Three Months

Well, it's been three months and I've already managed to miss half of my updates. My apologies to anybody who has been out there and still checks this site.

If everything goes well, reviews will resume on the 10th of April.

Review: Bullet

With this review taking place around St. Valentine's Day, it would probably be appropriate for me to review a romance webcomic (It would have been even more appropriate if the review were actually out on the weekend like it was supposed to be, I suppose). Anyway, I now bring you Bullet, a webcomic written and illustrated by Juli Shvets.

Bullet is a manga-esque webcomic hosted on Smackjeeves, and I mean that in every sense of the word (mostly). Most of the time, the webcomics you see that are drawn in the style of manga will use an artistic style remniscent of manga, which will be either left uncoloured or coloured into greyscale or full-colour. Shvets takes it a step further, using actual screentones (or at least duplicating the effect digitally) and creating strips that are read from right to left (my apologies to anybody who took the link in the first paragraph and tried to read the pages normally).

As far as the actual quality of the art, Bullet is decent. The characters are consistant and have enough uniqueness in their designs that they can be told apart easily, but there's just something a little off about them. Female characters seem a little thin, noses in profile seem rather large, perspectives of the characters and backgrounds don't always match up... basically, the artwork is solid and consistant, but a few things can occasionally be a little distracting. The backgrounds are put together well, panel layout makes sense (well, once you get used to it).

The comic itself is about a girl, Nikita Katayanara. Nikita is a bit of an outcast at school, lives alone with her alcoholic mother in constant poverty, has to work to support to the two of them, etc. The story can be a bit confusing at times (Bullet was actually created over two years ago, but Ms. Shvets recently made the decision to restart the comic from the beginning due to pacing issues with the original, which can be found here). The new version of the comic is much better, and has almost caught up in terms of the current point of the story (although there are some additional things revealed in flashbacks during the original which have yet to be completely reintroduced). The characterization is not spectacular, but neither is it bad.


I'm afraid that I haven't really done the comic justice in this review, if only because the comic is still in its early stages and has yet to get into the main plot (which was only just starting in the original, if I interpreted it correctly). The comic is rather serious in tone (I can't recall any usage of the more light-hearted visual styles that were present in in Shvet's other webcomic, Himawari).

The comic can be found here.

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Art: C+. A few things that are off just enough to push the characters towards Uncanny Valley.
Writing: B. The improvement in pacing between the original and the current version is noticeable and appreciated.
Humour: N/A.
Characterization: C. A few general ideas, but not much time yet has been devoted to showing what kind of people these characters are.
Story: B. Has solid foundations set, and is probably the most promising aspect of the comic

Arbitrary Overall Rating: C+. I look forward to future updates of this comic. Recommended for anybody who likes a serious story with romantic elements.

Review: Addanac City

Today's webcomic is Addanac City, a daily comic strip by George Ford. Addanac City follows the everyday adventures of Hank Addanac, a seven-year-old boy with a bit of a behavioral problem. Of course, when I say "a bit", I mean it in the same sense that Ebola Zaire is "a bit" deadly. If we knew him in real life, even the most hardened adult would find themselves at wit's end, but since we don't have to directly deal with that it's comedy gold just waiting to happen.

I mentioned in my review of Four Days that many humour-driven strips take their inspiration from newspaper comics, and such a thing has never been more apparent than while reading Addanac City. The comic is composed of one-shot comics that use the same characters, but otherwise rarely make reference to past events. As a result, you can start reading the comic from any point and not miss out on anything, and the strips themselves are able to stay current with whatever season it currently is.

The style of humour in AC is reminiscent of newspaper comics as well (think Calvin and Hobbes cranked up to eleven). As with all comic strips, there are places where it could be better, but these are few and far between, and even such lulls are usually the result of a joke being too similar to another rather than the joke not being funny. Addanac City is probably one of those comic strips that is best when it's not being read all in one sitting, whereas I by necessity have to read through the entire archives and cannot afford such a luxury. Still, the comic got a few laughs out of me and triggered a refreshing wave of nostalgia.

The art is art. I realize that tautologies aren't particularly helpful in a review (not to mention the subjective nature of the word "art"), but there's really not much I can say about it. The character designs are solid and accomplish what they need to do, which is convey the joke. There's really nothing lacking in the style that Mr. Ford utilizes, nor can I think of anything specific that would be worth improving.

Characterization The single most challenging thing about writing child characters is probably that writers are not children. As a result, there is a wide range of unrealistic characterizations ranging from Ichigo Marshmallow at one end of the scale to Hank Addanac on the other extreme (of those two, Hank is probably much closer what one could expect in real life). Hank's friends, Christie and Tim, sometimes seem to be more rational than one would expect of second graders (or of children ranging all the way into their late teens, for that matter), but some of this may just be that everybody seems rational next to Hank. The characters keep their characterizations consistant, which is always a good thing.

Addanac City is a comic which I would definitely recommend to everybody, at least to try it out. You can find it at this site here.

