One of the things I think can consistently be said about the webcomics world (as well as television, movie, novel, short story, print comics … well, you get the point) is that it is hard to be stunningly original. A particular art-style breaks ground and suddenly every new comic features that style; amongst writers dark-and-gritty becomes de riguer until noble and heroic takes over; a new fantasy series takes the world by storm and suddenly every protagonist is a teen wizard, or a vampire, or both.

Sometimes, it’s okay to be a part of the pack, put your own personal spin on a set of characters or a setting, and just plug away contentedly. Be consistent enough, and you build a fan base. I think that’s what Bongoteez does with Superteam, hosted on the Drunk Duck web comics network.

The art is nice and simple: essentially stick-figures with capes. Just enough detail to tell one from another. For a parody strip about super-heroes, the simplicity works.

The jokes are mostly retreads – nothing incredibly original here. Early on, we get a standard Aquaman joke (anyone ever notice that Marvel also has a water-based King of Altantis character, but whenever a joke about a lame aquatic hero is needed, it’s the more recognizable DC character who gets the nod?). In the second storyline, after the introduction of the sidekicks, we get a standard joke about why kid sidekicks actually matter to adult heroes.

I didn’t find myself laughing out loud, but as an avowed super-team fan of long standing (I’ve been part of the Super-Team Amateur Press Alliance aka STAPA, for over twenty years now), I did find myself chuckling and nodding my head at having written stories like the ones presented here.

I’m giving Superteam 3.5 stars. It’s steady, reliable, consistent … nothing amazing but certainly not horrible. Rating:

Bongoteez’ Amazing Superteam
Reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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Better late than never.  Sorry I’m a few days behind posting this.  The usual poor hotel internet connections and a few other personal issues (it’s amazing how much time advertising your new novel takes up!) slowed down my process of reading through this comic’s archive, which as others have noted is quite lengthy.

First of all, congrats to John Rios on keeping this strip going in one form or another since 2001.  I know plenty of cartoonists who juggle a full time job, family life, owning a house and doing a classic three-panel gag comic (not me personally, mind you, because I can’t draw to save my life) and they find it hard to maintain a consistent update schedule for the strip when the rest of life presses in.  There is something to be said for bullish commitment.  And Rios obviously likes the fan base (“really cool indie readership,” he calls it in the FAQ) he’s developed over the years, another important trait in a creator of any kind of art.  I’m much more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to an creator who likes and respects his fans.

What do I like about Dead Days?  The art, especially as it has developed in the last year or so of the strip.  The hard angles and somewhat vague backgrounds give this strip a bit of a distinctive look from what we’ve been reviewing here.

I also think it’s a little creative (even if that creativity was born out of the author’s sort-of laziness) that the two main characters do not have names.  There’s the brown-haired one and the blond haired one, two “typical college guys” — not fratsters, not jocks, not nerds, just average guys.  Okay, maybe a little less than average, considering how long they’ve been in college and they’ve only just discovered how stoves work.

What don’t I like about Dead Days?  It’s a gag strip, but I’m not laughing.  I tried, honestly.  I think I did smile a few times (once, towards the end of the archive, when the characters once again show how aware they are of being in a comic, could just as easily have been a shot at certain genre television shows in which the characters go seven seasons without doing much more than changing their uniforms or the length of their hair).  Maybe a slight chuckle.  Now, I will admit that while Dead Days doesn’t work for me, it will probably be hysterical to many of you.  I base this partially on the truth that my sense of humor tends more to the punny than to the potty, and being a college comic there is plenty of potty humor.  I also asked a couple of the college students I know to take a look at the comic, and they found it far funnier and more “real” than I did.

So I’m going to give the strip 3.5 stars … for the art (which I liked) and for the fact that at least two other people I know liked it more than I did. Rating:

Dead Days
http://www.deaddays.net
by John Rios
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Maybe it’s just the mood I’m in lately, but my first reaction to “Cottonfluff Hollow” was … how cute! Adorable little (and not so little) purple dragons, floppy-eared rabbits, and a teddy bear with a Snake Plissken complex. Done up in bright colors, in easy-to-follow panel breakdowns, with clear dialogue and captions. A nice way for me to return to the fold of Comic Fencing.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that. These aren’t discarded stuffed animals (like those poor denizens of the Island of Forgotten Toys in the classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoon), nor are they outgrown imaginary friends (like the insanely antic denizens of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends). As forgotten dreams, they fall somewhere in the middle: they have the cuddliness of old beloved toys, but the rough edges of well-worn recurring dream characters.

