The Webcomicker

A nice group shot of the cast, from a wallpaper for Flatwood.

If there’s one thing I really like, something that will usually draw me into a comic, it’s a comic which exemplifies one aspect of the writing or artistic process. For example, in a previous post I doted on Hector for its devotion to juxtaposition. I read Silent Kimbly mostly because of Ryan Sias’ continued devotion for puns (which must get pretty difficult sometimes, I can imagine).

So when Zachary Parker emailed me after reading my Hector review and hinted that I might be interested in his comic as well, I immediately went over to Flatwood and gave it a look.

And boy was he right.

If you were going to sum up Flatwood in one word, that word would be “mood”. Parker has crafted his entire website around fostering that mood, with the black background stifling the content, giving an incredible feeling of closeness and claustophobia. The links are merely grey clouds hovering in the distance until you focus your attention on them, and as you read the comic, there are sinister looking eyes peering out of the blackness at you, not threatening to jump out at you, but merely callously and unfeelingly tracking your process as you trudge through the archives. The whole site just feels uninviting, and it matches the comic perfectly. This is an example of a website that really enhances the presentation of a webcomic, and should be up for a WCCA nomination for best website design. It’s not ostentatious. It’s not flashy. But it PERFECTLY complements and enhances the mood of the comic itself.

As for the comic itself, it revolves around a young man who simply wakes up in a room one day. No memories, no idea how or why he is here, no explanation whatsoever. And creepy stuff starts happening, pretty much right off the bat. As the story goes on, like all stories do, the man (Alex is his name, or so it would seem…) learns more about his situation, what caused it, and what he’s up against. He makes some allies, and he makes some enemies. There’s a girl to save. It’s the classic “unlikely hero against unbeatable odds” story. But what really sets it apart is the way in which the story is told.

It takes a few strips before Parker really starts to hit his stride. At first there is a fair amount of humor blended in, and you wonder if the whole story is going to be tongue in cheek. I mean, the kid’s using a tennis racket as a holy weapon, for goodness sake! You start to think that maybe the story’s going to follow more of an Evil Dead/Army of Darkness absurdist vein than true horror and macabre. But then things start to get darker. Like, literally. There is less white and more black in the comic as time goes one. Eventually things get so dark that Parker is actually coloring his strips with MULTIPLE SHADES OF BLACK. Your eye is immediately drawn to the few light sources in each strip as the rest of the world goes black, and then you have to actively search to try to pick out shapes in the darkness. It feels like you’re actually stuck in that forest with Alex, with darkness closing in on you from all sides.

And then there’s the use of animated GIFs. This is something that becomes more and more prevalent as the comic goes on, so if you’re trying to do a quick read through the archives, you might miss the first few. But once you realize they’re there, it makes you to slow down, and wait for each page to play out at the speed that Parker wants it to play out. It draws out the action and builds tension as you sit, waiting for the next part of the scene to be revealed. It literally forces you to experience the comic rather than just being able to quickly flip through it. And it definitely adds a cinematic feel to the whole experience, like the story is being told to you rather than you’re just simply reading it.

Also, it allows Parker to use more black on each page. Seriously, if you tried to print this comic out, you’d go through like twenty ink cartridges. I don’t know how Parker managed to sneak this past the people at Lulu at a “black and white” book. It’s more like a “black book, with occasional white”. I bet they’re making a loss on each copy they sell.

But I digress. The last thing I wanted to mention about Flatwood that simply adds yet more to the mood of the strip and its overall quality is the incredible weaving in of Christian themes.  There’s huge portions of the comics where characters are quoting directly from the Old Testament (paraphrased and rehashed somewhat), and the strip contains an obvious Christ archetype, which makes you start to wonder if the whole strip is an allegory for the apocalypse, or if it’s just borrowing heavily from Christian mythology (of which there is far too little in my opinion.  Generally Christians put a lot of negative connotation in the word “mythology”, which results in not a lot of Christian mythology getting written).  But these Biblical passages, when put in the midst of such a grim and dreary tale, suddenly gain a lot more life, more intensity, more powerful impact.  It’s downright bone-chilling at times.

This is the sort of comic that you’d actually get freaked out reading late at night in a dark room, lit only by your computer screen.  But it’s not “shock value” horror.  It’s more like Stephen King, where there is a deep mythology and a long and drawn out process of the characters discovering it.  And it’s pretty awesome.

So go get spooked tonight.

A nice group shot, from the first episode of PvP The Series.

This is the post that was supposed to appear two weeks ago, and it was supposed to appear over at Comixpedia. But I’ve found the readers there prefer well-researched articles with well-thought out arguments and precise critiques, as opposed to the rantings of a fan suffering from entitlement. So I’m posting it where it belongs, here at the Webcomicker.

