Monthly Archives: January 2011

Dan and Mab’s Furry Adventures

Posted on January 31, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I must admit that the most recent Dan and Mab’s Furry Adventures has left me feeling a tad conflicted. The revelation of what happened to Abel’s father, Aniz, was in many ways anticlimactic, with readers being told rather than shown what happened to him (and not even with a flashback graphic either). Undoubtedly part of my disappointment lies with the fact I was anticipating (with some sadistic glee) the emotional upheaval that would occur with Abel to confront the man who destroyed his life and ripped him away from a beloved mother and revealed that so much of his life was build on a life. Having this piece of potential drama dropped into Schrödinger’s opened box of felines would disappoint any fan of dramatic storytelling.

But on the other hand, Amber M. Williams dropped another bomb to surprise her readers (something she is apt to do on occasion, even as her stories often delight and bemuse; how Williams is able to juggle dramatic and comedic storytelling is something I puzzle over, and wish other webcartoonists who are deficient in this skill would learn) with the revelation of who was responsible for Aniz being in no position to further antagonize his son’s life. (Mind you, while Aniz may not be in a position to torment his son directly, I would not be at all surprised to learn that Abel has a sister. Or a brother, but somehow I suspect any siblings would be sisters, if only because of the tradition Williams has created with so many other brother-sister siblings in the comic.) That being, Quintinga Ti’Fiona.

While the specific character hasn’t appeared in the comic just yet, the last name was a strong hint, and a quick perusal of the cast page found her nestled in the character write-up for Alexis Ti’Fiona… Dan’s half-sister. This creates yet another link between Dan and Abel, with Dan’s father’s deceased wife having put down Aniz. Given the history between Abel and his father, I doubt there will be any real grief between the two over what happened in the past. Still, I’ve this weird mental image of Dan and Abel; in many ways they are like brothers, though they only just met within the last year (of the comic’s time). Thus my mixed feelings; while I would so very much have loved to see Abel face down his father… I’m fascinated by these latest twists linking these two characters together, and eagerly await the next twists to come from Williams’ pen.

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Schlock Mercenary

Posted on January 27, 2011 by | Leave a comment

A while back, Eric Burns of Websnark fame wrote up an article on retroactive continuity (retcons) in comics. In his typical fashion, Burns dissected the very concept of what a retcon is, and the varied forms they take. Just recently I’ve discovered (thanks to Howard Taylor of Schlock Mercenary fame) that there is in fact a sixth form of retcon: the Legal retcon, in which the very archives of a webcomic have been altered to try and avoid litigation concerning trademark violations: in this case, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates,” which was a parody of the book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey.

If I recall my legalese, Covey actually does not have a leg to stand on here; Taylor was using the title in parody of the original and did not base the comic around the parody title or the like. Unfortunately, depending on the whims of the judge (and how business-oriented the judge is; technically Schlock Mercenary is “art” which would likely get short shrift from today’s corporate-friendly judiciary), Taylor very possibly could have lost the case. Even if the judge did support Taylor, the legal fees could very possibly bankrupt Taylor, resulting in the legal retcon.

In an amusing note, Taylor has taken this legal lemon and turned it into literary lemonade. The new title, “The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries,” is admittedly superior to the old and has the added benefit of being unique to Taylor and to Schlock Mercenary. Further, by publicizing the incident Taylor very likely encouraged added archive crawls of his comic, which may lead to added book sales – especially as wily fans try to snatch up the remaining original copies that possess the original term; seeing that miscast coins and stamps are collectors’ items, I’m sure a book with a legally ambiguous title will be as well.

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Red String

Posted on January 26, 2011 by | 1 Comment

It can be easy at times (and admittedly tempting as well) to blithely pigeonhole certain characters in stories. This is especially true when the characters have proven on multiple occasions to be less than deserving of our sympathy or even our regard. Perhaps no character better fits this bill than Kazuo Fujiwara’s father in Gina Biggs’ web-manga Red String; the times we’ve seen him, he’s browbeaten Kazuo, treated his wife like she was worthless and all-but told her he was all set to toss her on the curbside, and pretty much shown no remorse or decency. Indeed, Kazuo’s father has been the rare exception with Biggs in a character that shows no redeeming qualities (a trait shared only with Miharu’s former teacher Mr. Arata).