The chapter one storyline progresses nicely. Cuddles (the bear with the Plissken eyepatch) is the newest arrival in Cottonfluff Hollow, but he cannot accept that he is forgotten. He is determined to “go away” (but not “far away,” which we’re told is very difficult to get to at this time of year) and some of the other lead characters try various things to delay his departure. The individuality of the characters comes out in the second half of the chapter.

Chapter two takes a complete turn. None of the established main characters appear; the new characters (mostly unnamed) seem to be more nightmarish (authors notes bear this out). Where the art of chapter one was airy and open, the art for chapter two feels to me claustrophobic. Of course, it probably helps that the focal point of chapter two seems to be a mime that the worst of the nightmares implies is much worse a thing to fear than the worst nightmare himself.

I personally think mimes are freakier than just about anything out there. And I’m the guy who had recurring nightmares as a kid about having to escape from the clutches of KISS by trying to fly. (Yes, I was afraid of KISS. And yet I owned all of their action figures. Gene Simmons should be proud on both counts.) So this chapter, with it’s long dark spaces, Lovecraftian mega-nightmares, and mimes … it feels completely discordant with what chapter one established. Will that be a benefit or a detriment in the long run? I can’t tell yet. It could swing either way.

Still, I’m open to the possibility that these two wildly different feels can be incorporated into one overall arc, and I’ll be checking back to see how things go.

Three point five stars for this one; intriguing enough that I’ll add it to the bookmarks and give it more of a trial run.Rating:

Phillipe St. Gerard’s “Cottonfluff Hollow”
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Adorable. Funny. Touching. Authentic.

I’m not sure I need to write a longer review than that. “School Spirit” is all of these things. It’s a web-comic I will gladly introduce my nephew to as soon as I get the chance. He’s the same age as the main characters (and quite a bit like Cody in terms of personality, although he’s likely to think otherwise, but beyond that I think the comic is also age-appropriate. My nephew and his friends are at that age where they’re still silly and goofy but are becoming aware of the world around them. The most recent storyline, about Grace’s grandfather developing Alzheimer’s, reminded me of how supportive my nephew and his classmates are of a friend of theirs who is battling cancer. Grace, Caspar and Cody’s attempts to help Principal Kelly with his memory is similar to the things my nephew and his friends do to support Liam.

Of course, this Alzheimer’s storyline appears when the comic numbers almost 700 pages of archives. By this point, we’ve had plenty of time to get to know these kids and their teachers, and to watch their friendships and rivalries develop. What a long way the comic has come from that first strip when we met Casper as he boarded the bus for his first day at a new school. In the best storytelling tradition, Casper is just as new to this school and peer group as we are, so we get to meet the other characters along with him.

What’s unusual about this school’s spirit is that there are several of them … a whole cemetery’s worth of them. Only Cody and Casper can see them: Wendy, the girl their own age. Old Bill, the groundskeeper. The Soldier. They set up quite a few recurring jokes, like the one about there being a difference between ghosts and spirits. Or the one about Casper believing in friendly ghosts. They add a nice dynamic to the story, taking it occasionally out of the realistic classroom setting.

Believe it or not, “School Spirit” is also a great educational tool – for learning Australia’s history as well as it’s slang. I’m sure some of these terms will be peppering my classes for the forseeable future.

The art quickly settles into a style which is recognizable – cartoony but consistent. Vivid coloring helps keep the eye’s attention as well.

Definitely full marks on this one! Rating:

Daniel VanderWerff’s “School Spirit”
http://www.schoolspirit.com
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I started off last week’s review by saying that I was glad that comic had a short archive because reading it felt endless. This week, I feel the opposite. I would gladly have pushed through an archive four times as long as “Night Owls” currently sports; even with a weak wireless signal slowing down the loading of the flash pages, reading this comic went way too fast.

This is the kind of story I love. I’ve been a fan of the old pulp novels for as long as I can remember – toss me a Doc Savage or Shadow story, I’m usually sucked right in. Night Owls is firmly entrenched in that genre, and also has tongue lodged firmly in cheek.

It would be easy for the Timony brothers to let their lead character be the classic pulp type: someone like Clark Savage or Lamont Cranston, or even DC Comics’ venerable but virtually unknown Doctor Occult (created, like Superman, by Siegel and Shuster). Someone strong, stalwart, silent. A real macho man. Instead, they make Ernest Baxter the opposite: he is scrawny, bookish, talkative to a fault. A sensitive man. He’d rather analyze a situation than fight, but he will fight if he has to (as evidenced by his quickly lost throw-down with a gang of vampires). He’s likable, and has an interesting flaw: he’s allergic to sunlight. Take that piece of information and assume what you will; I won’t spoil anything here.

