At the risk of becoming the grumpy old “I don’t like anything”curmudgeon of this merry band of reviewers, I have to again admit this comic just didn’t work for me. It has some promise, but the execution is lacking.

It’s the story of Ami and Lys, two high school girls who get sucked through a rift in spacetime (conveniently located in a dark room in their school) and end up in a dimension that looks and feels a lot like every other fantasy setting we’ve ever encountered. While the story is short on the stereotypical ogres and elves (so far), there are elemental goddesses and the shirtless men who do their bidding as well as a band of shirtless “knights” (I didn’t notice them doing anything particularly knight-like, but the narration says they are), a friendly inn-keeper (JayJay, young and female, somewhat bucking tradition there), a shady-acting man (Dannon, who possesses green glowing magical powers … or are they shadow powers? It seems to change as the storyline progresses), and some sort of secret goings-on that involve a band of men who want to possess Ami and Lys.

The writing definitely needs work. The concept is there, but the pacing is all off. Scenes that need greater explanation go by with almost no narration or dialogue, while other scenes are too long for what the creator is trying to accomplish. People who hate the tv series LOST because characters often fail to ask obvious and important questions will be aggravated by this comic, in which the main characters wait until chapter five to ask the most obvious question. (The pacing does improve somewhat in the most recent posts.) The dialogue is often stilted, and sometimes filled with non-sequiturs. For instance, the dialogue on this page is completely disconnected from the out-of-character moment on the next. It seems, like the half-cat nature of the main characters, to be inserted simply because the author thought it was funny, without regard to how it plays in the larger context.

Oh, and did I mention that, for no reason readily apparent in the story, when the girls fell through the rift they turned from fully human into half-human/half-cat? Yep, they gain cat ears and tails. Other characters have to point the change out to them (characters who didn’t know them before they came through the rift, so why would they feel the urge to point this out?) and although other characters admit to having fallen through similar rifts the girls seem to be the only ones who have been affected this way.

The art is also sketchy in a lot of places. On pages like this I’m not really sure what’s supposed to be happening. But then there are pages like the title page for chapter five, and this close up of Dannon that are very well done.

Overall, I’d give Antics two stars more for it’s potential than for its actual execution. Rating:

Antics
http://antics.comicgenesis.com/
by Kristina Foster
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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