(The following is a guest review by David Herbert.  Mr. Herbert had previously penned a review of Looking For Group on this site.  He also does the webcomics Living With Insanity and Domain Tnemrot.)

Ah, the alternate universe. Those of us who are familiar with print comics may have heard of Marvel’s Ultimate Line in which all the Marvel characters were re-introduced with new origins set in modern times with none of the prior canon that could scare new readers away. It was a new universe with an established starting point that new readers could enjoy without any prior knowledge of the original continuity. And that’s what we have here today.

Before Scott Kurtz was paving the way for cartoonists to work online, David Willis was a college student with a strip in the paper called Roomies! The strip was enjoyable, and is currently being re-uploaded on a new site, which was part of celebrating its 15^th anniversary. The art was blocky, the story telling weak and the tone schizophrenic. Eventually Roomies ended and a sequel series, It’s Walky, came around, a bizarre drama/comedy/action series with even weirder problems with consistent tone. It was an improvement, but oh dear God is it hard to pitch the strip to an outsider without it sounding stupid.  “Just trust me, it’s good” tends to be how I go. And the that ended and Shortpacked was launched, which was reviewed here, and also a direct sequel called Joyce and Walky, which was subscription based. Both again were marked improvements although Shortpacked had a slow start but did get much better.

However, it’s hard to get people to read four different webcomics and thousands of strips, especially when the creator was still learning his craft. So, Willis decided to take his 10,000 hours of experience and return to where it all started, college, with the characters everyone loved in a new world. The goal was to make a comic old readers could enjoy but new readers could get into.

And he did a very good job at it.

Dumbing of Age is set at Indiana University with most of the core cast being the freshman class. The over the top theatrics are gone, the premise is much more down to earth, the drama and comedy are much more evenly balanced, characters have more depth and the main villain only exists as a comic book and cartoon character. And we have a comedy about that awkward period of life where you’re trying to figure out what being an adult means.

The story is mostly focussed on Joyce Brown, a home-schooled, sheltered Christian girl who is attending college to make friends and find her true love, who she will marry. Unfortunately she doesn’t have much patience in regards to finding her future husband and gets annoyed if she finds out she’s wasted her time on a guy (Possibly why she snapped at Walky?). But she does manage to make friends and worm a place into the hearts of everyone around her. She’s heavily based on Willis’ own past as a sheltered Christian.

However the comic is not solely focussed on her. Everyone in the cast has managed to grab a substantial amount of screen time and have their own stories. To the point where the unlikeable can become sympathetic in an instant and a fan favourite can come from nowhere. Although I did lie, there is one fantastical element, one of the characters is a superhero. Though it’s played in a much more realistic fashion.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the comic is that there are a lot of subtle call backs to the original series that you can pick up on if you’re familiar with it, but they don’t alienate new readers who don’t get the reference. Mike and Walky are roommates, just like they were while at SEMME. Danny has a conversation with his mother that mimics the first ever strip. You also get subversions of things that happened in the original universe, like canon couples looking like they’ll happen, only for things to go in a different direction. (On Willis’ tumblr, he said he’s heavily considering keeping Danny and Billie apart so as not to just have everything turn out the same as the old universe). But if that’s not your thing, you can also enjoy the comments section, and the memes they latch onto.

Artistically the comic is also a marked improvement over the old universe. Backgrounds are detailed, thanks to photo references of the real life college itself, and the camera angles are played. Also, most of the character designs are varied enough so that even in Black and White, you’d be able to tell who is who.

Also, while the old universe aged at a real world rate, here Willis engages in Webcomic Time, out of a desire to let the story run for as long as it needs to. As such, we’re only up to the third week in terms of time passing, but since time jumps have been shown it’s unlikely the current pace of one week per year is always going to be the norm. But it also means that while the characters do evolve, it can take a while otherwise you’d have people changing their personalities every couple of days. However the number of various stories and characters mean if you get bored of one person, you won’t have to wait long until someone else gets screen time.

All in all, it’s an easy recommendation. If you like slice of life comedies with some solid character development, go check this one out.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

From Penny Arcade

(Guest writer David Herbert strikes again… this time commenting on strawman arguments.)

Any creator who ever puts politics in their comic will inevitably make a straw man argument. It’s a fact of political cartoons and unless you spend pages upon pages ensuring that your opposing has a strong argument, you will eventually pull one out.

But is that necessarily a bad thing?

Yes and no, depending on how you pull it off.

Yes in the way that it can cause you to come off as one-sided and bigoted to anyone holding the opposing view. But no in that when you explain your stance well enough, you get the point across quick and easy. The trouble with pulling out a straw man is that you need to be careful with the way you present your argument or it can cause backlash and damage what credibility you have.

Now first, let’s explore the differences between the straw man and the devil’s advocate.

A straw man is built to lose quickly and, in some cases, painfully to the hero of the story. They are usually not meant to be sympathetic and any strength that their argument has is entirely unintentional on the author’s part. Their only reason for participating in the discussion of this particular issue, whatever it may be, is to lose to the person who holds the author’s views and in some cases will not even be allowed to make a counter argument.

The Devil’s Advocate, however, does have a strong argument, but still loses to a stronger one. The term comes from the Catholic practice of preparing a person for sainthood. The party advocating sainthood must collect evidence about the candidate’s life to prove that they are worthy of the title. The devil’s advocate is a check on the system, whose job is to gather evidence that they are not worthy. This is not about keeping people from becoming saints, but to motivate the pro side into making the strongest argument they can.

One of the best examples for this I can think of is the Justice League episode A Better World Part Two. In it, an alternate Justice League, called the Justice Lords, have taken over the earth and imposed a tyrannical rule in the name of public safety. At one point, the League Batman and Lord Batman debate dictatorships against democracy while fighting until the Lord Batman points out with their rule, Thomas and Martha Wayne never would have died. League Batman concedes and the two drive around Gotham until they come across a man being punished for trying to get a free lunch. League Batman asks the Lord one if their parents would have enjoyed this place or not, throwing the argument back in his face and forcing Lord Batman to accept defeat.

However, as I said, there usually isn’t enough time to pump up both sides, especially if the author only wants this to be a one off as most don’t want their comics to become entirely based around politics. So, you have to figure a way to get the point across without coming off as one-sided or ignorant. One way is to base the straw character on real arguments made so that you’re responding to comments made by the opposing side. Another is to cite a real incident rather than a general spectrum of politics.

What you want to avoid, however, is making comics in which you come off as overly opinionated or ignorant of the other side. This can happen by having you character talking over the other side to prevent them from getting a counter out or not even making an opposing argument, just mocking them.

Now you may be wondering, do I have any more examples of good argument presentation besides a cartoon about Batman fighting Batman? Well you’re right, this is a website about webcomics and so I will use them for examples as to what I’m talking about.

1.       Opponent is permitted to express their views.

Done right – Order of the Stick

Done wrong – Better Days

So in Order of the Stick we have a man who is so obviously a villain that a couple of pages later he easily admits it and is looking forward to his son, the hero, beating him. But here he points out that his ‘kill one, save a hundred’ approach could potentially have longer lasting results. You can point out this technically isn’t an intended political argument but it is a good example. We understand the logic, though we may not agree with the ethics.

Better Days on the other hand has the mother talk over a teacher who is understandably concerned at the amount of racism and ableist language in her student’s work and yet told to shut up. You can point out the teacher did cross a line by calling the woman a slut, but it was irrelevant to the argument and so clearly only used to end the scene with the mother on top.

2.       Citing a real argument

Done right – Shortpacked!

Done Wrong – Least I Could Do

The first example is based on Tony Harris and his blog about how most women who attend conventions are only there for the attention, which many women, some of who were fans of Harris, were offended by. And there were some people who were quick to defend the notion. So Willis illustrates this by showing ‘Barass’ attacking one of the most unapologetic nerds in the cast to illustrate the fallacies of this ideal.

Least I Could Do on the other hand creates an argument altogether. The real reason newspapers, and most print publishers in general, were initially reluctant to switch to digital distribution is the cut in profits and the ease of piracy. However, according to Ryan Sohmer, it’s because they’re all lazy luddites who see technology as witchcraft.

3.       Presenting the other side as an equal.

Done right – Darths and Droids

Done Wrong – Sinfest

So one of the goals of Darths and Droids was to have R2-D2’s player, Pete, be there to portray some of the worst traits of some table top gamers. But despite this, he’s always portrayed as a friend the people enjoy playing with and an asset to the party who will do his best to see they all achieve victory, thus keeping him from the dreaded status of ‘The Scrappy.’

Now before I get into Sinfest, let me point out I do think it’s a good thing that Tat is campaigning for women’s rights. However his way of doing it is not that laudable, especially in this case in which he dismisses his own fans as misogynistic trolls just because they prefer the smiling ‘Nique to the current one who seems depressed thanks to her new outlook on life. It’s also incredibly insulting to those fans who don’t hate her new views since it’s not all that different from her anarchist preaching from before, they just want to see her smiling and enjoying life again.

So as you can see, creating a straw man argument does not always have to be a bad thing. That’s why most of the good examples I listed here aren’t listed as Straw Man arguments over at TV Tropes. It’s why Andrew Dobson gets crap for attacking readers giving feedback and yet Randy Milholland doesn’t have gain a horde of anonymous trolls ready to tear him down when he comments on reader entitlement.

Like any part of writing, it’s all about the way you frame everything.

So I guess I’ve been pretty non-active these last couple of weeks and giving the conn over to the very gracious David Herbert.  But the question remains: where has El Santo been?

Well, readers, it has been a very hectic two weeks.  We have a family of five at our house, and, long story short… it was a HANDFUL.  Seriously, it takes all your mental energy to keep track of two kids and one adult who are diagnosed with ADHD.  We were soooooooo wiped out by the time the week was through.  In short order: El Santo has been skiing, touring downtown Seattle, touring downtown Vancouver, stopping for pictures at the border crossing, and going to the place where Twin Peaks was filmed twice because someone forgot their camera at a coffee house near there.

To keep in touch with my sanity, I actually reconnected with an old online writing group that I hadn’t visited in some years.  To cope, I sorta started writing fiction.  Before the two weeks were over, I’d written like 25K words spread out over a few stories.  So it helped me gain some perspective on quick storytelling, as well as discovering some surprisingly well written stories that others had written in the years I’d missed.

