Comical Musings

Since last week’s review involved a comic that seemed like the Internet’s answer to Calvin and Hobbes, perhaps I’ve been in a bit too much of a mood to compare webcomics to popular things in other media. It doesn’t work all that well, though, because sometimes there’s nothing to compare and sometimes there’s too much. For example, if there’s anything in the older media that compares to Furthia High, I’d rather not know about it. This week, however, there’s a bit too much to compare.

At first, it’s tempting to describe Evil Inc., by Brad Guigar, as Dilbert with supervillains. After all, it’s set at a big corporation and occasionally gives extra attention to a specific department or the workers’ union. You even get the occasional jab at office misogyny from a super’s perspective. In fact, at first gloss the only apparent difference from Scott Adams’ oeuvre is that the art is considerably higher in quality and the plot lines are more complicated. (This plotline kinda resolves here, but its effects are still apparent here and may continue to dominate the comic plotline for some time yet).

Well, then the differences start to crop up. For one thing, you’ll notice that Guigar loves his call desk puns. He really loves him some call–center comedy. It doesn’t matter if there’s a plot in progress; if there’s a random pun to be made by Lightning Lady on a headset, the comic will be inserted. And if you take a good look at the comics I just linked to in this paragraph, you’ll notice that (with the exception of the Iron Dragon one) most of those panels do some heavy panel recycling.

Reusing panels for throwaway gags isn’t a terrible thing to do, but after a while it gets sort of grating (which I imagine call center work also does). Mostly, it’s disappointing. After all, Guigar does both dramatic and cartoony art well enough to transition smoothly from one to the other in one strip. And once the color comics start, you get to see every curve of … well, let’s just say that Guigar follows the example of comic book artists everywhere. So while seeing repeats of Guigar’s art isn’t as bad as seeing the sort of thing that Powerup Comics actively spoofs, it’s still a little let-down from someone whose fresh art is so appealing.

The writing is heavy on the parody, as the above examples show. There are certainly enough comic book cliches to mock out there, and Guigar mines them for all they’re worth. But, as with most long-running plot-based comics out there, it starts to experiment with more serious fare. This can be good or bad, depending on whether it adds maturity or detracts from the humor.

It’s not until you get into the supplemental information that you find out that Evil Inc. is actually a spin-off from Guigar’s previous comic, Greystone Inn. Apparently Lightning Lady started with a minor role in that comic, then garnered enough attention to go for a solo career of sorts. In which csae, perhaps Evil Inc. isn’t so much Dilbert after all, but whether it’s a Frasier or a Joanie Loves Chachi is still up in the air.

Comic Rating: Three and a half days he will RUE!

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?