Brian Roney’s webcomic reviews

Evil, Inc. (first strip) (daily M-Sa, mostly gag-a-day, occasional adult situations, punny) is a strip that I’ve been wanting to review for a while now, but it never really seemed like a good time to review it. The strip has been mostly gag-a-day, but every once in a while drops into dramatic storylines like the one going on right now, and I didn’t want to get people started into a strip at a cliffhanger. Evil, Inc. started on May 30th, 2005 and has had no breaks in the M-Sa streak (This is the other strip that I’m rooting for in the Daily Grind), meaning that there’s about 700 strips in the archive.

Evil Inc. is set in a world where superheroes, supervillians, mutants, freaks, and aliens all exist and have existed long enough that the cliche matchups and organizations have settled into patterns. Hero fights villian, villian is thwarted, goes to jail, gets out, fights hero again. Until one day a villian (Evil Atom) decided to start a corporation to organize these villians, which would follow standard business and accounting practices. Which, in this sort of world, means that they manage to do a lot more evil because they’re doing it legally. There’s laws against robbing banks, but there’s little stopping them from organizing a hostile takeover. There’s laws against mugging, but not against credit card fees. And if at the same time Evil Atom can organize the supervillians, henchmen, lackeys, and all the other evil requirements for a nice tidy profit… all the better, right?

Evil, Inc. is a nice, witty strip that covers a lot of ground in an area that doesn’t get mocked thoroughly enough. The Incredibles and various other stories have done a fine job parodying superheroes having to live in a world, but Evil Inc. takes things past that and lampoons everything - superhero/villian genetics, child care, flirting, fame, costuming… nothing in the superhero genre is safe. There’s several regular characters, Lightning Lady, Miss Match, Captain Heroic… just enough characters to hit most of the main parody subjects but few enough to keep everybody straight. Sometimes the speech patterns of the characters run together a little bit, but they’re all distinctively drawn (and the art’s pretty good for B+W line art, too).

Evil, Inc. feels remarkably like a newspaper strip in pacing- and yes, it’s syndicated in several newspapers. I’m frequently surprised with the kind of innuendo and suggestive situations that go into the comic that can make it through the syndicates, but more power to him. Like most of the good newspaper strips, Evil, Inc. doesn’t often make me laugh hard, but I get a good set of chuckles out of the archives, and the humor’s pretty broad. There’s occasionally a pun punchline, but generally it’s part of a snappy comeback as well.

The part that I feel Evil, Inc disappoints in is during the dramatic storylines. There’s a good solid plot going through the strip, and while there’s gags for most of the bits, every once in a while the story requires a climax and the strip goes dramatic for a bit, and I generally find these bits to be a little slow. It looks like it’s just coming out of a dramatic arc now, so hopefully the funny will be coming back shortly.

Evil, Inc. is vaguely a sequel to Brad Guigar (the author)’s previous strip, Greystone Inn, a comic about the behind-the-scenes work to produce a comic, if such work required having a set and script and such. Mostly it’s a sequel in that the characters from Greystone still exist in Evil, Inc and occasionally have parts. Lightning Lady originated from Greystone, for instance, and some of the minor characters in Evil, Inc. were main characters in Greystone as well. You don’t need to know the strip to get any of Evil, Inc’s humor or story, however. There’s only a few scenes where they end up calling some of the bit characters in Greystone, and some backstory about Lightning Lady’s boyfriend.

Evil, Inc. is an engaging read, and a comic I suggest people try. It starts out strong and gives a good indication of what the comic is like for the rest of the run, so it’s very easy to figure out whether you’ll like this strip just by reading the first ten strips or so. Go give it a try.

Partially Clips (first strip) (lower bandwidth version of archive) (gag a day, punny, adult (vulgar)) is a pure non-continuity strip that’s deeply vulgar and quite funny. It’s currently weekly, although updated more frequently in the past. Online since October 2001, there’s … I don’t know how many strips in the archive, since the numbering system is all screwed up. No characters carry over from strip to strip, so the gags are always completely new and you don’t need any previous explanations from strips that came before. There’s also very few references to things you’d need to know to get a laugh (although there are a few).