Anyway, the tl;dr version: I should have a new review up by the end of this week, provided my brain has unwrinkled by then.

Thanks for checking up, and thanks to David Herbert for his articles!

In a way, PAX TV plays in the same sort of online playground as the webcomic that launched the franchise. Network television — nay, all television, including cable and the premium channels — may be walking dinosaurs like newspaper comics. To get any sort of ratings, TV has to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Smart TV shows are routinely punished by low ratings. And then … sometimes they push out ideas that are absolutely baffling. Did you know that there’s a celebrity diving show? Are there people watching this?  Online reports say the show got a  2.6 rating with adults 18-49, which is pretty decent.

I don’t understand you, viewers.

So it makes sense that there’s been some stirring on the online front.  Shows are appearing on YouTube.  Places like That Guy With The Glasses and Red Letter Media have gained decent followings.  And, even more recently, Netflix has gotten into the game with online-only content.  House of Cards has proven to be a modest hit, and the new season of Arrested Development is in the wings.  Can this be the next bold, new frontier?

It looks like Penny Arcade has gotten in the game, too.  Strip Search debuted on Penny Arcade TV some time ago.  It plays in that lowliest of TV formats: the reality show.  (Though there is a soft spot in my heart for these things.  I’ll have you know that I might have been the only person to devote blog posts about friggin’ Who Wants To Be A Superhero?)  This is of the more skill-based variety, a cousin to shows like Chopped, America’s Next Top Model, and Top Shot, where contestants are judged in skills based competition.  The goal: to win a one-year contract with Penny Arcade to draw webcomics for them.  In other words, this is the sort of show where you tune in to watch human resources at work in the hiring process.  Fun!

The first episode opens in Seattle.  This is my town, friends.   My back yard.  I think if I sneezed, you’d hear it on the soundtrack somewhere.  Shoot that probably IS true.  I’ve been spending quite a lot of time downtown showing some visitors on tours of the city.

Credit to the film crew: they did a good job high-lighting some of the lesser known local spots.  Like the Ducks Tour (that amphibious craft you see in the background).  And Bainbridge Island, I think.  I can’t wait for the episode where they visit the Gum Wall.

In fact, the Seattle of Strip Search looks pretty gritty.  No beauty shots of the Chihuly exhibit or a stroll down Bellevue to show the refined side of town.  In fact, if I didn’t know any better, Seattle on this show looks an awful lot like Portland.  Friggin’ Portland!  Gabe and Tycho are our hosts.  OK, I know thy have real names, but I’m going to go with the comic name because it’s far easier to remember.  Also, sexier.  As you can see abouve, one’s got the slouch and the gold necklace of a mafia hitman.  The other looks like a skinnier version of the guy from Mythbusters.  In other words, they looks exactly like their comic strip counterparts.

Anyway, they come off as sorta low wattage.  OK, I know this sounds a little mean.  You look a little jittery in your own videos, don’t you El Santo?  However, if you’re willing throwing yourself in a role involves being in front of the camera and presenting yourself potentially to the 7 billion people in the world, then you’re opening yourself up for criticism.  It really shows up later when the two joke that there’s a trap in the house.  It is really, really awkward.  I couldn’t tell if they were joking or trying to be ominous or being anything other than totally nervous.  I mean, I know that folks who get into webcomics are all total introverts, but man, Gabe and Tycho could’ve used some visual coaching.

We are introduced to some contestants, who are escorted to a secret location by being blindfolded with a bra.  Not even kidding.

So this is one of those reality shows where all the people have to live in one house.  Now a lot of these folks have different jobs (and plenty have an art background).  It seems like a lot of them do journal comics.  I guess that makes sense; Penny Arcade itself is a journal comic at heart. I guess I would’ve liked to see some variety, though.  But maybe I’m just a little tired of this style of comic.  Given that everyone here is in their mid to late 20′s, I don’t know if I want to read another comic about being a hipster learning to embrace adulthood.

It strikes me that all the contestants are basically the same type of person.  Seriously, there’s more variety on America’s Next Top Model, and all of those women a skinny, young, attractive ladies who have to meet a certain height requirement.  This should come as no surprise.  Total introverts, remember?  They’re by and larg meek, exceedingly polite, and look fairly uncomfortable making eye contact.  They’re clearly trying to set Abby as either a villain or the tough contestant who doesn’t play well with others.  But when she says, “Too many creative people think their idea is the best when in fact it is my idea that is the best,” it sounds forced and a little apologetic.

Everyone here looks kinda the same, too.  There are plenty of neckbeards on the dudes, a smattering of pixie cuts on the gals, and black-rimmed hipster glasses EVERYWHERE.  Shoot, I actually stifled a laugh when host Graham Stark shows up, and he’s got a neckbeard and the black-rimmed glasses.  I actually felt a little out of place in this crowd because I’m personally styling a pair of rimless glasses.  Is that why everyone in Seattle gives me a dirty look?  Am I that out of bed with fashion?

Erika Moen the most well known of the contestants, when she shows up, I’m all, “What’s she doing here? Does she really need this? Will it be revealed that she is… the Mole?”

With that, the show ends.  The first episode is all introduction.  The contest comes ahead.  Oh, and a bunch of ladies swear at the end.  Because this is the internet!  You can swear now!  Oh man, so edgy.

Anyway, let me know if you want me to continue with this.  If so, I can power watch the next five episodes to catch up.

(Here’s another opinion piece brought to you by the always gracious David Herbert.  Enjoy!)

So last week I made an idiot of myself by making a commentary on straw man arguments, while using an inaccurate definition of the term. My apologies. But now we dig into territory that’s a little harder to define since the term tends to be thrown around rather casually, especially on TV Tropes.

By the broadest definition, a Sue/Stu is an idealised version of the author who is universally liked, sometimes even by the antagonists, has powers/abilities far beyond any one else and always comes out on top. However, many protagonists have traits that fall under these categories and yet are never accused of being a Sue/Stu. And there are also many who have these traits but are unfairly labelled as one.

For example, Hermione Granger is a character I feel is unfairly labelled. Now yes, you can point out that JK Rowling has admitted she identifies most with Hermione and we are talking about a witch who can perform magic far beyond what is expected of her, but that doesn’t make her a Sue. (For the record, I’m only going by the books, not the movies). In the first novel, she’s introduced as being somewhat stuck up, a buzz kill, arrogant and these traits have alienated her from the rest of her classmates. She eventually loosens up, but the other characters still find her irritating at times.

The character is shown to be very neurotic; in book 3 she fails a test when the final obstacle, a creature that transforms into a person’s worst fear, appears as the deputy headmistress and informs her she flunked all her exams. She’s also only knowledgeable on textbook subjects, relying on Ron to tell her about wizarding culture as she didn’t grow up with them. And around book 4, she gains some white guilt over the plight of house elves, even going so far as to try and trick them into freeing themselves despite the elves being perfectly happy at Hogwarts, almost in an analogue of Islamic women who hate people campaigning for the banning of burqas. She refuses to accept that though since she’s very narrow minded and is routinely shown as this being a negative quality.

There’s nothing wrong with having a character based on the author, it’s always good to write what you know. And there’s nothing wrong with having a character that can be used as a power fantasy. It really all comes down to, as I said last week, framing and execution. If the character does something bad, are they punished for it? Are we shown or told how great a character is? How do they compare to the people around them?

Let’s take a look at some characters who can be seen as Stu/Sues and see if they fit the bill.

Ethan McManus of Ctrl+Alt+Delete

Now Buckley draws himself and Ethan the same way, so this is a clear author avatar. He’s idealised, to the point of being declared the king of gaming. His friends forgive him for awful things and his pain is usually shown as being of greater concern. However he’s not really supposed to be the superior one, in fact much of the humour comes from his idiocy. But that factor actually strengthens the other claims since he can be that stupid and still that right.

Verdict: Marty Stu

Tom Preston from So… You’re a Cartoonist.

The comic is semi-autobiographical so it’s an author avatar. However he’s not really idealised, he’s never presented as being a great cartoonist, in fact Dobson does mock himself on occasion and people around him tend to not like him. But he usually is presented as being in the right even when he’s being completely arrogant.

Verdict: Designated Hero

Rayne Summers from Least I Could Do

The name is very close to the author’s plus they share the same views and interests. He can pick up any woman he wants and helps run a corporation without any prior qualifications successfully. He wins every argument without allowing the opposition to counter, and is supposedly wise for this. When he does awful things, he’s not the one to blame. His friends tolerate abuse and are shown to find it amusing no matter the subject or even endearing.

Verdict: Marty Stu

Piro from Megatokyo

Named after Fred Gallagher’s username. Not entirely idealised, but is hinted at being a talented artist who doesn’t have enough self-esteem to realise it. Has a teenager fall in love with him. He’s too self-absorbed to realise the bizarre ongoing events around him. However he is called out for being whiny.

Verdict: Designated Hero

I had some more candidates, but it was almost impossible to navigate their archives and find the references I was looking for. Feel free to comment with your own analysis of other characters. I’d love to see what people think of my own characters.

That’s all from me for now. I’ll see you guys in April where we take a look at Sinfest and see if we can determine why people are having issues with it. Take care.

So when we last left our contestants, the were led away from the Hotel Max with bras over their eyes to live in a house in blustery Seattle.  Hopefully they all brought umbrellas.  So now these bunch of strangers have to get to know each other.  Our tenants in the Emerald City are a motley crew, who helpfully have a roster on the Strip Search site because other than Erika Moen, Abby, and Maki it’s kinda hard to tell them apart.

