Retrospective: Weapon Brown

Last week, Weapon Brown, the apocalyptic take on newspaper comics, ended it's current run.  Current meaning while the story as it started is over, I don't think he's done telling Chuck's story.  But for the moment, it is over, and thus it's time for a retrospective on it.

Last week, I said I almost wanted to compare the excellent Between Failures to the awful Blade Kitten, but honestly, the comparison wouldn't have been exactly fair.  Comparing Blade Kitten to Weapon Brown, however, is perfect.  A bounty hunter with a past, a world full of villains and virtually no heroes, a badass attitude but underneath a heart of gold?  It's weird how many basic traits Chuck and Kit share, up to and including the loyal pet.  But then, Chuck isn't a catgirl, so can't be a one to one match.

The other area where it doesn't compare?  Sheer violence.  Few comics I've read REVEL in violence the way Weapon Brown does.  It's completely over the top which makes it a thrill to read.  The fact that Chuck rarely gets through a fight completely unscathed gives an air of realism to the violent world around him, but doesn't reduce his badassery any.

The story is, well, just a vehicle for the violence honestly.  It's certainly modeled on The Road Warrior and it works well in that regard.  It's not perfectly a match for that classic post-apocalyptic film, of course.  There IS a civilization out there, it's just run by generally evil people.  Still, the classic trope of a lone hero working to save a small group of good guys is very much present in the second half of the story.  The first half, on the other hand, is more a lone survivor type tale.

As a character, Chuck doesn't really seem to change all that much through the course of the story.  He's a badass and while he may be weakened or beaten down, he keeps going.  About the only change is that he finds someone to love and when it's time to fight to save her, he doesn't back down.  Sadly, I will say that the rest of the characters are rather one note, but reading this kind of comic for character development is, well, kind of silly.  It's there for the violence, the glory of watching Chuck overcome the odds, and the references.

Ah yes, the references.  This is the real reason to read this comic, because it is a post-apocalyptic parody of the funny pages in the local newspaper.  Chuck is a grown up and hardened Charlie Brown.  His love interest is Little Orphan Annie.  His rival, CAL-v.1n is Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.  And that's just the tip of the iceburg.  Everything from Family Circus to Blondie, Gasoline Alley and B.C. gets a reference in there somewhere.  It can get quite obscure in some cases, so tags are often at the bottom of the comic to help point a direction, but guessing is part of the fun.

That's really the rub of it.  Yes, the comic is a good action/violence piece.  Yeah, the characters aren't anything to write home about, but they're based on even more one note characters and given a semblance of life.  It's just a lot of fun, and I'm glad to have found and read it.  Here's hoping that a sequel is in the works so I can watch Chuck and Jeffy carve a path of destruction through the Syndicate.

In many ways, Weapon Brown is the reason I started reviewing newspaper comics, and why I'll do so in the future.  Anyway, enough for today.  Until next time kiddies.

Palate Cleansing Wild Webcomic Review

Last week I did a full Not-So-Wild review of Blade Kitten.  I didn't intend for that, in fact, I wanted to make it just another part of the:

THE WILD WEBCOMIC REVIEW

It hurt.  I think it's because I don't really read a LOT of bad comics.  Maybe 10 or so I would rate as outright bad, and out of 240 comics, that's pretty good.  Still, I had meant to do a review batch, and with Blade Kitten on my mind, I needed something to cleanse my palate.  And I came up with 4 good comics, and one REALLY good one.  So let's get started.

236.  Gaia - Gaia is a high fantasy comic from the creator of Sandra and Woo, and it's very, VERY good.  Despite it's short life (little over a year at this point) it shows all signs of being an already very mature piece of fantasy.  The closest comparison I can make is to Errant Story, but with all the lessons it took Errant Story many years to learn already learned.  After maybe only 120 strips, this comic is already set to be one of my go to comics and I suspect I'll be following it for a long time.

237.  Between Failures - When I first started reading it, I was full of dread.  1000+ strips, and the main character came off as a bit of jerk.  Yet I kept going, and with a single moment, a kiss, I went from dreading it to loving this comic.  The art is good, and distinctive.  No issues telling one character from another.  The characters are great, taking a seed of a basic identity point, and growing them with each strip.  Each gets their moments to speak, and grow, and the dynamic between them is wonderful.  And that's all within the first 300 strips, which covers a SINGLE in story day.  This is the antithesis of Blade Kitten in almost every way, to the point I may do a side by side comparison of the two in the near future.  I highly recommend it.