The concept: take a piece of clip art. Copy and paste it for two more panels, making no changes to it (if it is required for the gag, occasionally it is allowed to change the shading or add a line or two). Add dialogue. Post the comic. You might think that this sounds boring, but you underestimate the situations that clip art can be interpreted into. This sort of strip lives or dies by the writing, and the writing is often excellent. There are quite a few Partially Clips comics that have multiple punchlines per strip, all of them solid. Some of these strips you could’ve finished halfway through the strip and I would’ve accepted that as humorous and a standard webcomic, but no, Partially Clips kicks it up a notch, and it makes me laugh doing it. Not all of them are winners, admittedly, and there’ll likely be several strips that fall flat, there’s several in there that made me laugh.

Partially Clips also beats out Something Positive for vulgarity. Not all the strips are vulgar, just like not all the strips are hit jokes, but there’s a fairly high density of both. Regardless of the misses, I’ve got to say, Partially Clips has the quite possibly best Norse god sex pun ever. The strips in Partially Clips tend to focus on the theme of taking something about the picture and giving it a background that isn’t generally considered appropriate, and then joking about it. There’s also mockery of people being stupid, and often a shock joke (a joke that is funny by being shocking or inappropriate). Occasionally there’s a reference to something cultural, such as wikipedia, but they’re all mainstream references, so there shouldn’t be too many problems on that part.

Also done by the same guy as Partially Clips is Erfworld (first strip), which is on the Order of the Stick host page. As OotS is to roleplaying games, Erfworld is to war simulation games. The writing’s snappy, the world is interesting, and the main character is thoroughly screwed and trying to fix things. If you liked OotS and you like Partially Clips, odds are very good you’ll like Erfworld.

If you don’t mind vulgarity and are interested in a funny, non-continuity comic, you should go give Partially Clips a try.

Arthur, King of Time and Space (main site) (first strip) (punny, daily, gag-a-day) is a beast of a comic to review. Not because it’s gone daily since 5/21/04 (1169 strips as of this writing), because other strips have gone longer. Not because it has a heavy pun content or requires knowledge of history or various mythologies to get all the references or has multiple running arcs at once, since we’ve had those before.

AKoTaS is difficult to review because it’s a shotgun comic. It’s all over the place.

AKoTaS is the retelling of the Arthurian legend. If for some strange reason you consider items from the Arthurian legends to be spoilers, skip this review and the comic (and seriously, go read the legends if you feel that way). I won’t be spoiling the comic, but I will be referencing the legends. The special part about this comic is that the Arthurian legend is told from the point of view of various different points in time. The storytelling jumps back and forth between these time arcs as appropriate, and does so often. There’s three main arcs- the fantasy arc, which is the most “traditional” telling of the legends, the contemporary arc, where the characters are set in modern times (instead of knights, they’re in high school), and the science fiction arc, which is set in the future where the head starship is the Excalibur. There’s also multiple other minor arcs, such as the superhero arc, the MASH tribute/parody arc, the generic movie parody arc, the western arc, and probably many others. Each arc handles the continuity that’s current (so the first year of Arthur’s reign in the space arc is still the first year of Arthur’s reign in the western arc, if the comic changes arcs at that point), but each handles it in its own way.

So the first thing a reader’s going to have to get past is the fact that the continuity that they’re currently reading in will occasionally have twists in the storytelling that the others don’t. Main points tend to stay the same, but ordering will often flipflop, often causing issues with timelines. For instance, in the contemporary arc, Arthur and Guenevere don’t get together until much later in the timeline, because in the contemporary culture marriage often is delayed a bit due to schooling and whatnot. The characters generally dress in specific colors to help with identification, due to various physical differences in different arcs (Arthur has different facial hair in each, for instance). To make things worse, the story occasionally makes flashbacks or flashforwards to tell the story correctly or make proper jokes. Combining continuity time travel with actual time travel and arc time travel… it’s often difficult to keep track of the comic. I generally accomplish it by not trying to distinguish between the bits and taking the story as it comes, but if you’re a continuity nazi, you will likely not enjoy yourself.