• Abby, whose appearance and attitude remind me a lot of Vicki from Community.  This is, incidentally, a good thing.  She might actually be my favorite for reasons I’ll explain later.
• Alex, who looks like Jesus.  He is from Arizona.  He’s not going to last in this weather.
• Amy, who’s… um…. sleepy eyed?  Anyway, we learn from Episode One that she quit her job to be on this show.  That does not sound like a solid five-year plan. The contract with Penny Arcade is only for a year.
• Erika Friggin’ Moen, who I still have a hard time understanding why she needs to win this contest.  I think she is secretly a mole.  I imagine in a future episode, she’ll be all, “Ha HA!  I’ve been secretly reporting your activities to Gabe and Tycho and your secrets will now be known TO THE WORLD!”  And they’ll be all, “Girl, cameras are on us 24/7, they already know what we’re up to.”
• Katie, draws herself like a little girl but is probably the oldest in the crew. She also looks a little like Kate Beaton.
• Lexxie, who has hipster glasses.
• Mackenzie, who looks like Brad Guigar.
• Maki, who has an awesome name, a neckbeard, and hipster glasses, and is probably the most huggable guy in the group.  In the dictionary, you will find his photo under “twee.”  Probably my second favorite.  I want an Abby/Maki finale.  It will be adorable.
• Monica, who I am surprised doesn’t wear hipster glasses.  She’s actually got a Colleen Haskell from Season 1 of Survivor look to her, actually.
• Nick, who… um… (don’t mention race, don’t mention race, don’t mention race) wears a hat?
• Tavis, who looks like a less awesome Maki.
• Ty, who wears hipster glasses.

So Episode Two is all about the group paying a game called Fax Machine.  Remember what those were, kids?  They were like internet, only printed on these things made out of pulp and fiber called “paper.”  The made the most melodious noises.  We would play them because mp3′s hadn’t been discovered yet.  Anyway, the goal of the game is to write down a phrase in a notebook, pass your notebook to the next artist, as to which the artist has two minutes to draw that phrase.  And then the next artist has to write down the phrase based on the drawing, and then it’s passed on down to the next artist.  It’s actually an interesting game that I’m going to have to bring up at the next ice cream social.

So the crew loosens up, there are plenty of pictures to be had, and they get to know each other.  They all agree that Maki is the best, which is a pretty undeniable fact.  The host declares him the unofficial winner.

But wait!  There’s a twist!  Unlike those circulars you get in the mail from your local auto dealerships bundled with fake keys and such, there’s actually a prize to being an unofficial winner.  For being the most awesome dude on the show, Maki wins a ticket!  It won’t get him a tour to the Willy Wonka Factory, but it does give him the chance to “redraw”, whatever that means.

Episode Three introduces the first challenge.  It entails what is apparently one of the most important tasks when it comes to being a webcomic creator. The contestants have to design … a T-shirt.  Hey, you sensitive types who complain about webcomic artists being called glorified T-shirt vendors?  Well f*** YOU!  Because unless you can design a T-shirt worthy of the Penny Arcade brand, you ain’t moving on to the next round, homes!

Incidentally, this will be judged by three of Penny Arcade’s marketing folks.  I really don’t know what the big deal is, by the way.  Have any of them ever seen the shirts that Jeph Jacques is offering for Questionable Content?  One of them literally just says “TEH.”  And I imagine it’s probably one of the best selling webcomic T-shirts ever.

Here’s my main problem with the contest.  They’re designing a T-shirt for the show, and not something for their own webcomic brand.  I mean, T-shirts always seemed to me a natural extension of the enthusiasm fans have of the webcomic product.  You’re fans love your story, they want to show their friends that’ll make them go, “Hey, that’s a nice shirt!  What’s it referring to?”  The artist provides something that could be a conversation starter. It’s a circle of love, and the artist benefits monetarily.

Here, the way it’s framed, you’re not being recruited for your storytelling abilities or your sense of humor.  No, it’s all in the selling.  You have to make a logo that people want to wear.  It’s so… soulless.  I mean, it’s nice that the winner gets all the profit of the T-shirt when it’s posted on the Penny Arcade site, but geez.  There was no love involved in it.  I understand that a lot of webcomic creators could stand to know the business side of things (I do have an MBA myself, so I get the importance), but, damn, this is like some other career that has nothing to do with pouring your heart out into making a comic.

Anyway, this is where I begin to really like Abby.  She’s the one who’s all bluster and bravado… and yet the judges see right through it and realize that she’s really, really nervous.  She’s constantly pointing out her own errors, which is a big no-no.  Oh, Abby.  I feel for ya, girl.

Anyway, after a bunch of disappointing designs (the judges’ words, not mine) they settle on the one below created by Amy:

And honestly?  It ain’t bad.  Once it popped up on the screen, I actually came to the same conclusion.  Amy scored major points by mocking it up on a drawing of T-shirt and showing the judges what her concept of the final product was.  I checked it up on the Penny Arcade site, and it does look like something I would wear.  While the other artists focused on illustration and drawing cartoon mascots, Amy went the other way and considered what would look good on apparel.  It works.  It totally works.

BUT!

This has nothing to do with webcomics.  If this was something for a low-rent version of Project Runway, fine.  But webcomic creators have sold T-shirts that have had much less panache, and little of it has to do with the design of the shirt itself.  I mean, Good Lord, Wil Wheaton wore this Penny Arcade shirt on an episode of Big Bang Theory, and I doubt the final design had to go through such a rigorous selection process.

So Amy gets her prize.  She also gets to decide who’s going to go up for elimination in the next episode.  She selects Jesus and Not Kate Beaton.  Tough luck, you two.  Looks like you’re being sent to the principal’s office.

I think we are entering a somewhat mature era for webcomics. Not necessarily “mature” in the sense of “growing up and getting a job” or “mature” in the way cable channels like Starz and Cinemax use it. (Though there are examples of both if you’re looking for it.) I mean mainly that it’s been around a while. When CAD aped the style of Penny Arcade, there was plenty of hoo-ing and hah-ing that somebody was getting their style ripped off. We’ve reached a day, I think, that if someone copped the same style these days, you could say, rather, that the comic was “influenced by” it’s more well known predecessor.

Can we seriously fault any new webcomic if it builds upon the precedents set by Penny Arcade or Kate Beaton or Scott Kurtz or Pete Abrams? After all, they were the ones who proved what worked and what didn’t. They’re the ones who know the safe route to success. Sure, it somewhat puts the limits of creativity. However, while a very few of us can be Pablo Picassos, most of us would be happy being Norman Rockwells: low in pizzazz, but just high enough in appeal for the masses at large.

These are the thoughts that flitted through my mind while ruminating over Citation Needed, by Christopher J. O’Brien and Amy T. Falcone. It’s a comic that stubbornly conforms to the established narrative as to what a webcomic should be. Namely it’s a roommate webcomic about wacky characters and totally random humor. Which means, bottom line, Citation Needed looks like pretty much every other webcomic ever.

Incidentally, while I was writing this review, I was struck with the dawning realization that I recognized one of those names. Amy Falcone is, in fact, one of the contestants from Strip Search. Now, while I’ve been doing reviews of the web show, I can assure you that my selection of the comic is purely coincidental and no one was more surprised than I was. I’d selected this comic off the Just The First Frame site before I had even buckled down to watch Strip Search. Still, it does give me something to talk about.

Ms. Falcone is the contestant who quit her day job in order to be on the show. She also promotes herself on her comic as the “villain” of the show. I’ve only gone to episode three so I have no idea how much of this is true. It seems that there are a fair amount of contestants who want to be the “villain,” but, like I said in my reviews of Strip Search, everyone seems to genial to actually pull it off. Conversely, I think more reality shows would be far more lively if we saw a fourth-wall-breaking meta scene where we see contestants playfully trying to figure out who is going to be the villain for the show. I’d watch that in my jammies.

In fact, Ms. Falcone was the one who won the T-shirt challenge. She definitely has a great sense of style. I’ve been checking her online gallery on Tumblr, and it’s full of some stunning visuals. The modern webcomic artists definitely have a huge advantage over their predecessors from a decade ago. The guys behind Penny Arcade, for example, are not artists. They stumbled on an underserved niche culture and caught attention with their risque humor. (Magic, by the way, that they seem to be desperately trying to replicate on their reality show.) Nowadays, people with actual talent are getting into the field. It was no surprise when Ms. Falcone won the T-shirt contest: she has a very good eye toward composition.

Unfortunately, she’s adopted a far simpler style here. While I want to say that it was influenced by John Kricfalusi, the creator of Ren & Stimpy, the style actually reminds me more of Shmorky’s. Shoot, if you told me that this was Shmorky’s side project where he was playing around with less edgy humor, I’d believe you. All the characters have familiar bean shaped heads, large eyes, pouty lips, and zero nostrils because everyone in this comic breathes through their mouths. (Well, up until Season 4, when Ms. Falcone switches up her style… perhaps as a result of Strip Search.)

Citation Needed gets its name from the Wikipedia reference request that became a meme somehow. The comic starts off with two characters, Gigi and Micro. There seems to be some unresolved sexual tension here, but that’s what you’re conditioned to assume when a webcomic starts with a guy and a gal who seem to flirt with each other all the time. Anyway, Gigi’s character trait is that she’s sarcastic and kinda sexually liberated, while Micro is a big man child.

An then we’re introduced to a bunch of other characters who all sort of look alike and are kinda ditched by the time 2013 rolls around. They are, by and large, pretty forgettable. There’s a wacky story arc where all the characters are re-enacting the movie Jaws, only Jaws is a Roomba vaccuum. (Ha, ha, how wacky!) This means all the characters are now dressed up in costumes from the movie. Here’s the problem: since everyone looks more or less the same, I had a hard time trying to tell apart which character was which. There was a guy with a five o’clock shadow, for example. Was this guy a previous character we saw with a line over his mouth… or was this part of a costume?

Actually, there’s one other notable character. Then there’s Macro, who looks exactly like Micro except he wears blue instead of red. For once, this isn’t lazy design choice: Macro is introduced as Micro’s clone. While this sounds like it should be a crazy one-off gag, Macro, to my endless chagrin, actually manages to stay around and pretty much usurps the comic to become the main character. He’s also a manchild like Micro, only he’s sweet instead of cruel.

He also manages to have some convoluted story arcs that rival M*A*S*H for waffling between comedic to maudlin. For example, there’s one story where Micro breaks his legs and he’s fawned over by the females of the cast. He makes a remark that he wanted robot legs. Macro picks up on this. So, in an ill-advised attempt to get the girls to like him, he takes a flying leap and breaks his legs. He’s not quite so lucky, and he has his legs amputated. The upside: he gets robot legs! And it makes him a hit with the chicks! Oh, Ethan Macro!

