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.

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.