Where wolf? There wolf …
a review of Tom Siddell’s “Gunnerkrigg Court”
by Anthony R. Cardno
I have nothing bad to say.
No, really. I read through over 400 pages of archives, and I really can’t think of a negative about this strip.
Okay, if I had to find something, I suppose I could point out that Mr. Siddell, by his own admission, seems to have a problem drawing Mr. Eglamore, but perhaps that has more to do with the fact that you can’t really tell what Eglamore is up to – he seems like an upright guy, defender of maidens from dragons and all that, but also seems to have more secrets than the fruit flavoring for Powerade – and so the creator can’t get a strong handle on drawing the character. (Don’t you love it when reviewers psychoanalyze creators? I’ll stop now.)
What’s it about? It’s about Antimony Carver, a girl who is effectively orphaned (dead Mom, disappearing Dad), who is sent to live at the same boarding school her parents went to (a fact she doesn’t learn until late in the story). Gunnerkrigg Court is ostensibly a school of science that looks like an out-of-control industrial park but there’s a lot of unexplained happenings and supernatural phenomena both in the school and in the woods across the ravine. And, it seems, Antimony may have some sort of role to play in keeping the peace between technology and the ethereal world.
Siddell’s art is cartoony without being simplistic; he takes efforts to show a difference between the science world and the supernatural, and to put little touches into where the two combine. The main characters and most of the supporting characters are individualized enough that you can tell them apart without a scorecard. There’s Antimony’s new human best friend Kat , her one-dimensional friend Shadow 2, and the aptly-named Robot. There are more, but mentioning some of them might give away some of the nice twists the story has.
And there are twists, and mysteries, and questions. Like most really good series fiction, characters don’t get introduced in Gunnerkrigg without having a purpose. Almost every secondary or tertiary character introduced has something to add to the story, either by becoming a larger player later on or by sharing a piece of information that will become important later on.
You are also not subjected to 400-plus pages of intricate plot movement. While there is an overall story arc (what exactly was the relationship between Antimony’s parents and the other adults who are still at the school? Why are tensions building between the human and other-than-human worlds of Court and Wood? What is Antimony’s role in all of this, as well as that of her friends? And who really are her friends and not enemies?), there are also lighter chapters that focus on unusual classes (like Dr. Disaster’s) or small moments that build the main characters. Kat has several such character-building moments, for instance.
So what are you waiting for? Don’t take my word for it – go read a really fun adventure strip with strong plot and characters that grow and have real emotions. Five stars.Rating: 
Gunnerkrigg Court
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/
by Tom Siddell
review by Anthony Cardno
(10 votes, average: 4.8 out of 5)
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August 8th, 2008 at 9:11 am
You’re right about those character building moments. Those are very well done.
August 8th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Looks like it’s you and me against those two heathens, Anthony, old pallie. I call dibs on the Sword of +2 Unholy Damage.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:06 am
Heathens, indeed!
I kept looking to see if the author’s name was an alias for that Rowling lady….
August 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Incidentally, CBR News posted in interview with Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court yesterday. They titled the piece “Gunnerkrigg Court — The Harriet Potter of Webcomics.” So, you know … pretty much everyone gets hung up on that.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I realize you truly enjoyed the comic, but “hung up,” is a misnomer - it implies people don’t have a reason for the comparison, or that it’s all people see. Myself, it seems more likely (and more logical, given what I have read and seen others say as well) that people interpret the setting/characters spot on, and that it comes across as unimaginative. Yes, there were attempts to make it different, but when you have ghosts that talk to you, constant supernatural events happening, parents dead under mysterious circumstances, people who turn into animals and still teach/talk to you…it’s more than “just” a coincidence. I won’t even touch the gaping holes in plot and character development, or the tropes used. That’s for another venue.
It would be analogous to me creating a superhero who comes from a “far..distant planet, orbiting a .. green sun” .. and .. “because Earth has water, he has super powers” .. and .. “his dad was a social worker but ..sent him to Earth to save him because…they had run out of water”…yeah… it’s not going to take a Rhodes scholar to see I’m cribbing from Superman.