But then it’s all pretty much retconned in the service of drama. I’m not kidding; Citation Needed pulls the drama tag so hard that David Willis would be proud. When Macro notice how jealous Micro has gotten over all the attention, there’s a sad moment where he says that the price he had to pay wasn’t worth having lost his legs. Later, even the ridiculous clone thing is retconned. Why Macro isn’t Micro’s clone after all… he’s his twin! What a twist! Also, Macro is gay and Canadian. Or rather, Macro thinks he might be gay because he’s attracted to Gigi (who he thought was a boy). But it turns out Gigi is a lesbian, who is turned on by girly men.

The Canadian thing still stands.

Here’s the most ludicrous twist that got reconned into drama: we learn that Macro didn’t lose his legs because he took a flying leap off a building. Rather, he was going to lose his legs anyway because he had a hidden disease. After the doctors amputated him, he felt it was better to live up the lie than tell everyone the truth.

Seriously. What the hell. We saw this guy take a flying leap off the roof in glee. We’re supposed to feel rotten about that now? Why?!?!?!?

I briefly considered that perhaps all these twists toward drama were intentional gags poking fun at other webcomics who do the same thing. I mean, can this really be serious? The transitions are so abrupt, the retconned stories are themselves not very emotional, and everything reverts back to full-on wackiness by the time we get to the next storyline. I can see this being a bit. If so, it’s not a particularly well executed one.

Besides, Citation Needed, in general, seems to be heading toward Dramaville in general. The webcomic split into seasons like a TV sitcom, and with each season it seems to ask the readers to consider these one-dimensional cyphers as serious characters. (It’s actually a technique I like. It sorta forces a pre-made schedule for shaking things up.) In Season 3, Citation Needed began the trend of turning Macro into an actual character rather than comic relief. Season 4 cleans the slate and revolves around the three characters who have had any kind of character development. After Gigi, Micro, and Macro return from a trip to Canada, they learn that they only have one day before they lose the house that they’ve been living in. Their other roommates have already moved on to other places. These three now have to start over again, living in a small apartment. I imagine a huge decrease in wacky hi-jinks compared to Season 1.

It’s really tough for me to separate this comic from its predecessors. Sure, all these wacky roommate webcomics have similarities. (As is the very tiresome trope of male leads who are all immature, mentally stunted manchildren. Also, for some reason, moustaches are hilarious! Oh, man, it’s not like I haven’t seen this trope like a hundred times already.) The best of the best manage to stand out from the pack through clever humor, attractive art, and interesting characters. Sad to say, Citation Needed misses on all fronts.

This a webcomic that more or less runs the “Roombas are hilarious” joke into the ground. And not to sweep up dirt, dust, and pesky stains. Plus, this is a comic that dares to make an elementary school joke out of the phrase “on a roll.” Now, granted, there are some funny moments: I did like the zombie lobster one, which met the minimum requirement of cleverness.

While Ms. Falcone does has an attractive portfolio, not of those skills are on display here. When Shmorky adopted this style, for example, he molded it like clay to suit the whimsical and macabre malleability of the animation medium. It doesn’t quite work on a static webcomic page. When you’re seeing characters just standing there and having conversation, things tend to look a little bland.

And finally, the characters are not interesting at all. The whiplash between comedy to drama does no favors at all. I ended up not really caring much for Macro, who started out as an innocent goof but is now a serious male lead for some reason? Micro was always annoying (though I’m sure that many of you readers have a higher tolerance for Ethanesque lobotomy patients). And Gigi, I don’t care much for. In the end, I can’t really hate this comic, since it’s competently executed. But I can’t help but feel that the whole thing is nothing more than totally average.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

GAZE UPON WHAT YOU HAVE DONE.

(h/t Algeya)

Last time on Strip Search – T-shirts are serious business! Bu now we get to the even more serious business: the first elimination. On Episode 4, it’s going to be between the longhaired and Bearded Alex vs. the non-glassed Katie. So we begin with this precious exchange where Tycho shows his comedic prowess: “Alex, I understand that your shirt design featured hateful, anti-Semitic imagery. Tell me, what is your favorite thing about Hitler?” Ehhh… it works better when spoken by a cool cartoon guy. At least Alex is on the ball enough to respond: “efficiency.”

Katie doesn’t know why she’s here in the bottom two either. Tycho actually thought the design was excellent. I’m going to guess this is going to play into how Amy’s been promoting herself as the show’s villain. How dare she lay waste to great T-shirt designs! To settle who gets eliminated, Katie and Alex have to select ideas from crumpled papers n a wastebasket, and they have one and a half hour to make webcomics out of them. Friggin’ finally. Something about webcomics. The ideas are “space” and “table tennis.”

The guys get to work on some fantastic-looking electronic tablets to draw up their toons. (Thought I was disappointed that this wasn’t totally old school. I would’ve loved to see a drafting table with T-squares, rubber erasers, and twelve different kinds of inking pens. Technology makes things visually boring.) Gabe and Tycho try to ramp up drama by goading Alex and Katie and asking them who they thought should’ve been eliminated, but the two of them are so polite that no drama is stirred. Alex comes closest, though, by saying that he agreed with the judges on their assessment on which T-shirt design was the weakest. Hey there, buckaroo, don’t be stirrin’ no hornet’s nest! You kiss your mother with that mouth?

Later, Gabe and Tycho try desperately to make the show exciting by stirring up crap by implying Amy had ulterior motives to have Katie kicked out… but that falls really, really flat and it is incredibly transparent. Katie actually says she sympathized with Amy. That doesn’t stop Gabe and Tycho from futilely pursuing this incredibly fruitless tangent. Amy Falcone Villiany Campaign: 0.

There’s some nice talk about whether an hour and a half is enough to draw a webcomic, and Gabe and Tycho reminisce how they had the same anxieties about those design contraints in 1998. Gabe pretty much hovers over the two like an evil genie.

Gabe goes, “Time! To think about what you’ll do with the remaining 45 minutes.” Ugh. These jokes just don’t translate on screen. Things get so … exciting… that Gabe and Tycho start critiquing the cartoon full-sized standee of Abagail Howard in the studio.

So Alex and Katie do their comic strips, and, in Webcomic Overlook parlance: Alex, 2 stars. Katie, 2 stars. Now, if you’ve ever watched shows like, say, Food Network Challenge, the judges are accomplished enough that they offer some great insights into why they chose a particular design. Gabe and Tycho’s comments? Incredibly superficial. Like, trying to find thesaurus words for “good” superficial.

And our first eliminations is… Alex. Sad, despite his noble attempt at trying to copy the Penny Arcade style as much as possible. Here are the adventures of… um… Abe and Psycho?

I suppose I should give him a break, though, since, yes, one and a half hours is hardly enough time to do anything good. Should’be put some time in those 24-hour comic challenges, buddy.

Incidentally, I almost expected Katie to hug Alex at the end, like they do on most of these shows, but the best she manages is a pat on the shoulder. I guess they’re still strangers, but man, give this guy a hug! He was the first elimination! That’s driven competitors on other reality shows to heavy drink! Or worse!

Episode 5 is called “Ducks,” which I assume is going to be about that amphibious tour that I take out-of-town visitors on when they blow into Seattle. I hope they include the pirate tour guide, Walken D. Plank. He was a blast.

I was right, by the way, that the Arizona guys would have a hard time with the weather. Phoenix guy has a hard time with the weather immediately. Sadly, our tour guide is not Walken D. Plank, but a less flamboyant dude named Captain Lou. At least he has a rubber duck hat. The next is sort of the Travelogue portion of the program. It makes Seattle look really, really wet. (And a little unappealing, to be honest. From my experience, the city usually looks more photogenic than what’s captured here.) Captain Lou goes through his tour guide thing. I have to say, this segment replicates exactly the feeling of being on a 70-minute tour.

So now the contestants take a quiz to see if they were paying attention during the tour. Unnnggggghhhhhhhhhhhh. Each contestant gets a pad, where they write out what they think is the correct answer to each question. No drawing. No making comics. Just doing a quiz on fun facts about Seattle.

This is MUST SEE TV.

Yes, if you were wondering, I friggin’ fast forwarded to the end of this one. The winner is Lexxy, the girl with the pixie cut and the hipster glasses.

For paying attention, though, Lexxy gets a really awesome prize: a Cintiq HD.

Next challenge: interviews. Wait, INTERVIEWS?!?!?!? Oh, COME ON! I thought I was kidding when I said we were televising Penny Arcade’s Human Resources Department!

As scintillating as witnessing a bunch of job interviews sounds, I think this is the end of the road for me and reviewing Strip Search. These challenges are seriously the sort of thing that you’d reject at a family renunion. At least we got to see a couple of webcomics being made.

All Night, by Brittney Sabo, is only 11 pages long as of this writing. It seems to be about a spellcaster living in the Wild West who does some magic extermination on pesky spirits. There’s little plot as of now. But, wow, is the art gorgeous. The beautifully textured line work is accentuated by a lovely red, blue, and brown palette. Some comics, I read for the story. This one, I just want to luxuriate in the visuals.

One of the most mockable aspects of anime is when the characters have a big brother/little relationship when the two characters are not actually related. (And, let’s face it, sometimes when they are.) There’s usually a sizable age difference. The girl will be barely into her teens, and the guy will be college age or older. The girl is typically portrayed as somewhat infantile, especially when mewling something along the lines of “onneeeeeiiiiisaaaannnn!” (Alternately, “neeeesannnnnnn!”) The guy, on the other hand, is some aloof, emotionally distant dude who appends the heroine’s name with “-chan.” While this is typically portrayed as sibling closeness, there’s a little bit of creepiness in the subtext of how that same closeness can easily translate into something more serious. (And it can get really weird when it actually does happen.)

In Strays by Samantha Whitten and Stacey Pefferkorn, we’re introduced to a young 12-year-old girl named Meela. She’s homeless and trying to survive in the big outdoors by herself. Suddenly, a fight breaks down nearby, which destroys her rickety lean-to. She meets the 28-year-old Feral. Feral, while being a silent badass, takes some pity on Meela and decides to let her tag along.

So many alarms were going off in my head.

So many alarms.

(Incidentally, I was writing this on the day before Easter — a huge shopping day, due to the many sales at the mall — while sitting at a window facing an American Girl doll store, which is abundantly populated by many tiny girls. I imagined a terrible scenario where someone called security, and they confiscated my laptop which currently has the first paragraph written up without any further context. I think that chances were high that I would’ve had to register my name on a list of not very nice people. These are the sorts of sacrifices I make for you, dear readers. Blogging is more dangerous than it sounds.)