Here’s the real impressive part- Paul Gadzikowski, the author, is intending to retell the Arthurian Legend… in real time. Which means that he’s got twenty five years of story planned out, one strip a day. So there’s a wide gap in drama- there’s often pitched battles and wars and backstabbings and close calls, because those are in there. But there’s often quiet advancement of characters and jokes and kidding around, because life’s like that.

Now, I mentioned needing to know history. Amusingly, most of the needed history isn’t Arthurian- the standard “I’ve watched a few movies about the subject.” will get you through, as generally new bits are explained by the characters (having an omniscient wizard helps). There are, however, references to Oedipus, Hercules, Socrates, Plato, and various other historical figures. You generally don’t need to know the references to get the fact that the puns are referencing them, luckily. And yes, there are many puns. Worse, they’re very well done.

There’s also often webcomic references- within the contemporary arc, there’s references to Megatokyo, Real Life, PvP, and Dinosaur Comics, at the very least. There’s references to hurricane Katrina, gas prices, various Bushisms, and many other current topics. There’s also often references to the 1970s, as the “Merlin” of the present talks about his past. From references in the strip, I get the impression that Paul works in a school as his day job and is comfortable with his age, and enjoys making references to some of that wisdom (and he does it wonderfully).

AKoTaS contains quite a few strips that the humor falls flat for me. But there are also a few strips that even having read them for the third time, I laughed long and hard. That rarely happens nowadays, and AKoTaS has several of them. Due to the fact that he’s retelling a legend and generally including all the necessary information, often AKoTaS is fairly wordy, although there’s been a few silent comics and everything in between. The drama arcs always feel half-spoiled since I’ve actually read much of the mythology he’s drawing from, although there’s often twists in the individual arcs that I couldn’t've predicted. This is what I mean by a shotgun comic- he’s got something hitting every part of the storytelling spectrum. People who want consistency will probably not find it here, but if you enjoy occasional perfection, it’s in there.

An AKoTaS review would not be complete without mentioning the Daily Grind. Way back in March of 2005, a whole bunch of cartoonists put $20 each into a pot and the last person to miss a daily update wins the pot. Paul’s still in it (and is one of the two people I’m rooting for, out of the people that are left). Go Paul!

AKoTaS is done in MS Paint (as a point of pride, I think), and occasionally has only shapes for characters if he’s feeling a little burned out. The art isn’t much to write home about, although the expressions of the characters are generally very communicative. There’s always a strip, too. And quite often there’s footnotes, although you generally have to scroll down past the navigation bar for that, so it’ll often get missed, and the footnotes are generally for explanation, not humor (although due to the rules of the Daily Grind, the footnotes are occasionally used to have a “second panel”, so you can get two comics for the price of one). Also, for the longest time (and possibly still), Paul updates his site by hand-coding the HTML. That’s hardcore.

I keep thinking I’m making it sound like I’m trying to chase people off, but AKoTaS is an excellently done comic. I just don’t think people should be reading epics without the proper warning.

So, you’ve been warned. Go read the epic. It’s good.

Irregular Webcomic! (main site) (first strip) (punny) is the first (and likely only for a long time) review of a webcomic that uses photography instead of drawn art to make the panels. The author, David Morgan-Mar, has various lego sets, roleplaying-miniatures, and assorted other methods of finding various ways to get pictures of characters. The way this remains consistent is that he also has many different “Themes”, each of which are generally distinct from each other. His Star Wars parody generally has nothing to do with his Fantasy story arc, which tends to not interact with his Indiana Jones parody or his take on Mythbusters. At current count there are 17 different themes. More on this later. All of the strips have a punchline, and there’s very rarely any serious drama. When there is, it’s used purely for comedic value.

Irregular Webcomic!, despite its name, has been surprisingly regular. It started on Dec 31, 2002, and starting Jan 27, 2003, the strip has been updated daily, save for about 6 exceptions, the last of which was in 2004. As of 7/29/07, he’s at 1645 strips. In his FAQ, he claims that the Irregular part of the name is that he doesn’t guarantee any particular schedule, so if he misses an update or such, that’s just part of the webcomic being Irregular. The fact that it’s been much more regular than a majority of webcomics he cites as an example of life’s amusing ironies.