Let me start by saying that all in all, the first episode was not terrible. I’ve watched it over and over in the process of forming my opinion, and it’s still watchable to me. I’m looking forward to the next episode. And I don’t feel that I’ve wasted my subscription money, if only because I’m helping further the cause of webcomic animation, which I’d love to see more and more of in the future.

That being said, I would also say that the first episode of PvP The Series, while not terrible, was also not very good. And since I was a subscriber to Ctrl-Alt-Del the Animation as well, I think perhaps I have some perspective that many out there don’t have. So let’s dive in. (Oh, quick note: this is all about the episode proper, not the preview bit they put up for free as a teaser for the show).
First off, the animation itself. I’m not going to be nitpicky here about clipping problems and jerky movements. There have been much higher budget productions which have suffered from similar problems, and quite frankly the problems were minor and on the whole the animation was pretty fluid. However, the whole thing came off as really flat to me. Basically every shot in the whole episode consisted of the characters in three-quarter view, sitting or standing behind a table. Not too exciting, eh? I know that’s typically how PvP the comic strip goes down as well, but animation is not a comic strip. We want to see people moving around, doing things, basically taking advantage of the dynamic medium that animation presents.

Ctrl+Alt+Del is another strip that generally has the characters sitting and standing around in three-quarter view, and yet even in the first episode of CAD The Animation we saw a lot of dynamicism. Characters in foreground and background, a character falling from the roof followed by a really nice “run toward the camera” shot and generally a lot more of characters moving around. With CAD The Animation, it felt like Buckley was really enjoying the new medium, playing around with the opportunities it presented. With PvP The Series, it feels like Kurtz is just saying “Hey look, now my characters are delivering their jokes OUT LOUD!” I remember one of the big selling points for PvP The Series was that now Blind Ferret had its own in-house animation studio, and boy-howdy were they going to be able to do great things now. And, as evidenced by the Least I Could Do Animation Trailer, they can do good work. But it feels like PvP The Series isn’t using this talent.

Now, the voice acting. Notice that I’m not talking about the voices themselves here, but rather the voice acting. I think we all know how contentious a subject the characters voices are, and I’m content to let it be for now. I find that no matter how annoying you think a voice is at first (and note: I didn’t find any of the voices annoying), you get used to it and after a few episodes you won’t be able to imagine it any other way. Maybe you weren’t expecting a nasally Cole (I sure wasn’t). Maybe you thought Jade would sound more sultry. But in the long run, that’s not really what matters. What matters is the acting behind the voices, and in PvP The Series, it just seemed… off. Maybe it was really the editing that was the problem, but when watching the show, it sounds to me more like individual actors reading off their lines separately and then those lines getting spliced together than it sounds like a conversation between characters. And I realize that this is probably how it was actually recorded, but it shouldn’t sound that way.

This is actually a problem that was shared by CAD The Animation. In CAD, it often felt like the characters were talking to themselves, and I’m not sure if the two series are using some of the same voice actors, but it seems like something needs to be done. Maybe the actors need to have a bit less of a “Here I am, this is my line” reading mentality, or maybe the editing just needs to be tightened up to eliminate those short pauses in conversation, or maybe they just need to have a few more takes on the lines and then decide which take for one character fit best with which take from another character. I’m honestly not an expert here. All I know is that it comes off sounding forced, fragmented, and not a whole lot like normal conversation.

Lastly, the writing. All in all, the writing was very typical of PvP. The characters were very reckonizable, and acted about as I expected them to act. Francis seemed a bit tamer than usual, but this wasn’t really his show, so that’s reasonable. In fact, I could easily see this story being plotted out as a short storyline in the comic strip instead of an animation. And that may actually be a problem. Each scene felt like it could be a strip or two, with a premise, build up, and knock-down. One of the advantages of working in a longer form medium like animation is that every scene doesn’t have to be a self-contained joke. You probably want to work humor into each scene, but by no means does each scene need to execute like a comic strip. You can have scenes that build to a greater humor later in the show, that hint at things to come, or simply add to a greater ongoing plot without having any great significance by themselves.

This kind of adjustment in writing style is probably just something that takes practice. CAD The Animation had similar problems at times, with each scene feeling like an independent comic (Episode 1 is actually remarkable devoid of these scenes, but they cropped up later on), but as the series drew to a close Buckley was actually able to do a decent three-part Star Wars parody with pretty good storyline development and pacing (although by that time production was so ridiculously behind schedule that the animation suffered quite a bit, unfortunately). So I’m anticipating that aspect to improve with subsequent episodes of PvP The Series.

