Review: Psychic Soldier Kai

Today's comic has a little bit of a special meaning for me. A few months back, I was eating up some leisure time by reading webcomics. During this period of time, I found several comics that caught my attention for various reasons and wondered why I'd never heard of them before. In part, that formed the inspiration for me to go and create this review blog, and so I suppose I owe those comics a bit of a thanks. For those of you who have not yet figured it out, Psychic Soldier Kai was one of those comics.

Psychic Soldier Kai is a comic that is artisticly inspired by manga. While this could probably be said about a decently large number of webcomics, it's a bit of a refreshing sight to see that Mason Easley isn't content to simply throw together some generic character designs and call it a day. The characters are realistically proportioned, the eyes are the size you'd expect them to be on an actual person, and the series is devoid of characters whose hair exceeds the volume of their head. Shading in the comic is done in varying levels of grey with a good degree of success.

The storyline of the comic can get a little confusing at times, if only because Easley is in the habit of throwing out terms or dialogue and expecting us to run with it. As opposed to the other extreme, the infodump, this one tends to be preferable in webcomics because it doesn't require that the story be put on pause for weeks as the audience recieves background information. It does mean that readers should probably take the time to read each comic rather than skimming through them (as I myself have been prone to do). It's probably a good thing that the main character of the story knows as little as we do, and as such gives Easley the room to put explainations in his comics without destroying the sense of realism. Once the meaning of the dialogue becomes clear, the story is actually quite straightforward, at least so far. As an additional bonus, the title of the strip, "Psychic Soldier Kai", is actually a fairly good descriptor of the strip, as opposed to so many other webcomics which have only a very loose connection to their own title.

Since I have yet to actually talk about the story, the gist of it is that there is this guy named Walter. There's part of a secret organization of psychics who want him dead, but another part wants him to stay alive, while yet a third part wants his help, but don't particularly care about his well-being once he's no longer of use to them. Above all that, theres the actual villain of the story. This probably isn't a very specific description, but the story is mostly still in the beginnings, and just now seems to be heading into the story proper.

If you like humour comics, then you'll probably want to skip out on this one. Psychic Soldier Kai utilizes dramatic storytelling and has little room for making jokes. If you can appreciate a story for the sake of being a story, then Psychic Soldier Kai is definitely worth taking your time to check it out. Next week, I'll return with a funny comic, I promise.

The comic can be found through this link

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Art: B+. Very consistent. Characters actually have their own facial structures, rather than being distinctive hairstyles placed on top of the same six cut-and-paste faces.
Story: B+. The story proper has yet to kick off, but the first chapter serves as a good hook, and the rest of what is up so far is engaging.
Characterization: C. Other than a few things that have happened to the main character, we don't really know much about any of these people. Probably unavoidable this early in the run of the comic.
Writing: C+. I'm torn between praising the comic for mentioning some things and leaving the reader in suspense about what exactly they're talking about until later, or being frustrated that webcomics tend to be a slow medium that doesn't work well with long-term revelations.
Humour: N/A.

Arbitrary Overall Rating: B, with extreme potential to improve as we get more into the comic.