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Art: B. No doubt it could be improved upon, but there's really no problem with the current art.
Story: N/A
Characterization: C+. Hank sometimes seems a little one-dimensional and the others sometimes seem a little vaguely-defined, but existing characterizations are always consistant.
Writing: B. The coloured words in each comic strip are a bit of an interesting touch (personally, they conjure memories of playing Ocarina of Time, but that's quite beside the point). I've seen webcomicists use bold font to achieve the same effect, but for some reason this method seems more natural for Addanac City (possibly due to the the amount of colour already present in the comic... the speech feels like it's actually part of the image rather than something that got added on top of it)
Humour: B+. Some good humour that everybody can relate to.

Arbitrary Overall Rating: B+. A good humour-comic that is safe for all ages and should hold appeal for everybody.

Announcement: No review last week

Y'all have probably figured this out by now, but there was no review posted last week. Since it's already halfway through the week, the review will be posted as normal on Friday. Sorry.

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.

Review: Stoopitz

I have a text file stored on my computer. It contains a list of webcomics that I have considered posting a review for, although I sometimes wonder why I even bother keeping the list, since I don't see myself doing anything with it in the near future. The major factor in this is probably laziness, since reviewing a comic from the list would require me to actually keep reading all of those comics so that I could note which of them have built up enough of an archive that I can actually review them, rather than making a few comments about the art. Instead, I end up trawling through the usual places every week, looking for a new comic to review.

This past week, the comic I came accross was Stoopitz, a webcomic by Brian Gibson which was a pleasure to find in more ways than one. Yeah, it meant that I would be able to get a review done that week, but there's also the fact that Stoopitz is quite possibly better than some of the big-name comics out there. In fact, I had to constantly check to ensure that this comic was, in fact, a newer comic and not something that was read by approximately half of the webcomics community.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a little up there... sort of. Stoopitz isn't a shining utopian vision (which is what it'd take to get such a large reaction from webcomicers, since in my experience there are only a few titles out there that would be universally recognized, and that doesn't necessarily mean that everybody has actually read them). The comic is, however, very well-done and professional looking, and I have no doubt that Mr. Gibson can be a force to be reckoned with amongst webcomicists a few years from now.

One of the things that makes Stoopitz good is that it's fairly easy to relate to. It's a slice of life comic revolving around Tim, a young man living in a big city. There's no suspension of disbelief required, and for the most part things he experiences are things that we can understand, probably because the comic is loosely based around experiences that Gibson himself had while living in New York. Things are mostly humourous, and the comics that I didn't find funny can probably be chalked up to my having a sense of humour roughly equivalent to that of a birch tree. At any rate, the humour is more or less always present without being completely over the top or tacked-on, which is certainly a good thing.

The other thing that grabbed my attention in Stoopitz was the artwork. The art is completely in black and white at the beginning of the archive, then switches to greyscale after a few strips, while a single comic to date has been posted in colour. No matter what the palette is, Gibson's panels have an immersive feel to them that I wouldn't expect from anybody less than Makoto Shinkai. It was this kind of thing that made me wonder how I'd never heard of this comic before every time I loaded a page. If you don't believe me, then see for yourself.

Beyond that, Stoopitz is solid but not exceptional in other areas. The story is solid in the sense that you can't really assign a plot to somebody who is simply living out their life, and the characters are likewise just as balanced and realistic as you'd expect from your next door neighbor.

Now, as I look back on my review I notice that there's a severe lack of criticism in there. Since I'm usually all for the idea that no work is either the shining example of it's genre and medium nor a complete and utter piece of crap that the world would be better off without that particular artist, I feel a little hypocritical in the fact that I can't think of any honest criticism for this comic, and if I weren't running a day late on this review I'd go back and scour the archives until I notice a glaring flaw that I somehow forgot about in the week that passed between when I read the comic and when I actually sat down to write this review, or I'd go through and nitpick the comic to death about things such as the art being "Great, but not Excellent". Since I haven't got the time to do so at the moment, I'll instead look to the future.

Usually, I keep a positive mind when I look to the future. In terms of the quality of the work, it usually tends to be accurate, since few artists actively try to produce work of lower quality as they continue with a project. There are, however, a few things that can be seen as a step backwards by some people simply because those people are not part of the group of people who see the change as a step forward. In this case, I am talking about Cerebus Syndrome.

Cerebus Syndrome is the trend of serial works that originally dealt in comedy to slide towards drama the longer they run. This is usually because nobody, no matter how talented, can continue to think of jokes at a constant rate for an indefinite period of time. Since a joke usually will only work for one comic while a dramatic story can be dragged out indefinitely, this can be an attractive action once it gets harder to stay funny. In comics where things are based on real life events, it can be even worse, since the writer can run out of experiences and suddenly realize that they themselves have absolutely no talent for writing humour. Since Stoopitz is lightly based off of real occurrances, it's a prime candidate for the Syndrome to set in.

This isn't a given, of course, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Dramatic storylines can be just as good as comedy, and the two can even be worked together without sacrificing story integrity. Still, such a change should have forethought put into it, and it should happen because the writer wants for it to happen, not because it's the only option left to them.

