start with–see the first comic, linked above–but as time passes, Bilitz figures out ways to stylize his stick figures in a way that makes them look better than most. (Better even than some attempts at fleshed-out drawings by other online cartoonists, but I’m not about to name names.) His colored-pencil Sunday comics are interesting, and I’m particularly fond of this strip. And I’ll admit that the hidden jokes in the background signs are just fun.

The plot is comparable to various sit-coms; while continuity is rather flexible and the status quo tends to be maintained, earlier plotlines do have their impact and are occasionally referenced later. And occasionally old characters will make new appearances.

In all, I’d say the comic is worth a read–but do it when you’ve got a lot of time to spare. With somewhere around 3000 pages in the archives, PLT is a long, hard, often hilarious slog.

Comic Rating: Five number-7 combos and a Slushee. Your total comes to $39.47, next window please.

Post script: this one makes me giggle every time I read it.

Every once in a while, you find a comic that makes you giggle at the same time it makes you squirm. You know the sort: you laugh because it puts up gosh-awful stereotypes that most people couldn’t be expected to believe . . . and then you squirm because deep down, you realize that you know someone like that. This, for example, is why I can no longer watch The Singles Ward or anything else by Halestorm Entertainment: I’ve lived in the Utah Valley and seen every one of their characters in real life.

Enter Weregeek by Alina Pete, the most recent addition to Keenspot Comics and one of the more recent additions to my reading list. Just her cast page reads like a list of the people I’m usually eating lunch or attending medieval club meetings with: there’s the guy who still wants to be normal; the small, energetic LARPer girl; the “lovable lug”; the sarcastic MMO addict; the hyperactive fangirl; the guy who can’t stop talking; and the woman who dresses in vaguely pirate fashion. There’s even the occasional normal person who wanders over and lasts all of five minutes before fleeing in terror.

The art style is easy on the eyes. Being a graphic designer, artist, and animator, Pete is another of the cartoonists who have quite nicely avoided the typical webmanga look in favor of something fresh. And every character is recognizable and distinct from the others, which I can tell you is no mean feat. It’s a good litmus test of an art style to see if you can still tell characters apart after you change their clothes, and Pete is able to pull this off. You can even tell who’s playing which character in the many “gaming night” plot diversions by their resemblance to the players.

Speaking of plot diversions, the plot is where the comic gets either its most confusing or most fun, depending on which side of the line you want to sit on. The story at its most superficial concerns itself with Mark, an otherwise normal young man who, under the light of the full moon, develops a bad haircut and jaundice. Just kidding! He’s merely forced to confront his repressed desires to enjoy role-playing games and quote cult-favorite movies by being driven insane and running for the closest gaming shop post-haste.

That’s right, Mark is a weregeek. And as pretty much every recent monster movie other than Dog Soldiers has taught us, were-things are noble things, but terribly misunderstood. Hence, they must keep their existence a guarded secret and band together on full moons. Unless, of course, they feel like freaking the mundanes, in which case it’s perfectly fine to fling your darkest secrets to the wind and whatnot.

And you’d think they’d be a bit more careful when they have violent psychopaths tailing them. Yes, there are geek hunters. People determined to dress alike and preserve the city’s sense of normalcy by hunting down every last geek and making them suffer. Y’know, kinda like high school, except they kill you instead of stuffing you in a locker and calling you gay. Then again, considering that geeks are actually vicious shadowbeast fiends in human form as opposed to well-meaning social maladroits, maybe the hunters have more of a clue than the geeks give them credit for.

There’s also the trickiness of the storyline taking detours through various gaming experiences without much prior warning. Occasionally you can’t even tell that they’re in a deeper layer of fiction until someone ends up with elf ears or something. It’s not worth a massive gripe, and it’s not like it turned me away from the comic, but it can be disorienting on occasion.

So there you have it. I recommend giving Weregeek a look, if only to immerse yourself in the occasional justified wackiness that pops up.

Comic Rating: 2d6 + Int.

By singular demand, I present to you Hereville by Barry Deutsch. Hereville proudly follows the tradition first seen in such books as Wuthering Heights, and later carried on in the writings of Flannery O’Connor and the like, by presenting us with characters who are very obviously from one place and speak their local dialect unashamedly. Unlike the aforementioned writers, though, Deutsch is polite enough to provide translations for the abundant Yiddish in his comics. And believe me, in a comic about Orthodox Jews in modern times, the Yiddish flows like a person’s tears after eating the horseradish at a seder. (Yes, let’s all watch Luprand pretend like he knows anything about Jewish culture.)

The art is generally quite appealing. For the most part, it’s a pleasant cartoony form that handily avoids the “I wish I could draw like my favorite manga-ka or anime-kun” style that I still have yet to escape. Occasionally he throws in a panel of startling realism or two.