So what’s the verdict? Wait and see. As it stands, the first episode of PvP The Series was underwhelming in my mind. I liked the first episode of CAD The Animation better, and I like PvP better than CAD in general. But it certainly wasn’t so awful that I never want to see any more of it again. It really just has me interested in the second episode, to see if they hit their stride a bit better, with tighter writing and better use of the medium. And I’m looking forward to seeing some of the other characters transfer over to moving pictures. I was sad that Skull was not in the first episode, because he’s one of those characters that really provides a lot of energy to the strip, and energy is important to animation. And what about Max Powers? Or the infamous Scratch Fury!? They always add some hijinks to the mix. So I’m looking forward to seeing where things go.

We’ll see what my attitude is after episode 2.

A typical example of the Terror Island humor style.

Every once in awhile, a strip comes along that is easily accessible to the wider audience, and garners immediate accolade and fame.

Terror Island is not one of those strips.

Terror Island (by Ben Heaton and Lewis Powell) is the adventures of board game pieces as they, well, hang around. It’s not like they don’t do anything (they do open restaurants, hold spelling bees, and occasionally summon demons), it’s just that mostly what they do is sit around and argue about who’s going to go buy groceries. To date, groceries have not been purchased.

Photocomics (or more properly, Fumetti) are kind of considered the fringe of the comics world, with a lot of comickers regarding them as the works of people too lazy to draw. And that probably is the case in some circumstances (perhaps the majority of circumstances). But some comickers have harnessed the form for dramatic effect. Leisure Town uses its colorful and cute toy actors to build irony which emphasizes the ugliness of the characters they portray. A Softer World uses blurred images a mundane life to subvert the reader’s expectations with the text.

And Terror Island uses board game pieces to give the strip a very iconic, universal feeling. The characters feel less like individual characters and more like disfunctional everymen, plotting and deceiving and generally disrespecting their friends. I feel like I can connect with the characters in Terror Island better because they are abstract pieces than I could if they were Lego men, which would be more likely to make me think “Shouldn’t they have drawn this instead of copping out with little figures?”

I mentioned at the top of this post that I didn’t think Terror Island was immediately accessible, and I stand by that. I think a lot of people will be put off at first by the photocomic style, and those that get by it and actually read a few strips may have some trouble getting into the style of the strip, which comes off very intellectual in my mind (it’s written by a Math major and a Philosophy major, and it sounds like it was written by a Math major and a Philosophy major. Take the strip thumbnailed above). Most of the jokes are of the “wry smile” variety than the “laugh out loud” style, and that’s not instantly appealing. It takes some investment to get into the characters, the running gags, and the style.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

So go give Terror Island a shot, and see what you think.

One of the more amusing pages, from Hector.

If there’s one artistic technique that we don’t see very often from webcomics, it’s the art of juxtaposition.

The funny comics are funny, and are drawn with cartoony, simplified, bouyant art styles. The serious comics are serious, and drawn more realistically, or darkly. Manga style strips seem to have this ability built in, with the characters being highly detailed when they are being serious, and reduced to simplified (or chibi) form when they are being funny. There are a couple of exceptions to the rule (Gone With the Blastwave comes to mind), but in those cases generally the whole point of the comic is to draw attention to the contrast between the art and the content. Rather than using juxtaposition, the entirety of the comic is juxtaposition.

Enter Hector. Hector is a webcomic about an average guy who just so happens to be the incarnation of Hector of Troy, mighty Greek hero. Maybe he’s not too happy about it, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least try to act heroic. He’s joined by his not so faithful minstrel Johnny Black and a notoriously unreliable oracle as they try to establish themselves as some sort of heroic team.

It usually doesn’t work out that way.

But here’s the thing. The world of Hector, while being a bit off-kilter, is far from a silly place. It’s got real villians, real monsters, and an interesting system in which heroes are born by inheriting the spirits of other great heroes. It’s got all the tropes of a high fantasy story, with a richly detailed world (little of which has actually been seen yet, but the threads of folklore are being woven) and (presumably) epic scope of story.

And the art matches the world perfectly. The stark black and white with highly detailed linework and extensive use of negative space sets up a dark, brooding, fantastical world, highly reminiscent in my mind of the popular manga Berserk. It’s the perfect fit for a violent medieval heroic tale.

Except the heros consist of a slacker, a con man, and a headcase. And they’re misfits all. Juxtaposition. And it provides not only humor, but also a sense of greater reality to the story. These are characters you can relate to. They’re the half-assed heroes who somehow scrape by.

