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Next week’s review is on Geeks Next Door and we hope you’ll enjoy our analysis. Also, making his first appearance here next week is our mysterious fifth reviewer. You’ll get five viewpoints to consider.
To tide you over until then, check out the interview of Joanne Wojtysiak of Gothbunnies over at Webcomic Asylum. There’s an extra bonus at the end of this interview, as well.
And thanks for reading Comic Fencing!
There is something to be said for persistence, for a creator’s steadfast devotion to a concept over the course of many years. We’ve seen it in books, in print comics, on the web – Stephen King wrote his best sellers but always had some portion of “The Dark Tower” floating around the back of his head; Orson Scott Card returns to the Ender and Alvin Maker series; Harvey Pekar continues to plug away on “American Splendor.” So I have to give credit to Joachim Lipski – he’s been working on some aspect of ad1997 for close to 8 years now if I read the background notes properly. That amount of time spent thinking about the characters and the world shines through in his author’s notes. He obviously enjoys these characters, this setting, and the process he’s gone through to develop them. And many of his pages show a lot of care taken in the design and layout.
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Welcome back! If you read my first review and came back again, congrats! If you read it and didn’t come back, then who are you and why are you posing as someone else?
Ok, I admit it. I don’t have the time to sit and read through 2 or 3 years of archives in order to get the big picture of the webcomic, talk about the evolution of the art, and all those other fancy things that artists do. Why? Well, if I told you that I’d give away information that could be detrimental to my secret identity (I’m NOT crazy – read the bio! They wrote it, I didn’t) so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Despite that, I do my level darndest to read as much of the webcomic as I can in order to give what I consider to be a relatively informed opinion on the comic.
Ad1997 is a black and white comic colored with greytones. The linework is interesting, with a great variety of line and lots of black. It’s fun to look at.
The choice of view in the panels reminds me of a movie storyboard. For some reason, the movie Die Hard comes to mind but I’m not sure exactly why that movie in particular. Over time, the art gets a little crisper and easier to follow, too.
A.D. 1997 involves a huge multinational corporation, and a murder that threatens to unravel, well, everything. I was looking forward to reading and reviewing a non gag humor comic this time, so let’s get right into it.
Artwise this comic has a unique look, with lots of busy linework and a bubbly, almost anime style in blacks, grays and whites. There is lots to look at, with very detailed skylines and crowded streets and cityscapes. Now, with that said, I found it highly confusing at times to figure out what was going on in certain panels.
We thought we’d have a post explaining what comics we are willing to look at. We’re pretty open here at ComicFencing. Go ahead and send your review request to comicfencing@gmail.com today! We’ll consider virtually any comic for review, with the following thoughts in mind:
We want to provide a fun place to read about and discuss webcomics. We will always want to know if there’s a way to make the site better and more user friendly. You are always welcome to submit a comic for review and send your thoughts about ComicFencing to comicfencing@gmail.com .
To make it easy to share any general comments, questions and suggestions - we thought we’d start a post so we can have some open discussion about ComicFencing itself. Feel free to offer your general thoughts right here and we’ll have some dialogue.
Note that we require all comments (and reviews) to be G Rated and have no inflammatory speech. We don’t want any spam, name calling, swearing or hate talk here. While we expect some disagreements, anything that violates the basic principles above will be deleted without remorse.
Since we can’t possibly anticipate everything right up front, we want to make sure we are listening to your suggestions. From TWCL, we have these thoughts:
“I have some comments, but since I see no obvious place on the Comic Fencing site to contact the people in charge (my comments are not in regards to one particular review, so it doesn’t make sense to me to leave a comment there), I’m going to put my thoughts here.”
Good point! You can always reach us through comicfencing@gmail.com We’ll also start a post entitled General Comments so you can post ideas there as well.
Another commenter noted: “First, I really like the idea. Having a bunch of reviews of the same comic all in one place sounds very helpful, since one person’s opinion isn’t necessarily going to agree with mine. Second (following up on that last remark), I would be even more interested if it were clear that all of you had different tastes in webcomics. If you had one fan of classic gag strips and one fan of long form vampire comics, for example, then I know the different reviews would really be varied and interesting. You could use the bio section to highlight that kind of thing. Third, if you can add a female reviewer to your ranks, that would be awesome.”
Thanks for the kudos! We’ll be adding that bias info to the bio page as each reviewer provides it. And we agree that a female reviewer would be a great addition to the team. If you’d like to be on our review staff, send us an email at comicfencing@gmail.com. We (currently) could use a couple more reviewers as we had a few drop out for various reasons. We had hoped to have at least five starting out but you know how that goes…
And the next thought: “I did get lost a little when I was reading the reviews though. The block of review info text (webcomic name, author, link, and reviewer name) between each of the reviews threw me off for a bit.”
We’ll shorten the posts on the front page to show just the opening blurb, which will remedy that confusion.
“It might be interesting to have a different ‘example’ page from the comic being examined for each review, rather than just showing the same image multiple times”
From here on out, we’ll do that too.
And …“more hyperlinks”
We’ll try but time may not always allow for that. Good idea, though.
Lastly, “Information on how to submit a comic for review, if you accept requests, and any requirements (comic must be x pages long, etc.), would be good.”
There was some info about that on the About page, but it would probably be better as a post. We’ll post that under a post entitled Submit A Comic.
We’ll also be swapping out this theme with something more colorful and adding some other images. Stay tuned.
The first webcomic to be reviewed is one called We the Robots, and immediately upon reading it, I realized I’d stepped into an arena I was woefully unprepared for, given my rather straight and narrow outlook on life.
However, despite that, I’ll do my best and use my Power of Peerless Prose ™, rather than the Power of the Infinite Windbag ™. If pressured for an opinion, I’d give Robots 2 out of 5 stars. Why? I’m glad you asked.
For one, the comic’s art isn’t really all that impressive. It looks like a great many other webcomics, i.e., simple and without anything resembling fanciness, or perhaps as though the person didn’t really feel they needed to put a lot of work into the drawings themselves. Stick figures meets a how to draw heads course, neither one of them working.
Another negative were the stories themselves. I constantly got the impression as I read that the creators were trying to draw those heavy symbolisms between humanity’s foibles through the examples of the robots. Case in point, the strip in which the robot sits, simply staring at the television for 4 panels.(October 15, 2007) Obviously some kind of comment on the mindlessness of television, but hasn’t that about been done to death? Those types of examples abound; overall the strip simply tries too hard to be “with it,” as they used to say, but instead comes off more as a strip in which you’d scratch your head and say “Huh?” more often than not. Entertainment, guys. Entertainment.
Finally, the comic is entirely too willing to use harsh or crude language, seemingly just for the sake of using it. Like theatre when I was in college, it seems to be put in simply because it can be, or as though they want to show how cool and modern they are by having their characters resort to vulgarity when it isnt necessary. Best case in point, the comic of October 12, 2007, in which the robots are talking about someone named “Superbot” and for no apparent or good reason, the strip ends with “Superbot would punch them in the C*CK!” Now….the point or reason for that was? I’m neither a prude nor a Bible thumper, but come on. Use some imagination, guys.
So there you have it, my review. No doubt many will not like it, and for that all I can say is not “Im sorry,” but instead, “that’s my opinion and only holds true to me.” Enjoy!
Rating: 
We the Robots
by Chris Harding
http://www.wetherobots.com/
review by Jay Slay
(5 votes, average: 4 out of 5)
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