238.  Alex Ze Pirate - This is a much older comic than it first appears, as revealed by the VERY first strip, which you have to find manually.  That would be my biggest complaint, the archive is a touch annoying to deal with, especially with no "first" button.  Not that the comic really NEEDS it, as this is more a daily humor type comic up until the halfway point of the comic where stories start coming out, but even these feel like early forays into the larger story telling world.  I'm hoping this expands more as while the random humor strips are funny enough, I think these same characters would do better with slightly longer story arcs.

239.  The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo - Way back when, I reviewed a comic called Perchance to Dream, which has the distinction of being the only comic I've ever wanted to go back and rewrite myself.  The frustration was that it took classic fantasy elements (Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, the Jungle Book) and didn't quite go as far, or as well, as it should have with them.  Edgar Allan Poo does the same with characters from myth and legend, but does it RIGHT.  This is an amazing comic, not just in the strange art style, but in the fantastic story telling.  It's really hard to describe it without reading it, but while the title says "surreal" I find it much more dreamlike, and that makes it feel the way I wanted to feel from Perchance to Dream.  Very good, worth a read, except, well, it hasn't updated since July 2012.  I have a dread feeling it may not be back anytime soon.

240.  The Fancy Adventures of Jack Cannon - My initial reaction was that this was just another high school comedy comic.  Then the bully pulled out a keyboard and start causing the earth to punch the hero.  Then things got weird.  It's an action comic, with a focus on punching people.  A lot of people.  Of course when one of the character's last name is "Facepuncher" you get this is pretty silly comic, but it's up front with it's silliness, allowing the reader to just enjoy it.  There's a plot, of course, and it's reasonably serious, for a very silly comic.  It's a good read, and after Edgar Allan Poo's very serious take, it was nice to get to something less than serious and quite humorous.  As the "villain" was defeated recently, I'm curious what direction a continuance of this story will go.  I'll be watching to see.

And that's it kiddies, 5 very good comics, but Between Failures is my favorite of the batch.  With Christmas coming up, and a few other things, updates will be a little sporadic.  I'll post at least something next time.  Until then kiddies.

Not So Wild Review Special: Blade Kitten

NOTE:  Sorry kids, looks like the damn thing didn't publish on time.  Should have checked it yesterday and forgot.  Sorry.

I don't do this.  Normally, when I find a new comic and am set to review it, I'll put it aside and locate at least 4 more comics to review at once.  These five would be the newest addition to the Wild Webcomic Review.  Not So Wild Reviews follow later, typically in the order in which I originally reviewed the comic, assuming I'm still reading it.  This is how I've done this since the beginning.  Today I make an exception for:

BLADE KITTEN

Before I begin, I also broke another general rule for reading comics because of how I found it.  I found this comic via the Let's Play Archive, and a Let's Play of the game that's based on the comic.  This game was the final nail in the coffin for a major game development studio.  The comic is done by one of the company's founders and creative director.  Watching the LP, I am stunned at how well the game seems to function from a mechanical perspective.  From everything else, I can see why it bombed.  It also meant I HAD to see the comic, I had to read it.  As such, I started this comic with background information I normally wouldn't have had in a dry archive run.  This may or may not color some of my comments.  Let's get on with this.

ART

This is a manga/anime style comic, but not quite as good as it should be.  It's not awful, but I've seen much better comics using this kind of art style.  The issue, I think, is that it leans far too hard on the anime tropes, including, but not limited to, girls in impractical clothing and cat girls.  Specifically the main character who is very much a cat girl, with pink hair and everything.  There's also a trend that rarely does a panel pass without some kind of dialog block interfering.  To be fair, even Errant Story's early strips suffered from this, too much script going in, so this isn't a stumbling block, but it is a sure sign that he's not confident the art can tell the story.  And we'll get to the story later.  It's at least competent, not god awful, but I don't think the overall style and point of the comic is very good.

CHARACTERS

Oh these characters.  The main character is a cat girl, named Kit.  Most of the names are awful.  Alamo, Justice, Kaiser, Gattling etc are some of the WORSE "creative" names I've seen.  And these aren't pets, oh no, these are actual people.  If these were nick names, or code names or something, I might stand them, but no, these are their proper names.  Names aside, that's about all these characters have.  Most are one note personalities, even if they have "a dark past" or some other emotional trauma.  Kit is especially bad as she wisecracks unnecessarily, slips into badass mode at the drop of hat, then goes all teary eyed later.  I've seen characters with LESS character become something greater, so I suppose that with time all of them can get better, but at the moment they're just glorified tropes running around with cat ears.  The worse part?  Dialog dumps worth of character backstory.  Yeah, way to make me care.