One of the things that people should probably be warned about Irregular Webcomic! is that the strip uses puns an awful lot. There’s even been running gag puns. So if you hate puns, you may want to skip this one. If you don’t mind them, however, it’s quite well done. There’s also a large number of geek jokes. David Morgan-Mar claims to have a PhD in Physics, and I’d believe it. There’s a long series of strips regarding the thermodynamic impossibilities of Coruscant and the Death Star, over which he received quite a bit of mail from people clinging on to their believes that Star Wars physics should work (which mostly just gave him more material to mock). Parodies are the majority of his Themes, with roleplaying games coming a close second.

Irregular Webcomic also happens to be possibly the best designed webcomic site I’ve ever seen. There’s an RSS feed (including an LJ feed), the archives are remarkably easy to navigate through regardless of whether you’re intending to read through the entire archive or by theme, and the archives allow you to load comics 5 at a time, including annotations. There are cookies you can store to turn annotations off, or visually-impaired mode on, and a link to a strip’s permanent url even when it’s on the main page. Also, the strip is small enough and high enough on the page that scrolling down is not necessary unless you’re at a truly abysmal resolution (or there’s a long footnote). Roughly the only gripe I could possibly come up with (and I’m a professional software tester) is that if you’re going through the main archives 5-strips at a time and a theme comes up in one of the first two strips you have to select that strip individually before being able to just navigate through that theme’s strips. Considering I don’t think I’ve seen anybody have the site navigate even this easily, I’m certainly not going to be complaining about an extra click in rare situations. Also amusing on the site is a web poll that gets updated every few days, and an archive of past poll results. Generally the web polls are silly, and occasionally thoughtful (”which line separates yellows from greens” with a graphical list of colors was actually quite interesting). Every once in a while there’s also polls that you can either try to use some game theory to figure out what the right answer will be, or just have some fun and pick something. This poll likes to make you think.

As mentioned, there’s 17 different Themes, and you can navigate through the archives of the themes individually. This means that if you just want to read one particular plotline, or if you don’t particularly like various themes, there’s methods to work around that. I’m not as fond of some of the themes as others, so every once in a while I’ll just read through an individual theme that I like, and I enjoy having that option. All the themes are pretty decent, though.

The other fun thing about the fact that there’s 17 themes in Irregular Webcomic is that he often takes the opportunity to mix and match them. He has a “crossover grid” somewhere, marking which strips have been a crossover between which themes. These are generally just throwaway gags, like Colonel Haken from the Cliffhangers theme (Indiana Jones parody) falling through a portal into the Star Wars universe where he and Darth Vader compare notes about how incompetent their minions are. Most interestingly is that the Death theme ties all the themes together- the idea is that there are Deaths for each possibly way to die. Death by Insanely Overpowered Fireballs tends to get the most work (there’s a Fantasy theme. This should be obvious), although Death by Choking On A Giant Frog and even Death of Being Ground By A Mars Rover Rock Abrasion Tool get screen time. Whenever one of the other Themes has a death, one of the Deaths goes to deal with it. Although generally the Deaths experiene some bureaucratic snafu or are on strike, so most of the deaths don’t generally stick.

Due to the fact that the strip’s photographs, it’s hard to make any claims about art quality improving, but the sets have gotten more elaborate and clearer over time. This sort of strip generally isn’t looked to for art, however, and the writing is quite good for being geek-based pun-loving humor. Annotations explain all of the more obscure jokes (so if you’re not familiar with the fact that a certain flower is also a word in German for something else, it’ll get explained), but if you don’t like humor that requires knowing various facts, you’ll often be left behind. On the flipside, if you don’t mind learning something new, or if you already have a bunch of obscure trivia, there’ll be jokes here that you’ve never seen anybody make before. Kudos to him for that.

Irregular Webcomic is a great comic for people who enjoy puns and obscure geek trivia. Go give it a try.

Dominic Deegan : (first strip) (some gore and violence, some sexual content (no displayed nudity)) plays heavily on one of my favorite themes- prophecy. Generally when I see people play with this sort of theme, it’s in a time travel motif such as Sam or many various ST:Voyager episodes, or with a one-time shot prophecy like Star Wars or various fantasy novels. Dominic Deegan is one of the few comic strips that has a seer as a main character.