So right off the bat, Meela is pretty annoying in that “perky anime catgirl who can’t shut up” sort of way. Wait, did I say that she’s a catgirl? She’s actually part wolf. We see here running around with a fluffy little tail, though, so my confusion is understandable. In the world of Strays, many of the characters can typically transform into spectacular beasties. Meela and Feral are wolves, there’s a gal introduced later on who can turn into a fox, a few characters can transform into birds, and one particularly fearsome nemesis can turn into a panther.

It turns out that commmunication with Feral can be one sided. It’s not just because his stoic and cool, which he is. (Who wouldn’t get lost in those dreamy red/gray eyes?) It turns out he also had his throat ripped out. How it happened remains one of the comic’s central mysteries. Feral can only communicate through the most rudimentary of sign languages, usually by crossing his arms to his chest. I have to give a lot of credit to Whitten and Pefferkorn: this was a bold storytelling decision. They do a very good job of developing Feral’s personality primarily through facial expressions and body language. Good job, you two!

This may not be the best idea that Feral has ever had, though. I think he tries to shake Meela a few times, but it turns out she’s very persistent and very lonely. And it’s not like Feral actually tries all that hard to lose her, either. (It’s revealed later that both sort of have tragic pasts, which may be why the two of them have this unspoken need to bond with each other.) However, Feral’s job is not the most kid-friendly one on the market. He’s a bounty hunter, and where he goes, trouble follows.

Meela tags along with Feral on his next mission, which apparently involves heading out to eastern Kentucky to face a redneck with a shotgun. Or rather, to pick up a bounty on some guy who murdered his wife and is apparently evading authorities. Things go pretty bad from the start. Thanks to Meela’s poor control over the volume of her speaking voice, the two are discovered almost immediately. Second, shotguns are apparently a rare commodity in Strays-verse. Feral’s primary weapon is knives. And, in case you haven’t seen the Deadliest Warrior episode about it, knives do not stand a very good chance against a 12-gage. The two are perplexed with how to approach the situation. Stealth is considered, and perhaps the best option for a bounty hunter with a speech disorder, but that option is out of the question when Meela’s on board.

In the end, though, through some magic mumbo jumbo, the mission turns out to be a success… but it ends tragically. The target is killed, and Meela is more than a little convinced — based on a panicked testimony and some extremely circumstantial evidence — that the man might in fact be innocent.

From there, the story gets a little more complex. (Though, I should point out, not that hard to follow.) We learn that Feral was working for a secret benefactor named Holland. It turns out that Feral and Holland have a past, and that he might have ulterior motives in contracting Feral. It turns out Feral was sort of a big brother figure to Holland. I take it that means he has both an emotional connection with our silent protagonist, and he also knows what his unique capabilities are.

Also, Holland is super flamboyant. Like, “I have no idea why Strays is trying to convince us that Holland is attracted to women” flamboyant. Anyway, Holland is character that’s full of secrets. There’s a big reveal to Meela that I won’t discuss here, but what impressed me most is how Whitten and Pefferkorn managed to sprinkle clues to reveal several chapters previously, but were so deftly coy that the revelation still came off as a bit of a surprise.

Even the sexy lady thief Piper is more than she appears. Incidentally, I like how Whitten and/or Pefferkorn draw her, by the way. While Piper is attractive, she’s not drawn as a rail thin supermodel, a template that most artists would adopt for a cat thief. She’s definitely got some muscle tone on her bones, which makes her look believable athletic. What can I say? I’m a big fan of the Jennifer-Lawrence-as-Katniss-Everdeen body type.

But back to the character. She’s originally introduced as a sexy babe who Feral hits on (silently) at a tavern. It turns out the two of them are playing an elaborate con game: Piper is trying to rob Feral, and Feral is trying to bring her in for a bounty. But wait, there’s more! It turns out Piper and Holland have a past. You know, Holland, the guy who’s really been the one sending Feral on missions?

I’m being a little cagey because a big factor in enjoying Strays is that the comic is chock full of crazy plot twists … and for once, I kinda like it. When I started reading Strays, my initial impression was that this was going to be one of the webcomics where we spend long stretches where nothing happens and everything is carried along by the artwork. (Which is very easy on the eyes, admittedly.) It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve reviewed many, many webcomics with decent to great visuals that just dragged like a two-legged dog because the creator(s) couldn’t balance the art with narrative flow.

Nope! One of the things I admire most about Strays is how energetic it is. I have no idea how much of this is planned ahead. I have a sneaky feeling very little of it was, and much of the story is the creators freestyling the next plot element, but ultimately it doesn’t matter since it’s all incredibly lively.

Does Meela ever stop being annoying? Not really. But I grew to accept that aspect of her character, one of a chatty motor mouth who, through the magnitude of her good intentions, ends up getting into more trouble that it’s worth. I think it helps that Meela is pretty much portrayed as a screw up. She’s no prodigy, nor she is someone who is necessary to make the team better. Feral’s letting Meela hang around out of pity. Holland wants her around because he sees how much she’s helping Feral open up. And Piper… well, it’s not explicitly stated, but I’m guessing she like having another female on this bro-heavy team.

So, in a way, Meela becomes sort of the imouto-chan to the readers as well. Perky, difficult, over eager, and a little bit of a brat, but with so much heart that, darn it, it wouldn’t hurt babysitting her again just one more time. Also, don’t be thinking romantic thoughts or nothing. That’s just weird. (Incidentally, I read the creators have pretty much guaranteed there there will be no romance between Meela and Feral. So if that’s where your thoughts was heading, take this moment to think about your life and what happened that got you to the point where you’re shipping a 12-year-old with a 28-year-old.)

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

There’s an old Cat and Girl comic that claims that hipsters don’t exist. “Everyone’s seen a hipster, but nobody is one,” snaps the girl. This idea was reiterated by a co-worker of mine, who insisted, every day, that there was no such thing as hipsters. They may as well have been ghosts or Santa Clauses or whatever. A mere figment of the imagination.

So… who were all these people I saw wearing trucker caps and Buddy Holly glasses, then? Was I … dreaming? When my brother calls himself a “hipster,” is he lying through his teeth? Maybe hipsters only appear if you say their name three times? No, wait… that’s Beetlejuice. Who, when you think about it, was sort of a hipster ghost.

These theoretical beings of light and illusion take center stage in the aptly titled webcomic Hipsters, by Adrian vom Baur. We follow these hipsters in their natural habitat of snark and loathing and … dinosaurs, apparently.

The hipsters are a bunch of urban guys and girls with scarves and glasses and crap.  It’s not unusual to see them wearing T-shirts with drawings of T-shirts on them.  So ironic.  For these hipsters, Irony is a huge commodity, with meta observations not far behind.  What’s cool for a hipster?  Only things that can be viewed with a detached sense of irony and  a knowing sneer. To live is to scorn.  If something they enjoy becomes too popular, the hipster defense mechanism is to complain about them selling out. However, hipsters also seem to have a genuine appreciation for anything retro. Even aged Cold War era machinery gains a modicum of respect.

These hipsters treat everything with an air of superiority, unfazed by anything the world throws at them. It doesn’t matter if they’re monsters, dinosaurs, robots, robot dinosaurs, or bronies. They can have their blood sucked by vampires. They can be chomped up in the gaping maw of a prehistoric beastie. Hipsters just don’t care. They are unimpressed by everything in equal measure.

Which is the greatest weakness of Hipsters, incidentally. This webcomic tends to get incredibly wordy. Yeah, I get that’s part of the joke: hipsters love to talk mainly because they like the sound of their own voices. But… does it need to be this wordy? Because, honestly, there’s not that many jokes to milk out of hipsters. There are only a few punchlines, and they’re repeated pretty regularly. You’ve got the standard gag of “we’re really obscure, you probably haven’t heard of us”. And when you’re bored with that, you can move on to “I totally was into it before it was cool”. These two (rather obvious) observations can be enjoyable in small measures. However, it doesn’t take long before it gets old… which happens, roughly, halfway through the second story arc (“Hipsters vs. Vampires”). Even seeing these hipsters meet grisly deaths brings me no joy.

I guess, in the end, the jaded hipster … is me.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 5).

They ride tall ships to the far away,
and see the long ago.
They walk where fabled people trod,
and Yetis trod the snow.

They meet the folks who live on stars,
and find them much like us,
With food and love and happiness
the things they most discuss.

The world is full of clans and cults
abuzz as angry bees,
And Junior Woodchucks snapping jeers
at Littlest Chickadees.

The ducks show us that part of life
is to forgive a slight.
That black eyes given in revenge
keep hatred burning bright.

So when our walks in sun or shade
pass graveyards filled by wars,
It’s nice to stop and read of ducks
whose battles leave no scars.

To read of ducks who parody
our vain attempts at glory,
They don’t exist, but somehow leave
us glad we bought their story.

That poem was written by the man known by the world as the Good Duck Artist: Carl Barks. Donald Duck may have been created by the late, great Walt Disney, but it can be argued — very successfully, in fact — that he didn’t come into his own until Carl Barks wrote stories about him. More importantly, Carl Barks is the creator of Donald Duck’s wealthy uncle: a self-made duck with a top hat and tiny pince-nez glasses named Scrooge McDuck.

The world of race cars, lasers, and aeroplanes would never be the same again.

(Incidentally, much of my info for this piece  comes straight from the Wikipedia entry on Carl Barks, which is super detailed.  I have a feeling Don Rosa wrote it.)

Carl Barks, called the “Hans Christian Andersen of comic books” by fellow legend Will Eisner, was born at the turn of the century: March 27, 1901. He lived in a world where cowboys still carried around revolvers and the big city meant somewhere located close to the rail lines. He was the simple son of farmers from the small town of Merrill, Oregon. (Current population: 844.) By all accounts, he had a lonely childhood. Neighbors were a half mile away. School was two miles away… end even then, there were only eight or ten students. He worked hard doing farmwork: breeding attle, cultivating crops, selling to the local slaughterhouses.

Barks would’ve liked to continue his education, but, alas, he’d developed hearing problems. Hearing aids were not easy to come by in those days, and bad hearing meant poor education. Barks decided not to move on to high school and instead drifted around, taking on odd jobs. He went from being a woodcutter to a mule driver to a cowboy. Along the way, he met several people, all blue collar folk just like him, who liked to joke with each other a lot just to get through the day.