About the only thing that bothers me is the Muppet mouth syndrome that seems to strike his characters. It’s not exactly For Better or For Worse-level, but in the second row of this page, I thought the top of Mirka’s head was slowly severing itself from her body and would start flying around and firing laser beams. That would have been so cool.

The plot looks like it will be an interesting one; it’s the first I’ve heard of a Jewish dragon-slayer, much less one who looks to be about twelve or so (unless I’m mistaken, which I often am). The upshot of this is a unique viewpoint for the main character and a really novel setting and personality for people. The downside of this is that right as the Marilyn Manson impersonator reveals how Mirka can get started on the path toward dragonslayerhood, the plot gets interrupted for The Great Muppet Shabbos.

(A side note: challah is delicious bread, and I wish I lived closer to a Great Harvest store so I could buy it more often, but after seeing this page, I will spend the rest of my life checking my loaves of bread for ethereal possession or possible interment of small young girls.)

The downside of any comic that cuts the action in order to present a tidbit of information in earnest (as opposed to Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams novels, which play such up for laughs) is that the reader generally feels cheated. It may be interesting, it may be essential, but it’s not necessarily what the reader came for. It’s like when I went to Subway recently and they mixed my order up with another person’s, so I ended up with roast beef and mustard instead of peppered turkey and mayonnaise. Sure, it was still a good sandwich, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Still, Muppet mouths, educational interruptions, and truly horrifying visages aside, Hereville shows a good deal of promise. I’m particularly fond of this page, which depicts Mirka’s roiling thoughts as she sets out to slay a troll. In a lovely twist of events, she winds up arguing it half to death. I look forward to future installments.

Comic Rating: Who knows, who knows four? I know four …

Gamer comics are, generally, considered among the lowest of the low in the webcomic world, along with (at last count) college roommate comics, bizarre fantasy comics, comics that try to push a social message about alternative lifestyles, furry comics, anything to do with politics, drunken lout comics, and generally anything else that gets published on the Internet. People who review or talk about webcomics often point to Penny Arcade as the end-all, be-all of gaming comics and attempt to shut down any conversation about a new gaming comic. While I agree that maybe we could stand to stanch the flow of recolored Sonic and Mario sprites, I also think that credit should be given where credit is due.

And I think credit is due in the case of AWKWARD ZOMBIE by Kate Tiedrich. To start with, she draws the characters herself instead of ripping and recoloring sprites, which earns her a lot of points right there. It’s also interesting to see her art style progress over the course of her art gallery, starting with a rather odd cross of anime and Precious Moments styles, then progressing to a much more individualistic style. It’s always nice to see an artist who can be recognized when compared to others; I’m generally guilty of falling back on something that looks like anime when I’m pressed for time, and I admire people who can push themselves to go for a bit more.

As for plot . . . you can see that it’s pretty obviously a Nintendo fan-comic of sorts, mostly centering on the Super Smash Bros. series and the presumed interactions between the franchise characters (along with Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, and World of Warcraft [in a slight break from the Nintendo things]). The comics on the site itself start with Tiedrich’s transition to doing comics in Flash instead of on oekaki programs, giving her the ability to do larger, longer comics and use smoother lines; right off the nailed bat, we’re treated to her characterizations of Roy as a somewhat attention-deficit wacko, Link as a clueless tag-along, and Marth as an imperious and somewhat effeminate fop. This is something of a thread in her Smash-related comics; she generally avoids the more notable characters (like, say, Mario) in favor of inventing her own personalities for the lesser-knowns. It’s a clever way to do fan works without being scrutinized over whether you’re properly matching canon.

One of Tiedrich’s quirks is to throw silly faces onto background objects and make enemy monsters look deranged, which I’m not above admitting gives me the giggles every time. And while her backgrounds are generally lacking, she makes up for it by getting the characters more detail than most people can handle.

It’s also refreshing to see an author avatar character who isn’t stunningly attractive, all-powerful, or generally just more awesome than everyone else. Tiedrich portrays herself as a scrawny, pale young woman with thick, uncontrollable hair, dark circles under her eyes, and what I can only hope are freckles and not some sort of polyp. Actually, she kinda creeps me out a little now and then.

And one last comment: I like her tendency more toward the “show, don’t tell” style. Some of her best comics use no words at all, other than the title. Sure, there’s commentary on the bottom for people who don’t get the strip at first gloss, but she can generally get the joke across without too much effort. And when she does wax verbose, it’s generally for comedic effect by making the long-winded character look like a babbler. Not to mention she really rocks the long, awkward silences.

I know a lot of webcomics rely heavily on wacky, random humor for their punchlines. And usually it’s what really turns me off to them (such as, say, White Ninja Comics or Castle Arfenhouse). But AWKWARD ZOMBIE manages to channel the wackiness into something pretty deft, and I give Tiedrich kudos for that. I recommend it to any Nintendo fan without a chip on the shoulder.

Comic Rating: Four Wii-motes, all pointing at Marth.