Which brings us to the description of said main character, Dominic Deegan (big surprise). Dominic has the ability to see into the future related to anything he concentrates on, and occasionally sees involuntary visions of important things to come. The future he sees is not necessarily what is destined to happen, but is what is likely to happen if things do not change. He also has some minor magic ability (mostly with illusion or distraction). Throughout the series he does learn new abilities, such as more interesting methods of communication and such.

Dominic’s ability to see the future is the main drive of the comic, and it’s used to propel the plot forward at a fast pace. You might think that it’s hard to keep tension in a comic where the main character can see the future, but this is mostly handled by limiting Dominic’s second sight to only seeing things relative to what he’s currently looking at or examining or things that he’s specifically looking for. So while it is obvious that Dominic has a huge advantage in piecing together all the pieces of a puzzle, he still has to _find_ all the pieces, including some that have vanished under the couch. The drama of the strip tends to focus on whether Dominic will piece together all of the information fast enough, as the evil of the current storyline is racing to destroy some important piece of Dominic’s world.

Dominic Deegan updates 7 days a week, and currently has 1400+ pages in its archives. All the pages before page 410 are four panels, and all the pages past 410 are eight panels (or the size equivalent. Basically after 410 he doubled the size of the strip). The art starts fairly choppy, but eventually improves to be quite good. The writer, Mookie, also has a fine sense of the dramatic in his art choices, choosing shading and spacing that leads to the biggest “dramatic reveal”. This is explained in-story as a family trait of all the Deegans- as Dominic’s father was a Bard, he learned early on how to make dramatic entrances, and uses his second sight to see how to be the most dramatic himself.

The comic is a story-based comic, with each minor chapter taking generally 50 strips or so to tell, but occasional major chapters that take up to 200 strips. The focus of the strip is almost entirely dramatic, and there’s rarely a punchline through most of the dramatic storylines. When there are punchlines (which is more often during the minor chapters), the punchlines tend to rely heavily on alliteration, puns, and awkward situations. These tend to be stretched out fairly often and even most of the characters seem annoyed at most of the puns, so if you despise that sense of humor you shouldn’t worry too much, although there’s not much other humor to be found.

One thing that Dominic Deegan does tend to suffer from is the sense that the main hero is going to be safe. After all, the comic’s named after him and he can see the future, so having the comic focus on this dramatic tension of whether Dominic is going to survive or not occasionally falls flat. However, some characters close to Dominic _have_ died, and Dominic himself has suffered permanent damage. The world has healing magic, but there seems to be limits to its usage- it cannot regenerate lost limbs, for instance, and damage from infernal or necromatic sources cannot be healed. I rather enjoy the way that Dominic Deegan classifies the various types of magic (white magic, necromantic, infernal, shamanistic, and normal magic, so far). He does not explain many of the details, but there are enough strips in the archive that a vigilant reader can piece together certain rules and differences between the magic types.

Dominic is portrayed as a bitter, grumpy man who has grown disillusioned with the world due to everybody asking him to use his second sight to see really stupid, minor things. Throughout the story so far, he grows from a lonely, bitter man to a man surrounded by friends and family he has accumulated and shows the emotional weakness that he is attempting to overcome to enjoy what he has achieved, and the mourning over what he has lost. The different personalities to all of the characters come through quite well, and they all have a distinct “voice” and feel. Topics of debate among the characters include racism, corruption, government, violence and sacrifice, with all of the characters having different attitudes about the issues. This leads to added tension, especially since regardless of how well you can see the future, convincing somebody that something is right when their emotions say it is wrong is still beyond Dominic.

Dominic Deegan is one of my favorite strips. I would suggest you read it.

Incidentally, www.websnark.com reviewed the reaction of Dominic Deegan’s fans to a storyline at http://www.websnark.com/archives/2006/07/you_know_i_have_3.html (although it does contain some spoilers). Basically, various fans have reacted negatively to a character death. Websnark responded with “Um. It’s his webcomic. He can kill the characters in it.” So, fair warning. People die.