While such an experience would probably be a downer for most of us, Barks, instead, decided to use it as an inspiration. He remembered experiences, the ups and downs (mostly the downs), and they would form the basis for his portrayal of his most famous characters: Disney’s Donald Duck and his own creation, Scrooge McDuck.

Barks had taken a few corresponded classes on art. He’d tried to sell his drawing to some small press newspapers beforehand, but with little success. He did find work at the Calgary Eye-Opener, which Wikipedia describes as a racy men’s cartoon magazine. (Don’t get too excited, readers: I did an internet search of those old papers, and “racy” apparently means talking about smoking and boozing a lot. Those looking for cartoons of ladies in knee breeches and bloomers best look elsewhere. Namely, within the pages of Ally Sloper.)

However, Barks finally got his big break when he was hired at Disney in 1935 as an in-betweener. (You know, the poor scrubs who have to draw all the tiny animation panels in between the key cells.) Working conditions at Disney were pretty poor in those days, though, and ongoing health problems caused Barks to quit in 1942.

He stumbled upon his true destiny, however, while moonlighting as a comic artist for Disney adaptations. He did half the artwork for Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, a 64-page story adapted from an unproduced feature. Looking for a stable income, he asked the publisher whether there was a regular artist for Donald Duck stories. He got the job and toiled away at the stories anonymously (as was the general practice in those days). The stories would draw heavily from Bark’s own experiences. One story chronicles Donald’s escapades at a chicken farm. Barks himself had played around with starting a chicken farm in the San Jacinto area after he quit Disney’s animation studios.

Scrooge McDuck made his debut in the 1947 comic story, “Christmas on Bear Mountain.” What was originally a bit part eventually became the foundation of the entire Duck universe. Barks envisioned Scrooge and Donald to not be at all that dissimilar. Both were irritable cranks, after all. But while Donald was based on Barks’ life as a journeyman, Scrooge seems to have been based on his later successes. Scrooge got to where he was through sheer perseverance, someone who became the “World’s Richest Duck” through hard work and cleverness. (“Tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties,” he would say to grand-nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie.)

And, oh yeah, Scrooge was totally responsible for planting into every child the dream that they, too, can swim through a bin stacked high with coins.

Scrooge would travel the world going on boss adventures with his nephews, facing every challenge with sheer pluck. For references, Barks would often draw on pictures he found in National Geographic magazine. Dismal Downs, the ancestral home of the Duck clan, was based on an article he’d come across about British castles. The references helped to give a certain sence of authenticity to his background illustrations, which were full of strong detail due to Bark’s one-time goal at writing more “serious” comics.

From there, Barks went to to create a myriad of classic characters: Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys, the Junior Woodchucks, Gyro Gearloose, Flintheart Glomgold, and Magica De Spell.

Eventually, fans of the Duck stories would catch on that there was a “Good Duck Artist” behind all of it. Eventually, fans managed to guess the identity of the farmer’s boy from Merrill, Oregon. Through fanzines and conventions, the name of Carl Barks spread until Carl Barks became the most well known artist to write and draw a Disney comic book.

The influence of the Carl Barks stories show up in the strangest of places. You know the infamous boulder scene from Indiana Jones that has been parodied, like, everywhere? Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas have admitted that the sequence was inspired by the same trap in the Uncle Scrooge story, “The Seven Cities of Cibola.”

Hey, do you know Osamu Tezuka, the guy who basically invented manga in Japan? He mentioned that his artistic style was heavily influenced by Bark’s Scrooge McDuck stories.

Barks remains a huge influence in Europe, where the Disney Duck stories remain popular. His style has been meticulously replicated by Dann Jippes, Freddy Milton, and Don Rosa… the current torchbearer one of the most prominent torchbearers of the Disney Duck legacy and creator of the Eisner Award-winning The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.

And finally, there’s DuckTales, perhaps the gold standard for all weekly animated series. Many of Carl Bark’s original Disney Duck stories would find their way into this landmark cartoon… apparently to the chagrin of some hardcore Disney Duck enthusiasts like Don Rosa (who’s not that complimentary of them in the comic reprints I’ve read). However, for a kid growing up in the 80′s, these were eye-openers … an amazing revelation that corporate icons like Donald, Scrooge, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie were capable of being in fun stories and adventures. It’s also in the running for quite possibly the best theme song of all time:

So there’s the inspiring story of how a guy who once had to take odd jobs where he could take ‘em ended up changing the comic field around the world.  It’s a success story that Scrooge McDuck himself would’ve been proud of.

Yeah, most of you have probably seen this already, but it’s new to me. (Curse those visitors at my house for derailing my typical feelers for any sort of webcomic news). PBS did a segment on their show, Off Book called “The Rise of Webcomics” … and it’s really well done. They interview Christina Xu of Breadpig, Nick Gurewitch of Perry Bible Fellowship, Sam Brown of Exploding Dog, Lucy Knisley of Stop Paying Attention, and Andrew Hussie of Homestuck. It’s a pretty nice slice of webcomic creators. Each of them give a little talk about what their plans for their webcomics are, and how the unique properties of the internet open up their comics to new possibilites. (I especially like how Hussie talks about how relationships between people are different now with the internet, and how he tries to replicate that sort of environment in his comic.) Anyay, a fine documentary, if a little short.

(h/t arstechnica.com)

I just learned of the sad news, through the AV Club, of the passing of Roger Ebert. Truly sad news. I’ve mentioned Ebert’s influence on my reviewing style many times on this site. I used to pore through all of his old reviews. He had a great way of keeping his reviews entertaining while elaborating his points without sounding pompous. There was always an unwritten “these are my opinions, but if you feel differently that’s fine, too” atmosphere about them.

And when he trashed a movie… he trashed a movie. His most infamous is probably his review of Deuce Biggalo: European Gigalo, where he took Rob Schnieder to the woodchipper:

The movie created a spot of controversy last February. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year’s Best Picture Nominees and wrote that they were “ignored, unloved and turned down flat by most of the same studios that … bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to ‘Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,’ a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.”

Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: “Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind … Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers.”

Reading this, I was about to observe that Schneider can dish it out but he can’t take it. Then I found he’s not so good at dishing it out, either. I went online and found that Patrick Goldstein has won a National Headliner Award, a Los Angeles Press Club Award, a RockCritics.com award, and the Publicists’ Guild award for lifetime achievement.

Schneider was nominated for a 2000 Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor, but lost to Jar-Jar Binks.

But Schneider is correct, and Patrick Goldstein has not yet won a Pulitzer Prize. Therefore, Goldstein is not qualified to complain that Columbia financed “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo” while passing on the opportunity to participate in “Million Dollar Baby,” “Ray,” “The Aviator,” “Sideways” and “Finding Neverland.” As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.

He lost some of his touch after his surgery (I thought he went too soft on some truly horrible movies). But that doesn’t invalidate the fun times I had over the years digging up an old Roger Ebert review and savoring it like fine wine. I’m gonna miss you. Hopefully you and Siskel and giving thumbs down to terrible movies in heaven.

(Hey, kids, what time is it? It’s David Herbert time! The resident comic opinion piece writer returns with some advice gleaned from his own experiences at writing writing webcomics.)

I was originally going to make a comic about this but I’m trying to keep LWI away from politics these days, plus I don’t think it’d be that funny.

When it comes to trying to make a career as a writer or artist, it’s always a good idea to get some advice from other creators out there who have gotten to the point where they make a living off their work and are respected by other creators. And thanks to the web, you can easily get nuggets of wisdom from these people.

Unfortunately, sometimes they’re full of shit.

So I have compiled a list of pieces of advice I have heard pros give to newcomers who want to know how they can become successful too. I have followed these words myself and I can tell you from experience, none of them work.

1. Don’t worry about not getting your comic out on time.

One word: Megatokyo. Years ago it used to get a hundred thousand hits a day easily and sold a lot of merch. These days, 30k if its lucky and Gallagher has admitted sales have gone down. Then you have Least I Could Do. Not always a quality product, but it is very popular and makes money.

The truth is, if people have to wait around, they’ll eventually get bored and leave unless your comic is something really special to them. And if you can’t get your comic out on time, why should they support you?

2. I don’t rely on buffers.

Now the first comment is usually about not wanting to put out an inferior product and that you should focus more on making a better comic page than a lot of them. Quality vs. quantity. I fully agree with that ideal. However, if this is what you practice, then you should make sure you have plenty of time to create that quality product so that it can be out on time and be good.

Many creators will then counter that they keep losing track of the pages and end up forgetting the order they’re supposed to go in or the date they’re supposed to go up. I’ve never had that problem, but if it is one for you, why can’t you just name the comic’s file the date it’s supposed to go up?

3. Don’t listen to critics. 

And how exactly did this help Tom Preston’s reputation? It’d be more accurate to say “See what the fans are saying, but remember to take it with a grain of salt.” Many readers are not pro creators, nor do they have aspirations to be, they’re just people who like your work. But they do know what they like and probably know what other people like. It’s more about knowing the difference between good advice and bad. You don’t have to try and please everyone but blocking them out is not the way to go.

4. Never cheapen yourself as an artist by drawing a Batman or Wolverine picture to sell.

Peter David once wrote a column about this. At a con, while he was sales manager for Marvel, an artist drew this absolutely gorgeous Alpha Flight piece on a bristol board. All day people came by and commented that the piece was good, but no one wanted to buy it, and when they asked for sketches from the artist, they usually asked for one of the X-Men. Eventually, the artist did a quick sketch of wolverine on the back of the Alpha Flight picture.

It was gone in five minutes.

I’ve seen this too. Back in 2011 I shared a table with an artist who had posters of his own characters, plus Flash, Green Lantern and Thor. He sold more Flash pieces than others. And when they wanted sketches, they asked for Marvel and DC characters. A couple of people were disappointed he didn’t have a Spider-Man or Batman piece available.

The problem is this advice ignores the way you can use established characters as a foot in the door to get people to check out your stuff. Would Spawn have been the most successful Image comic if Todd McFarlane had never drawn Spider-Man? Would Gail Simone’s Leaving Megalopolis have been fully funded if she hadn’t written Birds of Prey or Wonder Woman? They were successful because fans of the characters they worked on became fans of the way they wrote those characters and so became fans of the creators.

