Here I am, with my big debut as a Comic Fencer…and of course it’s reviewing a comic I can’t say I liked. At all. Darn it.

So, Muddle Creek, by one Jerome Benedict. My first impression picked up, as it always will, at the site. Not a bad layout, per se, but not the most user-friendly either. The graphics could be a lot cleaner, and the navigational buttons are a bit incomplete and unintuitive. The archives are just mean - you have to search by calender, and you can’t bookmark individual pages. Which made me a little grumpy as a reviewer, since I can’t link to these individual pages for my examples either.

The comic itself is done in the classical newspaper funnies format and sticks to that format like superglue. The art, well, when I started at the beginning of the archives I easily marked up a list of comic “don’t”s that this comic did. Of course, by the time I got caught up to the last couple months, Mr. Benedict had stolen a lot of my fire by correcting most of these major errors. Well, gymnasts and figure skaters are scored on the presentation of their entire routine, not just the last few seconds, and I don’t see why comics should be any different. So, let’s bring up the deductions:

No-no no. 1: Fonts. Free fonts all over the internet. They’re so much fun that you want to use them all, right? Well, don’t. One easy-to-read font is all you need. Breaking out of it for a good “GYAAAAAAAAA!” is great for emphasis, and in some cases, using another font for large, impressive creatures or gods or sommat works well. But for the first few years of archives, Muddle Creek tended for different fonts for different characters every different strip. Unless you’re trying to showcase what’s available on free-fonts.com, I really don’t see the excuse for this. Furthermore, a lot of the fun and funky fonts were at a tiny sizes. Making me lean squinting towards the screen is not an effective way to convince me to read your comic. Stepping away from the lettering and into the speech bubble itself, Muddle Creek also suffered from poor bubble placement. This comic is hand-drawn, scanned, and the bubbles are added in the computer. Nothing wrong with this method except it seems that the panels were not plotted out to actually have text in them. As a result, the speech is often banished to the far corners of the panels. More often than not, I read the row of text bubbles above the panels, and then the row below. Which, of course, was out of order. The line-work, while regular and complete enough, is plain and not at all dynamic, and doesn’t draw the eye in the correct reading order, which is the only way you could really get away with this kind of text placement.

Mm, which brings me to the line-work - looks like ink on bristol. Nothing wrong with that, except let me give you a small hint about black and white comics: Black on white, please, not fuzzy gray on white. My technical guess at what’s happening here is these are raw scans with no contrast adjustment compounded by the fact that what we get to view are gifs. I don’t trust gifs and the random over-sharp and over-blurry of lines, both original ink and computer additions, is a prime example of why. These are further compounded by gray and newsprint fills… Muddle Creek, I guess, for muddled gray. What the heck am I looking at here? And why do I care? Page after page of this, and my eyes just glazed over. This was somewhat improved once the comic switched to color, but it’s still dull, boring, poor contrast choices with the color.

Not that I’ve ratted on the presentation, on to technical merit! Wait, this is a comic…let’s call that “content.” Supposedly we’ve a cast of characters that work and live in a small town. It’s a good thing there’s a cast page to tell me so, as I wouldn’t know that these regular lumps were actually characters and not strawmen from the actual strips. (And apparently “Molly” and “Mouse” are the same person - the nickname wasn’t explained in the strip, but I guess I can feel better for thinking they looked similar.) Although there are a couple brief attempts at “storylines,” there’s only the barest of continuity from strip to strip. I guess that only leaves the jokes as possibility for content.

…uhm…huh. Jokes. Kay. Now, given the average American comedy, be it movies, sitcoms, whathaveyou, it could be safe to say that I have no sense of humor whatsoever. I did not laugh at a single one of these comic strips. I kinda smiled at that one that I copied up there, because I still feel bad for that poor Trix Rabbit…wait, that has nothing to do with this comic? My bad. I could leave this at “this comic isn’t my kind of humor” except that some of the “humor” got me ticked. Specifically the “girls are immature and behave badly” jokes and the “religious people are stupid” jokes. They weren’t really jokes, as there was no crafted punchline or painful truth. The situations were just presented to me as “jokes.” Maybe this is that bizarre “random is teh funniiie” bull?

So, I guess my final verdict for the comic as is will be go muddle through something else. But I’ll give 1 and 1/2 stars, as it did in fact fix the text/font and speech bubble placement by the current strips. Now it just needs to fix the contrast issues and actually be funny. Oh, and I’d suggest trying more than a handful of stock facial expressions. Rating:

Muddle Creek
http://muddlecreek.com/
by Jerry Benedict
Reviewed by Sly Eagle
(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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