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.

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.