STORY

Disjointed.  Incomplete.  I've read comics before where it felt like it was missing whole strips.  I never felt that in Blade Kitten, instead I felt I was missing entire PLOTLINES.  I don't mind mystery in my comics, and there are a couple moments throughout that actually almost worked.  But the mystery here was how vaugue could the artist be for any given story point.  We aren't given any reference points for things.  Alamo, at one point, turns out to be a robot, but there is never any HINT at what was going on, nothing odd to question her nature.  Why?  Because there's no time to learn anything.  She's maybe in a total of 6 pages before ANYTHING is questioned, and it has to be forced because when the non-robot version is revealed, there's no connection there.  Other times the overly dense strips feel like they could have told so much more if they were stretched to 3 or 4 pages.  In the end little is learned about the world, little is shown about the characters and their backstory (shown, not TOLD), and there's no investment in the story as a whole because the mystery and suspense of the tale is drown out by poor pacing and the fact that it feels more like the Cliff notes version of a comic.

OVERALL

I will forever hold that the worst comic I've ever read is the old EarthBeta (which you can't see any more, praise on to any deity that did that), so no, this isn't the worst comic ever.  It is, however, by no means good.  The art direction is annoying, the characters are one note or so trope filled as to topple over under their own "weight" and it almost feels like the artist is speeding through a story rather than building one.  The sad part?  That game, the one that destroyed the game studio?  It's built the same way.  The story in the game is disjointed and rushed, the characters are one note at best, and the art direction is actually about the same.  It's also canon with the rest of the comic, so there are events that don't make sense without the game, and vice versa.

This is a bad comic.  The only reason to even read it is to complete the understanding of the game and what happened after it.  That said, it is doing something a lot of comics can't do.  Yeah, that's right, it still updates.  Looks like about once a week.  It might get better one day, but I kind of doubt it.

This comic will NOT go on the official list because, well, I broke every rule with it.  Hopefully I'll get another batch of reviews up before the end of the year, or at least for the start of next year.  No promises though.  Until next time kiddies.

Not So Wild Review: Cat and Girl

Most comics have some sort of theme that unifies the various strips.  Sometimes it's absurdest humor, or action/adventure, or even just really great art.  These themes define the comic and aim it's direction, and at the very least they can be identified by the reader early on.  And then there's:

CAT AND GIRL

I think it's meant to be subversive, honestly.  But not quite.  A commentary on the world, without actually saying anything about the world.  Does that make sense?  Probably not, which is kind of how the comic works.  I read this comic thrice a week, but do I LIKE this comic?  Um, yeah, kind of.  In a weird way.  But let's break it down a bit.

CHARACTERS

They're not really characters.  At best they're designated voice boxes for various things.  They have some personality quirks, I guess, but asking "who is Cat and who is Girl" and I'd be hard pressed to say anything (besides Cat eats paint for some reason).  Some characters are there for the joke, like Bad Decision Dinosaur, who makes and encourages bad decisions.  Saying they have "character" would be wrong.  But then, this isn't a story comic in any sense, so not having character isn't a detriment to the comic at all.  It is about the joke, which I'll get to in a moment.

ART

All comics evolve in their art, but I'm not sure how to really label the evolution here.  From a technical perspective, the art, I suppose, has improved.  The lines are crisper, more defined in the current strips compared to the early strips.  At the same time, the art now feels stiffer, less lifelike and effective.  It's almost as if most of the art is copy and paste, though I'm pretty sure it isn't.  Looking back, the comic feels more alive in the early strips, while it's feels more dead in the later ones.  Though not always.  It's a very confusing comic.

HUMOR

Trying to describe the humor of this comic is difficult.  Let me try by quoting from the about page referring to the artist:

Dorothy Gambrell was born in Illinois, and educated at Illinois College and Union College of Law. She was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895, during which time she became the leader of the free silver movement. Her later years were devoted to the advocacy of fundamentalism, most notably as a prosecutor during the Scopes monkey trial.

Yeah, it's that kind of humor.  Is any of that actually funny?  To some it is, because it's silly, but it's not "ha ha" funny.  It's more "huh" funny.  And that's a lot of this comic, it just kind of makes you go "huh."   Oh, it does have some "ha ha" moments, enough that I do consider it a humor comic, but a lot of it isn't that way.  It's like a weird mix between a daily comic and an editorial comic but without necessarily being topical or timely.

OVERALL

I like this comic, but being able to say why has given me issues.  It's not strictly funny, but it is entertaining.  It offers commentary on life, the universe and everything, but doesn't really say much about them.  The art isn't great, but it's not awful.  It's subversive, but not really.  I somehow manage to enjoy it, and while it's not one of those comics I'm looking forward to reading, I'm not dreading it either.  Decent comic, and if you like the odd humor, you'll love it too.

