“The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.” -Adam Smith

Rating:

This week’s review is Edenworld Saga by Chris Crontiris, and edited by Jason Lanum. What’s a webcomic doing with an editor? I dunno. I suspect that in this case he helps with grammar and such. That’s a guess - I looked around on the site and couldn’t find any bios on the creative team. I’m very interested to know more about these people. Why am I interested? Because this thing rocks.

I have to mention something up front; I love giant robots. A lot. But just because I like the robots doesn’t mean Edenworld gets a free pass. Quite the contrary. There’s nothing that bugs me quite the same way as a badly done mecha story, simply because I want them to be good, and if they fall short of the mark I am more disappointed than I would normally be.

But gladly, this is not the case with Edenworld Saga. I was not disappointed - I was thrilled. The designs are brilliant, and the artwork is outstanding. The story is rich and detailed. Is this in print? The quality is there. If it’s not in print yet, someone should give these guys a call. It would be right at home next to any manga book out there.

I don’t claim to be a manga expert or anything. I own a lot of stuff by Masamune Shirow, some Miyazaki and I have a few of the Battle Angel Alita books. I tend to avoid manga online because the stories are usually very slow-paced with long story arcs and involved characters and relationships - not that that’s a bad thing, but it’s a big investment of time. I don’t want to try and get my head around a bunch of convoluted backstory and whatnot only to find out that I don’t like where the story is going for whatever reason. So I was a bit hesitant when I took my first look at Edenworld. It looks a bit Voltron to me, a bit Transformers, a bit Gundam. So it could have gone either way. There’s lots of people out there that are inspired by these properties, and not all of them are up to the task. I was not overly happy with some of the Transformers comics that have come out over the years. But I digress.

The backstory of this epic (and it is an epic, in the manga tradition) is modeled on Norse mythology. People familiar with terms like Yggdrasil, Norns and Jotun will recognize the hierarchy Crontiris has set up in this world. The robots are sentient creatures, who live in a state of animosity with their human neighbors as well as terrible dragons who wreak havoc on their settlement of Jotunheim. This is a world that seems like a fantasy world, but the magic and miracles have an underlying logic of highly advanced science. I could go into detail about this world, but it would make for a very long review. Suffice it to say that it feels very well thought-out, and as far as I’ve read, it doesn’t break its own rules (which is the cardinal sin of fantasy writing).

The backstory and plot don’t dominate the script. It’s all about the characters. These robots have familial bonds. There is a love story between Lyron (one of the gigantic Jotun) and Panchun (a human) which is very interesting to watch play out, since they are so different from each other. Some of the Jotun are brothers, and the fierce scrapper Beowulf is very protective of his little brother Ennesix. These robots have very distinct personalities, which is the key that allows the reader to be drawn in to the drama.

The only reason I gave Edenworld 4.5 stars instead of 5 was the art. While it is beautifully designed, the linework and shading is often a bit vague, leaving many panels a bit indistinct and difficult to interpret. I got the sense that the artist would like to eventually colour the art, but the story is shortchanged in the meantime. Stronger linework to clarify characters from backgrounds and denser shading would really help make this work in black and white.

So to sum up, I know manga isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like Robotech or Gundam or Voltron or Appleseed or Nausicaa, then you won’t like Edenworld Saga either. It is definitely is in the same league.

‘Edenworld Saga’
by Chris Crontiris
reviewed by Crackwalker
(4 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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“A telephone survey says that 51 percent of college students drink until they pass out at least once a month. The other 49 percent didn’t answer the phone.” - Craig Kilborn

Rating:

This week’s review is ‘Dead Days’ by John Rios. It’s about two college roommates. They do the sorts of things you’d expect from typical middle-class north american twenty-somethings. They eat junk food, they play video games, they drink beer, they avoid work, they try and date women, often unsuccessfully.

This comic has been online since 2004 according to the archive. According the the FAQ, Rios started drawing Dead Days for the college paper when he was in college in 2001. He has since graduated (class of ‘04) but keeps doing the comic for his loyal community of readers because he loves cartooning. That’s an impressive achievement. It’s also a very looong archive. I didn’t manage to get through the whole thing, but I swooped down and sampled from various periods in the strip’s history.

It reads very much like a print comic strip. I can see this in a college paper, and it would be head-and-shoulders above the majority of comics in that market. The art is very professional. The character designs are solid. All-in-all, a very well-done little strip. There’s one big problem for me. I didn’t laugh. I didn’t even break a smile. I read a lot of these, just to make sure I wasn’t reading a dry period or something. But, no. It was exactly as funny as Garfield. I like the drawings, but the fact that it’s black and white doesn’t help matters. Again, if you consider this to be a printed strip, then the B&W makes sense. But even Garfield did colour strips in the Sunday edition.