And the worst of all?

5. Anyone can do it or Just put in lots of hard work and you’ll be successful.

The latter first. If you truly believe that, then how come Tim Buckley makes way more money than David Willis? How come Chris Hazelton needs to run a kickstarter in order to do his comics full time after nearly ten years? As for the former, if that were true than we would have tens of thousands more people making a living off of their work.

I tend to be optimistic but ‘just work hard’ is some of the most naive bullshit I have ever heard and it just pisses me off when pros out there imply others aren’t working as hard as they are.

As for anyone can do it, no. Not everyone has the ability to connect with an audience like some other creators. Rich Burlew isn’t your average writer. Jim Lee isn’t your average artist. They made better products than many of us could ever hope to and that is why people are willing to give them their money. Most creators are not interchangeable.

So that’s my list of things a pro can say to make me think they are too successful to try giving out advice to the amateurs. See, those pros can get away with these things because they already have their established fan base. Guys like me? We aren’t able to yet and won’t get anywhere if we tried.

(David Herbert is the creator of Living With Insanity and Tnemrot.)

(David Herbert returns… this time with a surprising take on the much maligned CAD: the Animated Series.)

So this week I’ve decided to try something different and give you guys a column that’s partially a guest review but also something of a “Know Thy History” piece. And I can hear the scrolling of mice as people flurry to the comments section to bash Ctrl+Alt+Del before reading or possibly to bash me since I haven’t been too kind to Buckley in my other columns but please hold off for a little while… at least until the third paragraph.

So it’s no secret CAD has attracted its share of haters, for legitimate reasons and others that are rather overblown, which means anything related to the comic would attract a hatedom as well. Not just from Encyclopaedia Dramatica, which does not say anything kind, but also from the series’ director Ryan Sohmer, who has said it was the worst business venture he ever engaged in.

But honestly, it’s not that bad. It’s not that good, but I can’t call it horrible.

These days you can just stream the episodes for free, which is the only way to watch it because the premium section of CAD is gone now. And if you watch the show, honestly it’s just mediocre. Flat voice acting, with some bizarre pauses, the animation seems to be missing frames from the way characters jump around, and the plots of the episodes are boring. That’s really its worst flaw. It’s not entertaining even in a bad way.

Personally, I think it could have had an audience who would be willing to give it some time to find its feet if it had been put out on youtube or newgrounds for free. By the end of season one, they were improving, if you can ignore it being a rip off of Return of the Jedi just for an excuse to bash Jack Thompson and Hilary Clinton. Not my thing, but I can see it as having a sizeable fan base when you compare it to some of the things online out there that are popular.

So if it’s not as bad as everyone says, why did it bankrupt Blind Ferret’s animation department? The answer is kind of obvious but it goes even deeper than that. So let’s take a look back at history and see why CAD failed as hard as it did.

The Blind Leading the Blind

It’s a shame LICD got rid of its forum because that’s where all of Ryan Sohmer’s old blogs are and I could really have used them for this article. But there was one that has always stayed in my mind. While talking about the animation program BFE was using for LICD’s animated series (This was back in 08 or 09 if I recall correctly) Sohmer mentioned that he had actually initially bought his animation team copies of Flash first, but discovered it was horrible for getting the level of quality he wanted.

See, Sohmer wanted his animation department to be taken seriously. The Looking for Group movie was held up since it was planned to have a theatrical release and in this interview from 2008, he states his intention to try and get LICD on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. So why did he get Flash? Because he figured since it was a popular program it must be pro quality. And rather than do any research, he actually wasted his company’s money by buying copies.

Despite wanting to be a pro animation company, no one at Blind Ferret Entertainment had any real experience in the animation field aside from watching cartoons growing up.  And rather than hire a pro animation director, Sohmer chose to do the job himself. This meant that no one in charge had any idea what they were doing.

A particularly bad example was when Buckley turned in his first scripts. Everyone assumed that they would equate to a full length episode but only turned out to be five minutes in length. While talking about this to my sister, she immediately quoted Phillip J Fry: “It took me an hour to write, I figured it’d take an hour to read.”

Marketing 101

Back in the mid 90s, Cartoon Network launched the What a Cartoon show. The purpose of the show was for the creator to bring a return of seven minute one shots like Red Hot Riding Hood. However, many of these shorts gained a cry for more and were turned into TV shows. This is how we got Courage the Cowardly Dog, The Powerpuff Girls and my favourite of all, Dexter’s Laboratory. One was even retooled to become Family Guy.

It was thanks to these initial cheap shorts that Cartoon Network were able to gauge audience reactions and were able to build up their original content thanks to this method (Though we never got a Mina and the Count show. Sad). It also meant the shows had an audience who knew what to expect. This was still the method when I stopped watching CN so it must have worked well for them (No clue if they still do it though).

This also worked very well for BFE as well. Their animated musicals such as Slaughter the World and Why Won’t She Leave generated a lot of hype for the LFG movie and the LICD show. However, for CAD, all we got were snippets that told us nothing about the show aside from how poor the animation and voice acting were (Would you really pay $30 for a show that doesn’t even bother to do a second take so your writer doesn’t sound like he’s licking the mic?) and that was only for the second season.

Doomed From the Start

A few fans of Misfile and I have, for a while, been considering putting together an anime based on the comic. The reason we haven’t is that animation is damn expensive and even if we were partners on youtube or hosted on blip, we would need a LOT of viewers to pay for the episodes. However we have more options since most video providers do offer ad revenue these days.

The problem however is that CAD season one never had that option. It was released back in 2006 which meant subscription based payment was the only way to make money until a DVD could be released. There wasn’t a Hulu or Netflix either.  Their only choice was to rely on CAD’s popularity to make back the money, which didn’t happen since it is a fact that a chunk of the comic’s fan base are made of haters who just want to find something to mock Buckley for.

If BFE put a cease and desist on all the pirate sites and then rereleased it on a partnered channel, it might make back some of the money. But that’s over seven years after the pilot was released so there wouldn’t be much use in that except to help fund current projects.

Was There Any Hope?

There’s hope for anything. The problem is there was no real plan when it came to the execution of this series, it was just made and expected it to do well. That seems to be a recurring theme with a lot of BFE projects; they just rely on the popularity of the creators to make them money, Con Season being one of the worst cases.

If they had hired on someone with animation training and/or experience they could have ironed out a lot of the bugs. They could have also just worked on getting CAD onto network TV like they were going to for LICD and just shopped around a pilot that was polished to finesse, maybe even uploading it to try and drum up some hype to convince the networks it would sell.

Unfortunately, thanks to the lacklustre effort by everyone involved, CAD the animated series will always be regarded as a joke and a failure. And it probably hurt the PVP animated series as well.

Well that’s all from me for this week. Next week I’m going to embarrass myself by talking about my dumb writing from five years ago. Get your mocking comments ready for that one.

You can say many things about webcomic veteran Kris Straub. Maybe you can say that for some reason he has an almost pathological fear of nostrils. Or that he replace the first letter of his name to a “Ch” to avoid gender confusion. Or that his beard is weird. Like I said, many things.

One thing that you cannot say, though, is that he has no ideas. Kris Straub is the sort of man where any fool thought pops into his head, and he has to go and make a webcomic about it. A webcomic space opera? Sure. Done. Got it. A comic about a struggling band? On it, buddy. A suit made out of chainsaws?

When you think about it, by the way, chainsawsuit (reviewed here) provides the perfect outlet for an ideas man. A thought pops up, and a hastily drawn comic later — BAM!!! — it’s the latest hit on Reddit, garnering tens of upvotes. In one of the Webcomic Weekly podcasts, Straub marvels how the comic was sort of done as a lark, but it turned out to be the one picking up the most views. I suspect, more than anything, that the format fit him like a glove … much like blogging about webcomics, for me, has given me a wide-ranging platform for my racist polemics.

The latest joint by the bearded man with an aversion for the olfactory senses comes in the form of Broodhollow. This time, Straub invites you to enter his particular vision of horror! Only it’s set around the turn of the 20th Century. And it’s still nominally a comedy. And people still don’t have noses.

Seriously, noses are for ethnic people.

The story takes place sometime during the Prohibition Era. It was a far more innocent time where men wore suspenders and bowties unironically. We’re introduced to our hero of the story: a hapless, mild-mannered encyclopedia salesman named Noseless McGee. Wait… the character page says his name is “Wadsworth Zane.” That’s only slightly more dignified than the name I made up for him. OK, so when we meet up with Zane, he’s unloading his troubles to a psychiatrist. You could say he’s in-Zane in the membrane! I mean, I wouldn’t, because that would mean making a incredibly dated Cypress Hill reference.

So Zane is here because he’s got a tiny little problem: he sees ghosts. They’re everywhere. In alleys. In his bathroom. Probably on a DVD starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore. He’d never had this problem until he entered the town of Broodhollow. That should’ve been his first clue that things were going to be off-kilter, by the way. That this place was called “Broodhollow,” not “Sunshinetopia.”

Zane ends up in Broodhollow, though, due to a matter of inheritance. His great-uncle was the proprietor of a creepy antique shop. He’d passed away some time ago, and Zane was the inheritor of the estate. He’s here in Broodhollow until all the paperwork has been sorted out.

The denizens of Broodhollow have by and large been very nice and decent folk. Solid salt-of-the-earth types, you might say. There’s Iris, a helpful teenager who shows Zane around the old antique shop. There’s the Mayor, who’s absolutely ecstatic at the prospect of a new Broodhollow resident. There’s the Bottlefly Boys, strong men who can come to your aid in a pinch. About the only nasty person is the eeeevvvviiilllll real estate developer, who wants to buy up Zane’s property.

None of the townsfolk are very phased about the ghosts, either. At this point, I sorta expected this to be a story about how everyone accepts these ghosts like common everyday nuisances, like aphids or children. Zane would learn a long hard lesson and, in the end, he finds out that intolerance is the real monster.

But no. The reason that folks are phased is because they don’t see the ghosts. When Zane sees giant bat demons, eye witnesses confirm that they were just your regular garden variety bats. (Still, with four-foot wingspans, which is frankly a little freaky.) He begins to doubt his own sanity. Is he Haley Joel Osmenting, seeing things with a spectacular sixth sense? Or — to quote a group of street poets named after a geographical feature — is he, in fact, insane in the membrane?