Once again, though, this is all just what could happen, and I think that even if it's inevitable for all works, it'll be a long time before Cerebus Syndrome takes over Stoopitz.

The comic can be reached here.

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Art: A-. In my eyes, there's really nothing that needs improving with the artwork in this comic. More colour strips would be nice, if such a thing is practical.
Story: C. There's not much that can be done with this one, unless one is willing to sacrifice a bit of the realism in favor of establishing an overriding purpose to the lives of the characters
Writing: B. Well presented and clear.
Characterization: C+. As with story, not much is possible with this, unless the comic were to take a serious turn and start delving into the character's psychology
Humour: B+. Not overly hilarious, but enough that I keep coming back day after day.

Arbitrary Overall Rating: B+. I was extremely tempted to give this comic an A, but was wary of setting the extremes of my standards so early after establishing this blog. A comic that will be checked weekly for updates, at any rate.

Review: Four Days

Well, it's come time to post the first entry on this site that I've actually been able to devote a full week to. As such, it'll be clear, concise, and thoroughly checked against the source material, right? Unfortunately, it won't be like that, because despite having a week to work on it, I procrastinated until the last few days. For those of you whose cursors are drifting up towards the "back" button on your browsers, I promise that I actually have a point here.

Anyway, procrastination is something that isn't really unheard of in webcomic artists, but we don't have to worry about that in today's pre-review rant, because the webcomic of the week, Four Days by Thomas Henriksson, is mostly above such things. Four Days is, for the most part, a webcomic that I would classify as a "gag-a-day" comic. These kinds of comics were mostly modeled after newspaper comics, where comicists would have to make sure that audiences would enjoy their comic. Since it's rather hard to cram in enough plot into two lines of panels on a newspaper page, these comics tend to eschew plot and an ongoing story in favour of telling a single joke. The format isn't as necessary with webcomics, since a webcomicist can cram as much content as they want into each update, but it remains a good idea for most comics to try to include humour in most updates.

(Since I'm a sucker for a good story comic, I'll point out to aspiring comic writers that it's better to leave out the joke than to shoehorn it into place. It's not funny if it has to be forced)

Speaking of story, Four Days doesn't really have much of a story, which is good because it doesn't get in the way of the jokes. That's all I really have to say on the subject, so let us skip this and move on to characterization and art. I talk about these two together because, in the case of this comic, I have a complaint that affects both areas: namely that I can't tell who's who.

To clarify the above statement, the comic utilizes a stylized kind of art where all of the characters have pencil-thin bodies and limbs, large heads, and even larger eyes. It's rather refreshing, because the artist doesn't aspire to anything beyond his ability, but on the other hand it's harder to tell the characters apart from each other, which puts a bit of a damper on the humour. A good amount of the jokes rely on character-based humour, in which a character does something we might not expect from our own experiences in life, but we accept it as realistic because it fits in with what we know of the character (somewhere out there, somebody with a Doctorate's degree in psychology has probably written a thesis on why something like this is funny). It's a bit of a problem when you can't tell whether the girl who just delivered the punchline of today's comic is the stereotyped tree-hugger or the stereotyped airhead.

I would like to point out that the wonk listed above does not apply to new comics, as the comics are now coloured and the character designs are easier to differentiate. The only place in which this applies are the comics posted before the author went on hiatus (referred to as "act one").

The characterizations themselves sometimes seem a little two-dimensional, as mentioned above. Far more distracting than the characters being flanderised stereotypes of an environmentalist, a cheerleader, and some kind of emo/goth hybrid is the fact that you have no idea why these characters even like each other. They seem to regard each other with utter hatred for the most part, unless of course this comic takes place in some dystopian American future in which people refer to each other as "you fucking bitch" with a smile on their face. I don't think it's possible for somebody to be that cheerfully insulting.

Looking back at this review, I can't see very many good things, so I suppose that I'll list a few here for the benefit of you readers. Aside from a several-month hiatus, Mr. Henriksson rarely (if ever) misses his updates, has consistant artwork, and every so often creates flash animations based on the comic that are worth checking out. This comic wasn't really my cup of tea, but I suppose that it's only my opinion on the matter.

Since there weren't any banners on the site, you can reach it through this link, or the potholed link at the top of the page.

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Art: C+. Hard-to-recognize characters during the first stretch of comics can make this webcomic a little harder to get into, but things have improved since.

Story: C. Basically nonexistant, doesn't get in the way of the humour.

Writing: C-. Punctuation in the comics is frequently a little off, which makes things a little weird.

Characterization: D+. The personalities of the characters are consistant, but can be more or less summed up in single word stereotypes. Characters are static and show no developement or depth.

Humour: B-. Does okay with this. If you decide to read the comic, chances are that you're going to read it for this.


Arbitrary Overall Rating: C. As with last week's comic, I didn't really find anything in this comic to be funny, but things were amusing enough that reading it wasn't a total waste of my time. Decent enough to stay on my watch list.