I’m glad that the comic has a loyal following, and I’m sure it would do well in any college paper. It’s all about the context, I think. If I was sitting at a bus stop, and I was looking for something to read, I might snicker at one of these strips. But sitting at my computer, where I have access to such a wide variety of comics, all competing for my eyeballs, Dead Days doesn’t hold its own. I’m not a big follower of gag strips anyways, even when they do make me laugh. Sinfest, Unstoppable, XKCD, and Perry Bible Fellowship come to mind as examples of strips I check in on every now and then.

I would have found this hilarious when I was younger. Jim Davis does very well with Garfield. I bought up all the Garfield collections when I was in Jr. High School. I read them until they were dog-eared. I memorized all the jokes, and told them to my friends. The subject matter of Dead Days is a bit more ‘mature’ what with the sexual and alcohol references, but the gags are about the same.

‘Dead Days’
by John Rios
reviewed by Crackwalker
(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Rating:

“There is a garden in every childhood, an enchanted place where colors are brighter, the air softer, and the morning more fragrant than ever again.” - Elizabeth Lawrence

I still have my teddy bear. I don’t sleep with it anymore - it’s just around the house. I used to try and hide behind the excuse that my kids played with it, but they don’t. It’s old and kinda mangey. They have their own stuffies. No, the truth is that every time I try and imagine throwing it out, I just can’t do it. That’s okay. He can stay.

There’s something very primal about these childhood objects - things we fixate on in our infancy, to help cope with the initial separation from our mothers. They are our only companions as we venture forth from the safety of constant attention and attachment, and into the world of individuality. These guys are the only allies we have during the formation of our id. It’s a big job. Our subconscious world is formed from the stuff of dreams and nightmares.

That’s the terrain of Cottonfluff Hollow.

It’s the area explored by Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh. We had a look at this world in the Pixar film, “Monsters Inc”. Mike Kunkel took us there in his comic “Hero Bear and the Kid”. Is it kid stuff? Yes, but does that mean it’s light reading? Hardly.

Childhood is the time when everything is new - and the things we find to be mundane later in life can be exciting, or scary when we first encounter them. It could be that we never feel as happy or as sad or as angry or as scared as we do when we are young children. These impressions are visceral, and stay with us, sometimes buried deep inside our psyche. The subconscious mind is the place where it all gets stored and sorted out. It’s a world of symbols and narratives and archetypes. And it’s here that all the affected irony and protective layers of sarcasm be have built up over the years are stripped away, and our true core self is laid bare.

So - this is the sandbox that Phillip St. Gerard is playing in with his webcomic “The World of Cottonfluff Hollow“. He’s in good company, standing on the shoulders of giants like Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne and Maurice Sendak, but how does he measure up? Well, it’s not quite a masterpiece of fiction. It is a fun read though, even if the pacing is slow in parts.

To sum it up I’d say it’s a very promising start. Like many webcomics, this one shows a growth curve as the creator finds their voice and experiments with style. To me, this is one of the joys of webcomics - witnessing the growth of an author as their ideas evolve week after week, month after month. For most of the archive he frolicks in the shallow end, as though St. Gerard is hesitant to plunge into the depths that are lurking in the distance. He’s given us hints and glimpses of the central dramatic dilemma, a plot thread to do with horrible monsters that terrorize the tender soul, but he doesn’t quite engage it until the last few pages. I am eager to see where he’s going with this. To St. Gerard I say this: we’ve had a lot of fluff, let’s get to the stuff.

Another thing webcomics readers will be familiar with is the changes in art style as the author finds their way. The start of the comic has the characters rendered in a shakey thin line, which later on gives way to a very thick-lined rendering, similar to Pokemon illustrations, or Paper Mario. Mostly.

I say ‘mostly’ because St. Gerard uses drawing technique as an additional story element in ‘Cottonfluff’, and to great effect. The world of this comic is an imaginary no-where land, where the characters spend their time when they are not actively involved in mortal humans’ dreams. The different ‘genres’ of dreams are rendered in different styles. The ninjas of the martial arts house are drawn with a loose brush style, for example. As the dream-creatures become more mature, so do their visual styles. Some may find this to be visually cluttered, but I found it quite an enjoyable aspect of the storytelling. There is a very clear logic behind it that I found easy to understand.

One thing about the overall layout is was not happy with was the repetitive titles on every page. This is a convention that comes from weekly print comics, such as Peanuts or Calvin & Hobbes - where the comic art will be appearing alongside other comic strips. Perhaps that was what St Gerard envisioned when he started ‘Cottonfluff’. I found it to be visually distracting to have the redundant reminder of the name of the comic I was reading at the top of every frame, especially since the comic is of the ‘epic narrative’ variety, rather than the ‘weekly installment’ variety. In his latest update, the author says that he’s rethinking the layout, and I would encourage him to leave the title in the dustbin and move on.

One more question about this webcomic puzzles me. Am I demented, or is Cuddles the Bear romatically involved with Amaranth the Younger Dragon Sister? Seriously, I thought there was a vibe there. Maybe I’m just a sick sick sick man. If I am, you can blame it on my twisted childhood.

‘The World of Cottonfluff Hollow’
by Phillippe ‘Sketch’ St. Gerard
reviewed by Crackwalker
(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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