Nor did this appear to change at all when he learned his son attempted to commit suicide; his initial response upon seeing Miharu at the hospital was to blame her for his son’s actions. Yet in blindly casting Kazuo’s father into the role of antagonist to Miharu, it becomes far too easy to blindly ignore the brief moment before he noticed our young protagonist lurking in the background… where he rushed into the hospital and took his wife into his arms to comfort her. I only now notice this after Biggs’ latest update; a quiet moment of introspection, with Kazuo’s father alone in the hospital… staring at his son through a window… and fighting to hold in his emotions.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized more and more that I am my father’s son. I mean that metaphorically; while I am my own person, there is much in me that is disturbingly similar to my memories of my father from twenty years ago. I wonder then… what was his father like? Is Kazuo’s father his father’s son? Is his actions and insensitivity due in part to his upbringing? (And how flawed is Kazuo as a result? Is Miharu truly fortunate not to be in a relationship with a young man who could very easily become as insensitive and callous as his own father?) It takes a gifted storyteller to impart emotion and introspection with five silent panels, using quiet art to hint at so much more, and craft a story that is well worth rereading, just to catch the hidden nuances that could be missed the first time through.

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Namesake

Posted on January 25, 2011 by | Leave a comment

One thing I try to avoid when writing stories is the use of info dumps. To be honest, I’m not quite sure where I got the impression that info dumps were bad; perhaps it’s the prevalence of info dumps in older science fiction literature (which at times… suffers in quality). Still as a general rule of thumb, info dumps often tend to be boring at best and unnecessary at worse, especially if readers have some basis of knowledge of the topic on hand. Thus when I saw an info dump rear its head in the contemporary fantasy webcomic Namesake I’ll admit I quickly grew bored. While I was unfamiliar with the backstory elements of Ozma being a fairy (to be honest, that’s not too surprising as L. Frank Baum changed things from book to book), I had passing familiarity with several of the Oz books and thus found myself bored with what I felt was excessive exposition.

The artwork behind the ongoing info dump helped put form to the characters, but I soon was wishing the comic would get to a more active bit of storytelling. As such, I was thoroughly shocked when cartoonists Megan Lavey and Isabelle Melançon deviated from the traditional backstory and had Dorothy die of old age… while still looking every bit the child thanks to Ozma’s magic. Perhaps part of the shock did lie with said artwork; while the imagery presented brief glimpses of the background story, Melançon managed to impart emotion and impact into those images, both of Ozma’s love for Dorothy and her grief at her death. And then we learned of the other Dorothies, of young girls who would appear into Oz… and each in turn would grow old and die, while masked in the illusion of youth, and this story takes on a darker aspect.

Truth be told, Namesake is not a story of the Land of Oz, though the main character is currently a Dorothy lost in Oz without the knowledge of how to escape (as it seems magic slippers don’t always send you home with a click of the heels). Rather, the story resembles another webcomic, Andy Weir’s Cheshire Crossing (which is sadly on hiatus and unlikely to drag itself out of that pit). In fact, both comics start with the emergence of Alice Liddell from the strange world they traveled to… and focus on these young women who can travel between worlds. But where Weir’s story focuses on the original Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy, Namesake lives up to its title and examines girls (and guys, for that matter) who embody these characters from classical literature and fairy tales.

The primary protagonist of the comic (after the prologue, which focuses on the Alice of literary fame, and presents a brief introduction to the concept of “Namesakes”) is a young woman named Emma Crewe, who when picking up her 15-year-old sister Elaine at the library ends up in the middle of an insane adventure, inheriting the mantle of “Dorothy” and finds herself transported to Oz. Unfortunately for Emma, things don’t quite work the way they did in the movie (which, to be honest, was a significant retelling from the original novel).

Unfortunately, while the artwork is quite striking (and I found the use of shades of green for coloring of the exposition info dump section to be rather innovative), Melançon doesn’t always have time to color the comics. As such, the comic can jump between color and greyscale or black-and-white art. There are even segments where there is spot color; I initially ascribed some extra meaning to the spot colors, but looking back I have to wonder if these moments of color, however light, may have been a result of insufficient time to color the comic adequately.

In spite of the inconsistency of color in the art, Namesake has an interesting premise that quickly differentiates it from similar webcomics. Lavey and Melançon have done a fine job of creating interesting and compelling characters and with tossing twists into the story you won’t always see coming. Even with the use of info dumps (and to be honest, I fully expect us to see more in the future, if only to explain just what the Namesakes are) the comic is enjoyable and manages to recreate familiar settings and make them unpredictable.

