An important aspect of fantasy and science fiction comics is the willing suspension of disbelief by its readers. Without this suspension of disbelief, readers will often find fault with the story and be less likely to continue reading. This is especially true with contemporary fantasies, which often take place in modern settings that readers can readily relate to, but risks losing a reader’s suspension of disbelief when something happens that is too over the top. This happened a couple months ago with me and the webcomic Key.

Like many contemporary fantasies, Key has an epic fantasy feel to it, which lends itself to fight scenes and other elements that can be difficult to effectively portray in a webcomic format. Fortunately, the start of the comic avoids many of these commonly-used tropes, and it is the interaction between Jerlorn, a half-human faerie knight exiled to the Earth, and Ki, a young lady who was orphaned as a child and has her own (unknown) ties to the Realm of Faerie that helped hook me into this comic. I found the growing friendship between Jerlorn and Ki to be of much greater interest than the apparent conflict between Jerlorn and the comic’s antagonist, Varian.

It can be difficult to do fight scenes in comics. The cartoonist has to balance action with plot or risk boring the audience. The initial fight between Jerlorn and Varian was short, sweet, and inconclusive but it worked because so little time was spent on the fighting. The last two chapters have focused on the fight between Jerlorn and Varian, with 22 pages of combat that should have been condensed to less than half that. Part of the problem is that cartoonist Flora Li is trying to be cinematic in a genre that doesn’t work well with that style. It’s a flaw that multiple cartoonists, both professional and amateur, have made and I don’t fault her for it. Instead, what has soured Key for me lies with blatant impossibilities in the comic.

The first was Jerlorn holding a bastard sword by the hilt using his teeth while climbing onto a wyvern in flight. What’s more, he’s able to hold his head upright while doing so. next, we have Varian using his sword to jump off of the side of a building onto said wyvern in flight and then running down its back to smack Jerlorn off of said wyvern. Third, we have a gryphon STOPPING said wyvern in mid-flight without the beast then crashing to the ground! That’s three strikes against a basic fundamental law (gravity), and a massive break in my suspension of disbelief. Added are other small discrepancies throughout the comic that, on their own, can be accepted but that gradually build up to further damage the reader’s ability to accept the storyline’s reality.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Li’s characters and basic storyline. The comic is good enough that I won’t stop reading. But I’m more lenient when it comes to a comic’s flaws than most, and when considering a comic’s setting and genre, the cartoonist has to take care not to sunder the readers’ suspension of disbelief. If the fight was cut in half (or more) and the more insane elements removed, this sequence would likely work well. If the action was broken into shorter sections and we had more character pieces with the rest of the cast, the fight likewise would work better. But as it is now, the last two chapters detract from the quality of the comic.

There are times when swordplay (or other combat) needs to be included in a story. However, audiences don’t need to have a blow-by-blow account of the fight. The use of storyboarding and eliminating unnecessary parts of a fight can help significantly condense these fights and return the comic to the story. Rereading the fight scene, I’m left to ask what the point of all this is? And why couldn’t it be told in half the time, allowing us to get back to the meat of the story? At the very least, a condensed fight might have avoided knocking me out of the story, quibbling over insignificant elements that have no bearing on the plot.