I’m sure as time goes by we’ll see the characters develop and begin to grow into the roles that have been placed on their shoulders, and I look forward to that time, because it will seem more natural seeing where they’ve come from. In the meantime, I think I’ll just sit back and enjoy watching them screw up.

Cover image from the My Life in Records Christmas mini-comic, from My Life in Records.

This begins a series of “catching-up” posts by me in which I will attempt to write up all the interesting things that I’d been meaning to cover on the old Webcomicker but never really had the time to post. Most of them are webcomic reviews and book reviews, but I’ve also got some commentary I want to get out as well. So here we go.

My Life in Records is a bit of a difficult comic for me to talk about, because I’m actually good friends with the creator, Grant Thomas. We lived in the same house for awhile in college, I still visit him and his wife all the time, and heck, he even did all the artwork for Birdsworth! So when I think he’s done something really cool with his own comic and I want to talk about it, I always have this nagging voice in the back of my head yelling “conflict of interest! conflict of interest!”

Well, any conflict of interest aside, My Life in Records is really a very good memoir comic. There are an over-abundance of “daily life” journal comics out there these days (although some are critically acclaimed), and some of them delve into childhood moments of the comicker, but there are very few true memoir webcomics that set out to tell the author’s whole story from start to finish, pacing it like you would any other story and developing themes and motifs. My Life in Records does this, and it does it very well. Thomas’ choice to develop each chapter around a particular song, interweaving the lyrics with the artwork of the story really ties the different stories together and provides a sense of continuity. His choice to represent himself and his brothers variously as normal kids, kids with animal masks, and anthropomorphic stuffed animals depending on the situation really helps to communicate the world of a child, where fantasy and reality blend together
seamlessly on a daily basis.

In many ways My Life in Records reminds me of Craig Thompson’s epic graphic novel, Blankets. Blankets is considered to be a fairly ground-breaking piece of work for comics, and if you haven’t read it I’d highly recommend picking up a copy somewhere. And there are many similarities between Blankets and My Life in Records, with both having strong Christian themes, both exploring the relationships between brothers, and both having a very “down-to-earth” feel of everyday people struggling with everyday issues. Blankets has a lot more angst than My Life in Records has had thus far, but I’m sure as My Life in Records hits the teenage years we’ll see that change. But despite their similarities, there are some profound differences in the form and structure of the comics.

For, you see, My Life in Records is a webcomic.

And this is not to say My Life in Records is any better or worse than Blankets for being a webcomic instead of a graphic novel. It’s just to say that there is a distinctive style to webcomics, and it has to do with execution. In classic 32 page serial comic books, the typical execution is to build each issue to a climax and end on some sort of cliffhanger up until the last issue in the current storyline. It keeps the reader coming back for more issues. In a graphic novel, on the other hand, the entire story is contained in a single volume, so it tends to be paced more like a typical novel with exposition, rising actions, climax and denouement. But in long form webcomics, you get a little bit from both camps, plus the expectation that each page of the story be able to stand alone, because typically the readers are reading the story one page at a time. So what you get is an author who wants to tell a novel-style plot but has to throw in occasional cliffhangers to keep the audience interested while at the same time writing each page so that it can stand alone. And that push and pull of dynamics is very evident in My Life in Records.

Blankets was a graphic novel, released all at one time in a single volume, and it reads like a novel. The story flows from page to page with Craig Thompson clearly not feeling like any page needs to stand by itself. But in My Life in Records, each page does stand alone, telling one aspect of the continuing story. And I never really noticed this until I sat down and read the My Life in Records Christmas mini-comic. When you’re reading a webcomic you expect a somewhat disjointed feel, either because you’ve got to keep clicking to the next page and waiting for it to load, or because you’re actually waiting for the next update. But pick up that same webcomic in book form and you find that often it feels more like a collection of strips than one continuous story. That’s just one of the downsides of the medium, I suppose.

But I digress. The My Life in Records Christmas mini-comic records one chapter of My Life in Records (specifically, the second) and it’s really not your typical Christmas story. It starts in July, ends in February, and really is more of a story about a young child’s understanding of the traditions and beliefs surrounding Christmas than a story about the Christmas “experience”. It parallels faith with expecting a certain present, and baby Jesus with a new baby in the family. In my eyes it’s much more thoughtful and soulful than most Christmas stories, which tend to be sentimental and maudlin.

So I recommend checking out My Life in Records and watching where it goes, as I’m sure its going to get even more interesting as we leave the childhood years behind. And if you’re looking for something to balance out your Christmas reading next year, pick up the mini-comic. If you read it in-between How the Grinch Stole Christmas and National Lampoons Christmas Vacation, I guarantee it’ll make you stop and think, and you’ll have a richer season for it.