Whenever a story starts with two friends basically sitting around and doing nothing more than gossiping and staring into space, I start to panic. This is how most terrible fan fictions start. This is how my sister’s unfinished eight page novella she wrote when she was 12 years old starts. And this is how Antics starts.

This is not the only resemblance Antics shares with poorly thought-out stories. For Pete’s sake, the main characters are named Ami and Lys. No, they’re not unicorns or elves. They are, however, school girls. School girls who are transformed into cat girls… after stepping into a magic portal in the most blasé way possible. (Summary: “This portal that just materialized in front of us is pretty! Let’s go in!”) There’s some needlessly convoluted mythology about elementals. And, hilariously, there’s a dreamy anti-hero who goes by the name of “Dannon.” (No word if he prefers his yogurt with fruit on the bottom.)

Antics looks like something lifted out of a pre-teen girl’s Trapper Keeper. Heck, I’m actually having a hard time criticizing this comic because, judging solely from the content of the comic, there’s a very, very good chance creators Katherine Taboda and Kristina Foster, are, indeed, under 18. Perhaps they’re just doing Antics for fun like a free-form NaNoWriMo novel — something not meant to have any rhyme or reason. It seems very unfair to judge their work on the same level as creators who have had training and practice to refine their skills. Yet, they asked for a review, so I assume they’re mature enough to handle scathing criticism.

The characters are as flat as dishwater. In fact, they’re impossible to tell apart in every respect, from personality to appearance. The art is generally unattractive. The pen strokes lack any confidence, and characters tend to blend into their surroundings. The attempts to pretty it up with sparse splotches of color only makes everything look more muddled. The manga “humor” is forced and embarrassing. The plot is an absolute head scratcher. I care very little if Ami or Lys ever make it home or succeed in becoming the right hand woman for Poison Ivy. And the little errors makes the entire comic feel sloppy, like when Chapter Six is incorrectly named “Chapter Five: Seeking Answers.”

Even if you’re a fan of manga, fantasy, and light comedy, I cannot recommend Antics. I encourage Ms. Taboda and Ms. Foster to keep trying. Enroll yourselves in writing workshops. Take art lessons on composition and perspective. Reverse engineer an actual manga to understand what works rather than throwing together collages of flat, uninteresting images. I sincerely hope that you don’t consider this comic to be a crowning achievement.

Rating:

Antics
by Katherine Taboda and Kristina Foster
http://antics.comicgenesis.com

reviewed by Larry “El Santo” Cruz

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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