So when the title is named after the place, you come to expect this to be one of those stories where “the city is the character.” How is this reflected in the comic? Well, Broodhollow is an eccentric little town that celebrates a lot of holidays. The first one that Zane experiences has to do with tuning forks. The townsfolk also get drunk on a non-alcoholic drink, which gets them around the legalities of Prohibition but still packs a mind-altering punch. The town’s quirks can get a little precious sometimes, but it does build a nice, off-kilter background on which to hang mysteries upon.

The town of Broodhollow gains a lot more personality than the Broodhollow residents themselves. Most come off as a little flat. A lot are quite one-dimensional. I suppose I should be giving this story some slack — it is the early goings and all — but many comics I’ve read that have established multi-dimensional side characters in the span of a few pages. While there are hints that there’s more to these characters than first meets the eye, the revelations feel a tad hamfisted at times.

As for our lead, Zane… he’s a little bland. There was nothing in his personality I could really latch to. I suppose he’s nebbish, and he’s got a bit of an OCD thing going (which I interpreted from his fiddling around with a mailbox door). He’s obsessed with finding patterns in things. I guess those traits are OK. Still, I’m never really curious, and neither do in really care, in seeing if Zane ever unravels the mystery.

The artwork has improved immensely since one of Straub’s earliest projects, Checkerboard Nightmare. The character designs are solid and distinct, with a confident cartoonishness. I talked about Carl Barks and the Uncle Scrooge comics last week, and Broodhollow reminds me a little of that. Simple designs to best convey expressions, while backgrounds are lovingly detailed.

The coloring adds a fantastic new dimension, too. As being a comic that’s part horror, the dark and moody colors add hints and teases of a world unknown. I like how the ghosts are rendered in a bright outline that you can imagine will blink out of existence the moment you turn your head. Straub’s visual storytelling is the strongest it’s been. You can interpret whole strips without the need for exposition or dialogue.

Which is why I was a little disappointed that Broodhollow is packed to the gills with long dialogue boxes. There’s so little revealed in these boxes that I have to conclude that Broodhollow would be a better comic if it wasn’t so wordy. The technique worked for F-Chords: those guys were struggling musicians, and I can see them yammering on just to stave off the fear of failure. But much of Broodhollow depends on the mood, and that gets stopped cold will all the frequent walls of text.

Broodhollow is an interesting experiment with some potential.  A small part of me is a little interested in figuring out what’s going on — whether it’s all mental, or whether there be ghosts.  However, the tonal shifts between comedy and horror isn’t always successful, and the characters cam be a little challenging to warm up to.  The art is the best that Straub has ever done, but that’s not enough to keep my interested in the story.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

After man first set foot on the moon, young kids dreamed of voyaging to other planets. After all, if human beings can put their footprints on soil not of this earth, how hard can it be to, say, go to Mars? As it turns out… very hard. Universe Today estimates that the journey would take 250 days. And that’s the nearest planet. How long is it going to take to get to the moons of Jupiter? To the rings of Saturn? Heck, are we even going to get out of the solar system?

So we resign ourselves to the fate that most deep space exploration is going to have to be conducted by robots and computers. Like Voyager 2 and it’s ground breaking tour through the outer planets. Or Mars rover Curiosity, journeying the red planet to unearth new scientific discoveries. Is it as thrilling as Neil Armstrong hopping off a lunar lander? Maybe not. At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a pang of empathy when the Spirit rover got stuck in sand. Sure, it was just a piece of machinery. And yet, it had sort of anthropomorphized into a poor little explorer stuck on a weird alien world.

James Anderson’s Ellie on Planet X is the story of one such space probe. this one, though, is a whole lot more adorable than anything assembled by NASA. Well, maybe except for Sojourner. That one was pretty darned cute.

Ellie is a deep space probe that sorta looks like a deranged Hello Kitty. She lands on the lush alien world of Planet X. Her early adventures are a lonely one. She toddles around the softly sloping landscape, cataloguing new life forms and transmitting the images back to Mission Control at home. (The time frame is a little weird here. I don’t know how long it took Ellie to get to Planet X, but Earth looks like a society stuck in the 1960′s. Was there a retro revival that never ended? Or should I repeat to myself that it’s just a webcomic, and I should really just relax?) This lonesome mission doesn’t bother Ellie, though. She takes joy in naming things and coming up with fun little poems.

Eventually, Ellie does run into an intelligent — or rather, a relatively intelligent — life form. It’s an invertebrate that she names Jeff. Using her mad linguistic skills, Ellie eventually learns to communicate with him. He’s a goofy, happy-go-lucky fellow who’s more than thrilled to join Ellie as a sidekick on her adventures.

They also run into a grumpy little alien that Ellie named Muffin (much to his chagrin). He is less thrilled. Also, he lives in a hole that very much makes it looks like he’s roommates with Winnie the Pooh. He tries to shake off Ellie at every opportunity … but she’s not easy to ditch because she must observe things in the name of science!

Indeed, Ellie’s arsenal is quite formidable. She’s equipped with a titanium shell, which comes in handy when beasties try to eat her. She has a little ring on her ear, which transmits data to the also cute orbital satellite hovering overhead. She has GPS (which Muffin interprets as a sign of Ellie’s craziness). And she’s got x-ray vision. But Ellie is also a sensitive piece of hardware, and any slip-up could cause her to go into an endless loop of system errors.

Along the way, they run into all sorts of imaginatively designed critters. There’s aliens that take the forms of bathtubs. With their mouths opened wide, you can take a bath in their bacteria-cleansing saliva. (They also have a mating ritual which is disgustingly drool-based.) There are rude, gigantic creatures who tower over the landscape and eat melons of incredible size. There are little worm-like things that puff up like balloons and ride the currents of the wind.

Ellie on Planet X is presented in lovely shades of orange and teal. (There’s a fun little meta joke, by they way, where the color palette is a result of a malfunction. Ellie manages to get the full range of colors at one point, and it blows her mind. Literally.) The scheme reminds me of Dr. Seuss books, where the price of colored ink only allowed for one other color on the printed page that wasn’t black or white. The visuals are very much in the spirit of Dr. Seuss as well. Plants grow in colorful stalks that end in big, fuzzy puff balls.

Anderson’s artwork is gleefully retro. They evoke the Space Age world of the 60′s, when the flowery path of an atom was a huge design revelation and when rockets were so cool that automakers were putting gigantic fins on cars. It’s the perfect backdrop for this comic: a time when optimism in space exploration was at an all time high, and when people didn’t worry about silly things like budget overruns and the brutal realities of time and space. Everyone’s smiling and fresh-faced, seeing a beautiful new world unfolding before them. One that’s almost become its own little fantasy world — one where traveling to another planet is a breezy little frolic.

Above all, though, Ellie on Planet X is irresistibly cute. I scores very high on the adorability index. Now, for those of you with low whimsy tolerance, you should probably stay away. But darn it, I like cute things. The great thing about Ellie on Planet X is that it’s just cute enough. It doesn’t get overly saccharine (there are drool monsters in this comic, after all).

Also, the characterizations are strong enough to overcome the cuteness. One of the best ways to gauge the strengths of the characters is to strip the imagery to dialogue and figure out which of the characters said it. It works very well in Ellie, because each has a unique voice. Ellie remains effortlessly optimistic, Jeff is good-natured but clueless, and Muffin has a touch of sarcasm. They’re like archetypes in classic cartoons, whether they’re Mickey, Goofy, and Donald or Fone Bone, Smiley Bone, and Phoney Bone. It’s perfect for a comic that inspires wistful nostalgia for a time that I personally did not grow up in.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

It’s that time of year again! That time we play “What’s that webcomic?” with the current crop of Eisner nominees for Best Digital Comic. This is not a commentary on the quality, per se. They’re usually somewhere on the scale of good to great. But … what are these? Last year, at least, there were several names I at least recognized: Josh Neufeld, Mike Norton (who eventually won for Battlepug), Tony Cliff with Delilah Dirk, Dylan Meconis, and Ryan Andrews, who did Sarah And The Seed. Pretty recognizable, eh?

This … I have no clue about what any of these comics are about. This may be a sign of my own advancing age, perhaps a signal that I should just go, “Well, El Santo, you had a good run… but webcomics are a young man’s game.” After which I spit out my chaw and ride forlornly into the sunset to a score set by Ennio Morricone.

Nevertheless, here they are, with my vague attempt at guessing what each of these webcomics are about based on the title alone:

• Ant Comic, by Michael DeForge – a story about Anthony N. Terwilliger, a.k.a. “A.N.T.”, a.k.a. “Ant”, a.k.a “Ant-drew Dice Clay,” as he tries stand-up at Second City.
• Bandette, by Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover – The heartwarming story of a tiny baguette shop, whose middle two letters have been charmingly spun upside down but the owners decided to keep it that way because whimsy.
• It Will All Hurt, by Farel Dalrymple – A comic that uses the same exact panels every day, a la Dinosaur Comics, of a man getting hit in the groin with a golf club.
• Our Bloodstained Roof, by Ryan Andrews – A story about … OK, I can’t really joke about this one, because I’ve read it. (The only one I’ve read on this list.) It’s about a blood stained roof.
• Oyster War, by Ben Towle – President Barnacle addresses the invertebrates with the sad news. At 5:34 Am this morning, the oysters have invaded. We are at war.

As always, I will review each and every Eisner nominated comic before the winner is announced at the San Diego Comic Con. I have a bad feeling that the Sugarshock!-o-meter is going to be uncalibrated for this one … but we must have faith that, each and every year, it will predict the winner with full accuracy.

I should also point out that Colleen Coover of Bandette is also up for Best Penciller/Inker and Best Colorist, so I’m a little excited about checking out that webcomic. Ryan North and Meredith Gran are getting props in the printed world for their Adventure Time comics (Best Humor Publication, Best New Series, and Best Publication for Kids for North; Best Publication for Teens for Gran). Sailor Twain, by Mark Siegel, is up for Best Graphic Album – Reprint. And El Santo was once again overlooked for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism.

This is when the Morricone track comes to a sudden stop, I turn my head to stare at the camera, and a fire erupts behind me as the background goes a blaze. Freeze frame, a “To be continued…?” caption, end scene.