They do populate the rest of the cast with classic types, but often with a slight twist that keeps “classic” from being “complete stereotype.” Baxter’s Gal Friday, Mindy Markus, could go toe-to-toe with her contemporaries Lois Lane, Margo Lane, Rose Psychic and Patricia Savage and hold her own just fine – it’s a fine tradition of scrappy women but Mindy deviates from the stereotype by being more physically involved in the cases than Baxter and pretty much never playing the damsel in distress. Roscoe is a play on the classic street-bruiser type, and I can imagine him playing poker with Savage’s Monk Mayfair, The Shadow’s cab-driver Shreevy, and Green Lantern’s cabbie “Doiby” Dickles … the nice twist being Roscoe is a gargoyle, not just an excitable New Yorker (some readers will say there’s no difference between the two). There is of course the close police contact reminiscent of Jim Gordon and Joe Cardona, although in Night Owls he is also the strong, somewhat silent type that Baxter is not. Since Night Owls has only been around for about 61 pages, there hasn’t been the time to develop a real rogues gallery, but Doctor You, who steals other people’s faces in order to commit his crimes, has the potential to be Baxter’s John Sunlight, Shiwan Khan or Joker … or perhaps an interesting mix of all three. There are other potentially-recurring bad-guys as well: Big Eagle Eye (a mythical creature) and that aforementioned gang of vampires.

The art is smooth, stylish, definitely what would have been on the pages of the Sunday comics in the 20s or in the pages of More Fun or Detective Comics in the late 30s. The characters don’t all blend together, the backgrounds are detailed, the panels are distinct and varied enough to keep each page interesting. The story looks good in black and white, as befits the era. They refer to each section of the series as a season, but I think it’s more fair to equate it to the Saturday morning serials: it doesn’t dwell on any particular story for long, keeping the action moving and tossing off one-liners regularly as page-enders.

I give Night Owls four stars. Definitely adding it to my list of regular reads, even though the Zuda site often gives my laptop fits of apoplexy. Rating:

Peter and Robert Timony’s “Night Owls”

http://zudacomics.com/the_night_owls

reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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“Calamities of Nature” has one of the shortest archives of any of the webcomics we’ve reviewed.  That’s a good thing in my book.  Not because my attention span struggles with longer-lived (or more frequently updated) series, but because …. well, Piro actually explains it well in one of his earliest pages.  Yeah, reading the archives felt kinda like that.

I get that these funny animals are supposed to be outside of humanity and commenting on it; the problem is they’re too much a part of the civilization they’re meant to be mocking.  There’s the super-cool aloof one, the insecure one, the obnoxiously dumb one, and the outcast oddball one … all the standard “types” for a strip like this.  Turn them into people instead of funny animals and readers would be complaining about how stereotypical they are.  And none of them seem to really like each other very much.  The aloof one complains about how stupid the rest of them are; the obnoxious one treats everyone badly; and they all pick on the outcast oddball one.

Then there’s the fact that I can’t really tell what animals they’re supposed to be.  It turns out Harold is a pig (but I honestly needed a guest strip by a different artist to help me realize that), Ferd is a groundhog (okay, could have called that one as he is drawn to look at least a little like Bloom County’s Portnoy), Brian …. I mean, Aaron is apparently a dog (although I don’t think that’s every made clear; he looks like the dog on Family Guy if he wore oversized earmuffs that hid his eyes), and Alp is … well, even the character page says no-one really knows what Alp is.

The fact that most of the jokes aren’t incredibly original doesn’t bother me (didn’t Lewis Black do this joke a few years back? so much as the odd pacing of the comic.  Early on there are several jokes that take two pages to develop, with the downside that not only is the end of the first page not funny it also gives no indication that it’s leading to a second page. Not that I need to be spoon-fed directions to “turn the page” so to speak (insert your own “the reviewer is old” joke here … I’ll wait.), but something to show that the page is a set up for an upcoming punchline seems to be called for.

So … for me, this comic just doesn’t work. Odd pacing, characters I don’t really find interesting, and art that seems kind of squashed …  I’m going to have to give it 1 star for me, but your mileage may vary. Rating:

Calamities of Nature
http://www.calamitiesofnature.com
by Tony Piro
review by Anthony R. Cardno
(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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