Until next time kiddies.

Wants and Needs

So the last time I had an article, I talked about characters and how, despite being the creators, most artists and authors really aren't good enough authorities the human mind to really discuss what's going on in the minds of said characters.

With that in mind, I figure I should walk through how I create a character for my various projects.  I'm not talking about the bits where the character is out to save the world or what hair style they have, I mean how I make the character's character.  As I said, I'm not a therapist, but I do need some kind of guide to tell me WHY a character does something.  Yes, characters need a reason to do things, and often they have plenty through the course of a story, but what matters to me is how they justify it to themselves.

Thus for each character where it's appropriate, I give them a simple, two column list.  One says "WANTS" and the other says "NEEDS."  And that's about it.  In my experience, simple is more effective than building a complex series of relationships or what not, as it is easier to remember, and easier to build on as the story continues.

Wants represent the desires of the character.  Typically they're physical in nature (wants this thing, for example) and often are declared by the character in some way.  It's the motivative force, it pushes the character forward and drives them along.  It also acts as a way to redirect the plot, taking what was initially a foregone conclusion and sending it off on a different path.  Wants are powerful, conscious, and often more than a touch irrational.  It's one thing to want to be ruler of the Earth, it's another to want to be King of the Universe.  One is doable, the other not so much.

Needs are different, but not exclusively.  They're usually not physical in nature, more mental or spiritual, and often even the character doesn't know that it's there.  It's more a completion force, when achieved it completes a character arc, and possibly set up a new one.  It doesn't mean it's the end of the story, of course, but it could be essential to the climax and lead to the end of the story.  Needs also tend to be reasonable and rational, and are almost always actually achievable.

Wants and needs relate to each other in various ways.  Sometimes, they're the same thing, or closely related.  Nothing says they HAVE to be different, after all.  At the same time, the want will often be bigger than need, so achieving the need won't achieve the want.  Other times, wants and needs are opposed to each other.  The want runs counter to the need, meaning getting that need often won't be accomplished via direction action of the character.

Here's the last comment on this:  as the author or artist, the wants and needs of the character should NEVER be given out.  It's a guide for developing the story and character and that's all it's for.  Revealing it would lead to potential spoilers, and remove the ability to change them as the story goes on.  Plus, it's fun to guess.

Well, that's enough for this week.  Until next time kiddies.

Blame it on laziness

Yeah, another nothing post.  Mostly due to laziness on my part.  I have an article planned, but I never got much past the title.  I'll work on having it up next week.  Until then.

You Are Not A Therapist

Exploring a character's personality is one of the most desired, and most difficult, task an author of any sort faces.  Getting it right, making it natural, and not dropping it on a readers head is the hard, but can be very rewarding in the long run.

But there is an issue.  Most artists and authors don't actually know how the mind works.  They're not therapists or psychologists.  This means, as the author starts to dig into what makes their own characters tick, they're not doing it from an educated position.  Which brings me to Schlock Mercenary and it's current "B" plot.

While Captian Kaff Tagon and his Toughs are busy trying to contain a nanite infested army of Gavs (or run away as the case may be), General (Retired) Karl Tagon is relating the story of the beginning of the Teraforming Wars (none of which is needed to actually know to understand this article).  The point:  Nearly his entire family died there, with only father and son (so far) getting out alive.  The fact that it was caused by nanites here as well has relevance on the "A" plot.

The most recent comic on this part of the plot tries to dissect what's going on in Karl's head with respect to this incident.  It ends with "You're not a good therapist."  The question is, however, is she right?  As far as Howard Taylor is concerned, I suspect he believes she is, but from a psychological one, I'm not so sure.  Mostly because, like Taylor, I'm not a therapist.

I've developed several characters for stories and I have the same problems, armchair psychiatry.  I THINK I know why characters do what they do, but is true?  I can only guess.  Intuition works to a point, but people who are more educated can probably see through it.  It's dangerous territory, and going beyond the most simple, broad strokes might likely get an author into trouble.

I really can't wait for the next comic on this plot for Schlock.  I'm curious to see what Karl believes happened in that moment, or how he deals with the fact that she might be right.  If anything, I find this "B" plot more interesting than the "A" plot, but only until the two start colliding.  After all, Kaff is dealing, once again, with nanites threating his life (and employeers), and there's a survivor as well.  What will HE do and how will it relate to what happened in the past?  Even if it's not psychologically accurate, the story is still damn good.

Until next time kiddies.