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Emergency Exit

Posted on January 24, 2011 by | 1 Comment

There are times when I think webcartoonists would benefit from a decent editor. (Mind you, I said decent – I’m not talking about those hacks who work at Marvel or DC and do their best to squash the creative talents of the cartoonists working for them.) Nor am I talking about the use of an editor to catch simple typos and confusing wording. What I mean is someone to look over a comic (and perhaps the script for a storyline if the webcartoonist was ambitious enough) and catch little things like the latest update of the contemporary fantasy Emergency Exit and ask the cartoonist “are you sure you want this character to say this? Because there are some… connotations you may not intend.”

The scene in question is the latest bit concerning the sudden breakup of Bob and Burgundy, due in part to Bob angsting over the fact he’s grown wings due to a curse he and his brothers are under, resulting in Burgundy running off and talking to the alien landlord (and yes, I know how truly bizarre that sounds out of context – unfortunately, this is true for most of EM). The problem lies with the last sentence, with Burgundy explaining to Vladic how girls who just had a breakup with a boyfriend want to hear that it’s not their fault. To me, it not only diminishes the emotional impact of the scene, it also belittles how Burgundy felt about the relationship itself. To be honest, the breakup didn’t make much sense to me (though that may be true to life – a lot of breakups have less-than-logical reasons behind them, including those infamous words “I just don’t love you anymore”).

I could live with that. But to watch Burgundy go from angry and upset at how Bob treated her to this cold dismissal feels out of character – not just of Burgundy, but of the scene as well. Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it does grate on me, and throws me out of the scene. It almost feels like N.J. Huff was trying to emphasize Vladic’s alienness, but stumbled and left Burgundy looking far less sympathetic than she’d been leading up to that final panel. And this is unfortunate; Burgundy is one of the more sympathetic characters in the comic, and this stumble diminishes her, if only a little. But even with little stumbles such as this one, Emergency Exit remains a complex and well-written comic that’s definitely worth an archive crawl.

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Requiem

Posted on January 20, 2011 by | Leave a comment

There’s a certain fascination with the concept of immortality (and by that I’m talking about physical immortality rather than the concept of the soul or of existence after death). Tales focusing on immortality can be found in a number of myths, as well as classic literature, opera, and the like. One thing that frequently turns up is the downsides of immortality; whether it’s the loss of youth, the death of friends and family, or even persecution from overzealous people who seek to gain immortality for themselves. In fact, it’s rare to see the benefits of immortality (such as possessing the time to learn and master new skills) with this fixation on the negative.

Still, I must admit that the negative aspects of immortality mentioned in James Roden’s online graphic novel Requiem appear to be well thought out and used in an intelligent fashion. While most of the cast is fairly young, several characters are thousands of years old (thanks to nanites designed during a technological singularity that ultimately went wrong). One of the Immortals assisting the protagonists, a woman researcher named Ishara, ends up explaining the cognitive confusion the older Immortals could suffer if too much happens too quickly. The easiest way for me to describe it (rather than quote the pertinent pages) is through computer terms: it’s as if you have a hard drive that has a lot of content and has not been defragged in a while. Slowdowns while retrieving data (and uploading new data) are often the least of your concerns.

Of course, part of the problem Ishara and the Immortals have faced is the need to hide their immortality from the world around them; as such they create new lives for themselves, learn new languages, and so on. After a while it gets difficult keeping track of things (something I’ve encountered in my decades-long life to date, let alone living for millennia). I do wonder how things would differ if an Immortal didn’t bother hiding, and was part of an existing culture of other Immortals. With a less-changing world where loved ones and friends did not pass away, that cognitive dissonance might be more subdued. While we’re unlikely to see such a society exist in Rodan’s comic, his treatment of the subject matter is decidedly more logical than the majority of stories on the subject, which either consider immortality to be immoral (and against God’s will) or ultimately without benefit. In Requiem it is more what the Immortals choose to do with their extended life that matters, rather than the immortality itself.

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Darken

Posted on January 19, 2011 by | Leave a comment

I have to admit some amusement at the conclusion of a recent story segment in the dark fantasy comic Darken, with Komiyan’s defeat of the spirit-blade Blackshard. While Darken tends toward black humor when possible, watching Komiyan manage to accidently outwit the spirit of the blade by getting drunk has to be one of the more amusing moments that the comic has had. In many ways this is reminiscent of roleplaying adventures I used to run (I still remember with great fondness the utter confusion my former players went through when I had the Big Bad of the game give up on his plans of becoming a God because he’d realized the PCs would kill him right after he attained that goal – he went off and took a vacation after that, leaving one player to ask in disbelief “Can he do that?”) with the utter unexpected twists that leave readers guessing. You often expect heroes to prevail through strength of will or the like. But by getting drunk? That one’s new to me, and a deliciously amusing end to that story segment.

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