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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Antics begins with a metaphysical origin story. The four elements came together and life was created, but so was death.

Life was the goal and result of a united effort between the elements but now death seeks to unravel all that work. The story then shows a girl ignoring her alarm clock and waking up late.

The linework is very light and almost has a sketchy quality. Antics is mostly streaking greys with bits of white. There are no word balloons, but there are smudges with white lettering serving the purpose. Overall, the effect is very dream like and moody. It does also make it very hard to follow what is going on. Let me give you an example from the opening comics:

There are two girls in a high school setting in Ontario, Canada. They look very similiar to me, but they have different hair styles and one is named Ami while the other is Lys. There’s a boy named David who tries to show one of the girls a little attention but the other gets upset. Then, not too much later one girl is falling through the air and complaining that the other girl is sleeping. She falls into water and starts to talk with the mistress of the sea. It continues on, but there are more events and conversations like that.

You see? Many comics later, there is a brief explanation that one of the girls fainted and got very cold. This was, in fact, all some kind of dream. Almost immediately after that is another transition for the other girl who began talking to some other strange entity. There is a lot left unexplained.

The themes that I’m seeing revolve around being left alone and having your decisions made by someone else than yourself. I would say decisions forced by circumstance but in Antics, almost everything is alive. The girls are stuck in a dream world.

Something I did like is that, in later comics, Antics has some unusual panel splits. There are designs like this one that leave some panels open. This helps with that dreamy mood that’s being maintained. Other artists accomplish the same thing by leaving a lot of empty space around odd sized panels. This might be a potentially useful technique for the comic artists reading this review.

Overall, I found Antics hard to understand. There is a more recent comic that explains enough of what has been going on that it makes sense (up to that point.) The storytelling focuses mostly on conversations so you don’t see much in the way of physical movement between places or obvious story and character progress. My confusion might be, in part, due to not being able to grasp the feminine sensibility of the artist. It does seem as if the artist knows what story she is telling and the art fits the mood. I give Antics two stars. Rating:

Antics
by Kristina Foster
http://antics.comicgenesis.com/
review by Delos Woodruff
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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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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Antics is one of our requested reviews. Look it over and then see if you agree with our reviewers when their reviews are posted next Friday.

No Need For Bushido by Alex Kolesar and Joe Kovell
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

The Moderator pretty much said it all in his “next up” piece:  it is colorful, it is full of oriental culture, and it is somewhat in a manga/anime style.

I have to be honest, I had a hard time working my way through this.  Creating a comedy-action-drama, as the creators describe this comic, is not easy.  For instance, I think the movie version of Iron Man got the balance right, but Bushido struggles.  Sometimes the story is too comedic, rife with anachronistic dialogue (for instance, the seemingly requisite-in-web-comics diss of Canada, seen here.  Sometimes it’s too dark compared to what surrounds it (a bloody battle in a forest like this one.  Sometimes it tries too hard for a creative punchline (what exactly IS a “bad hair day’s worst nightmare,”)It doesn’t seem to be able to find a balance.

The characters, at least early on, are as one-note as the art is cartoonish.  The good news is, the art does improve over the 300+ pages of the story – it grows from wide-eyed and round-faced and flat-looking to more streamlined and possessing a bit more depth.  It does pick up more “typical” action-manga stylings as it goes on, and there are some pages that seem reminiscent of the style used in “The Gods of Arr-Kellean” (one of my current favorite webcomics).  The characters also seem to grow – as the creators give them more realistic looks, they seem to lose some of the rougher edges of the stereotypes they represent.    At the beginning, I decided that “Ina” must be Japanese for “selfish brat,” Yori must translate as “clueless simpleton,” and Cho Teko as “Mr. Miyagi.”  By time I reached the 300s, I still felt that way, but not quite as much.  Actually, my opinion of one main character did change early on:  by this page, I realized that Yori wasn’t just any stereotypical clueless simpleton obsessed with the power tools of his day – he’s Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor!

I have to give the creators of “Bushido” an A for effort – they’ve been plugging away at this story for a long time, and they’ve tried hard to improve their art and storytelling.  I also have to give them credit for the fact that the first half of the really did remind me of an old Bob Hope / Bing Crosby / Dorothy Lamour “Road To …” picture.  If Lamour were a loud-mouthed brat, Hope were a clueless wannabe-samurai and Crosby were a blind Chinese swordsman.  If you can struggle past the first half of the archive, you might find yourself caught up in the action and intrigue that develops in the second half of the story.  It couldn’t hold my attention, but it might hold yours. Rating:

No Need for Bushido
by Alex Kolesar and Joseph Kovell
http://www.noneedforbushido.com/
review by Anthony R. Cardno
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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