Did he mean it as such? I don’t think that’s the point - but I do think people have a valid reason for saying that it looks, sounds, and behaves, if you will, like Harry Potter - and that makes it appear unimaginative.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
No, no, that’s not what I meant. And now you have forced me to go all Merriam-Webster on you:
hung up (adj.) - having great or excessive interest in or preoccupation with someone or something —usually used with on
I wasn’t implying that there was a misperception. I meant to say that most people catch the “Harry Potter/Gunnerkrigg Court” similarities and it tends to inform the rest of the reading experience. Heck, I mention it in my own review.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Well, then by your own definition my interpretation of the term “hung up” works as well
And yes, I agree about the Harry Potter similarities - it may be nothing more than a subconscious backlash about having it shoved in our faces and down our throats for so long as it was.
Myself, I didn’t really like HP, either (and can’t stand J.R. Rowling, or whatever her name is), so it’s no great surprise I didn’t care for the comic, bad plot holes, characterization and all.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Oddly enough (and this isn’t meant as a criticism of you, The Doctor, if that is your true name), while I notice the similarities, it doesn’t bother me much. For these following reasons:
1.) J.K. Rowling isn’t the first person to ever do an “orphan kid attending a gothic magical school” theme. Heck, my brother and I put together something like that five years before the first Harry Potter book came out. When it did, we just said to ourselves, “Wizards attending a castle school being taught by other wizards set in the modern day? Hey! We made that up!” Thing is, we didn’t. We probably cobbled the same story from previous young adult/fantasy novels we’d grown up on (as well as Vertigo comic books). Rowling herself got sued by another children’s writer for doing the same thing (up to and including the use of the word “Muggle”). Siddell may have taken his themes from Rowling, but I prefer to think that he mined his material from the same literary sources that we all did.
2.) If I was going to rail against “unoriginal” concepts, there are plenty of webcomics out there that tend to annoy me more. At the top of the list are video game webcomics. Following closely are roommate comics and then manga/anime comics. In the world of webcomics, and print comics too, Gunnerkrigg is very unique.
But, you know, that’s my POV, and part of the reason I’m a drooling Gunnerkrigg fanboy.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I wouldn’t disagree with you there - most of them, if not all of them, I would rip apart too, but I’d do it for mainly the same reasons -
1. lack of imagination
2. lack of at least an original way of presenting an old idea
3. lack of anything remotely resembling talent
And Siddell may indeed have mined his resources from all of the same ideas that the rest of us do - I think the problem comes in the presentation - SUCH a similarity to Potter that it tends to jump out at you.
And please…call me Doctor
It’s not my real name, obviously, but there’s no need to be so formal as to include “The” in front of it between friends and reviewers.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Actually, when Potter debuted, Rowling was accused in the press of stealing the entire character and concept from Neil Gaiman. Several years earlier Neil had created a character called Timothy Hunter, a raven-haired, tossle-headed, bespectacled British schoolboy whose best friend is a snowy owl, who finds out thanks to the intervention of a mysterious group of adults charged with teaching him about the Books of Magic that he is destined to be the most powerful sorcerer of the universe … as long as he could survive the forces allied against him reaching that destiny.
Gaiman, when asked if he would sue Rowling, replied with something along the lines of “do you know how many schoolboys there are in Britain with unruly black hair and glasses?”
I think largely this is the same thing. I might be more impatient with the similarities between Antimony’s world and Harry’s if it was set in a milieu I have lower tolerance for — for instance, all these series that have romantically beautiful vampires that fall in love with and mate with humans. As it is, with new Potter tales effectively done, I think Gunnerkrigg is a fine replacement / addition to the genre of “supernatural schools.” I also think that in time he’ll do more with the divide between science and the supernatural, and do more to show them working in harmony, something we never quite see in the Potter books.