Comical Musings

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.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m something of a prude, at least by the Internet’s standards. Granted, I was still a bit more prone to ribald jokes and unkind comments than the average student at my alma mater. The campus newspaper, The Daily Universe, was notorious for featuring letters to the editor whose writers were “shocked and appalled” at various things that got published and apparently shouldn’t have been. Some days I was amazed that the entire population of campus wasn’t stumbling around in a dazed pallor.

This stands in contrast to The Towerlight, student newspaper for Towson University, subject of recent controversy over an explicit sex column and publisher of the comic I’ll be reviewing this week. While that may seem to be an unfair introduction to Less Than Three (submitted for review by Steven Baird, who writes and draws the comic), it’s a bit more relevant than you’d think. Like the last self-submitted comic, <3 does its best to make NSFW seem like such an inadequate tag.

Originally intended to be a World of Warcraft comic, <3 shortly found itself in print and didn’t seem to know what to do from there. There were a few editorial cartoons and cracks in the fourth wall before the comic settled into a sporadic regimen of poop jokes, sex jokes, poop sex jokes, celebrity smear gags, more sex jokes, and loud left-wing politics.*

Some of the time, Baird’s comics rely on pop-culture references for their jokes. (As the saying goes, “Steal from the best.”) This includes sources as diverse as Peanuts, The Wizard of Oz, VG Cats, The Silence of the Lambs, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Resident Evil, Star Trek, Batman, and (perhaps most baffling) The Newlywed Game. His comic titles have also referenced Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, and Terry Pratchett (who is himself referencing Alan Moore). Of course, it’s somewhat depressing to see an allusion to Robert Burns tacked onto a comic about a mentally retarded ice cream cake.

Oh, well. At least he loves his mother.

Comic Rating: Two evil Snuggies.

* Political humor has its merits, chief of which being that as long as you express a popular opinion, people will laugh at your jokes no matter how tasteless or cruel they would otherwise be. The problem, however, is that it’s rarely done well enough to get people on the other side of the aisle to laugh. And once you start regularly expressing your political opinions in the middle of an otherwise neutral comic, BAM—there goes half your audience.

One of the troubles that writers often face is figuring out who, exactly, they want to be the protagonist. Most good writing will single out one or two characters to carry the plot to a proper resolution; the other characters, while still well-rounded, will play a more ancillary role. While complex tales with a handful of people all affecting each other’s actions is sometimes the mark of great literature, it can also be the mark of a colossal traffic jam if the author isn’t sufficiently careful.

One comic attempting to walk this tightrope is Institute of Metaphysics, by K. Lin. The setting and plot (the lives of supernatural students living at the premier U.S. college for supernatural students) lends itself well to an ensemble set-up, and Lin takes advantage of this. The current cast includes nine characters whose backstories are hinted at so far, with more and more joining the fray with each storyline. And since half of the characters on the cast page have yet to so much as show up . . . well, if all goes well, we’re looking at the potential for an ensemble epic; if not, we’re looking at the potential for a twenty-plot pile-up.

The character art is pleasing (though the constant apologies for no background grow rather tiring), and the writing is pretty tight, with the caveat that a lot of F-bombs get dropped and the fourth wall is pretty darn flimsy. Lin also has a tendency to follow various asides and other distractions, making an already convoluted bundle of plots just a little more perilous to navigate.

My comments here and the shortness of the review may make it sound like Institute of Metaphysics is a terrible comic, but that’s really not the case. (It’s more a side-effect of a weekend emergency that still has my blood boiling. My apologies.) If anything, it’s a pleasant comic that just needs to work out a few kinks and figure out its priorities.

Comic Rating: Three bishounen roommates.

So those of my readers who have tried dabbling in artistic ventures know that it can be a lot of hard work. Sure, some artwork looks effortless (and other works look like no effort was put into them, which is a bigger difference than you’d think), and sure, the average cartoonist will use no more muscles than absolutely necessary to get pencil to paper (or stylus to tablet), but the mental work that goes into crafting a storyline (or a punchline, for that matter) can be monumental. And anyone else who’s striven for verisimilitude knows the agony of sketching and resketching a picture, trying to figure out why that elbow doesn’t look quite right.* The difficulty that arises, though, is that for all that hard work, the pay rate isn’t all that good.

And few people know this as intimately as does Randie Springlemeyer, the main character of Squid Row, a slice-of-life comic by Bridgett Spicer. Hapless artist Randie lives and worries in a fictional variant of Monterey, California, where she works shifts at an art-supply store (an exquisite form of torture, when you think about it). The comic follows her exploits as she deals with rival artists, well-meaning relatives, library fines, and a very well-meaning best friend. Also the occasional disaster.

Yes, the slice of Randie’s life is a rather blue-colored cross-section, cataloguing all the frustrations she faces in work, art, and romantic matters. And perhaps because Randie has so many problems, it makes the little victories and kindnesses so much more enjoyable. (It also makes the moments of whimsy rather more fun, too.)

(I will pause here to note that Spicer has only recently set up the new site, so her archives are the devil to search through. I hope the links continue to work; it was a pain in the neck when, less than a week after the Sandra and Woo review came out, their site changed the archive system and all of the links had to be updated. But I digress.)

Squid Row‘s art style has changed quite a bit from its inception, using more varied linework, visual puns, and knock-off brands. And while the soulful eyes sometimes look a little strange on a twenty-something hipster or a sullen co-worker, it really brings out Randie’s willfully naive nature.

Which is sort of what the comic is all about, when you get down to it: a young woman trying to be a Pollyanna in spite of everything life throws at her. And the sheer fact that she hasn’t given up is enough reason to keep reading.

Comic Rating: Four cups of fancy, fancy coffee.

* Because it’s the left elbow, of course. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail inviting me to review a comic. This marks the second time that I’ve received such an invitation, and since I took several months even to notice the previous one, I thought I’d improve my track record and read the comic for this week’s review. And that comic is The Crooked Gremlins, by Carter Fort and Paul Lucci. I was assured that the comic was “well within the parameters of [my] suggestion criteria,” so it was with an open mind that I set out to read. This was something of a disappointment.

Somehow the phrase “not work safe” seems insufficient when dealing with The Crooked Gremlins. To say that the comic puts me off my lunch would be to leave out all the other meals that have lost their savor. The comic reads like a transcript of conversations from a freshman dorm room. Probably the room that smelled a little off.

The comic is declared to be the chronicles of a rag-tag group of gremlins who, in the tradition of their kind, are devoted to causing mischief to the humans on the surface world (annoyance being far more cruel than mere death). And when it actually focuses on the high jinks* that result from this mission, the comic’s at least decently good.

But it doesn’t. The premise is tossed casually aside in favor of random spectacularly tasteless celebrity references. This of course includes political jokes (with the added bonus of painful stereotypes). When politics aren’t involved, then the raunchy jokes get tossed in. And failing that, there’s always the resident butt-of-all-jokes to torment.

What more is there to say? The art is decent and the site design gives a better attempt at breaking away from the default ComicPress template than a lot of the comics I’ve reviewed of late, but it’s so much pretty dressing around poop jokes and spelling errors (for future reference, a nave is an area in a cathedral, while a knave is an uncouth fellow). Like wrapping a dead rat in gold leaf, it seems like an awful lot of effort to put into something so offensive.

Comic Rating: One rather apparent author insert (just read the character names backward).

* Incidentally, the phrase high jinks is amusing in and of itself when you look at it.