DEAD DAYS by John Rios is a black and white college newspaper strip - slice of college life, sometimes featuring the cartoonist as a cartoon himself. This sort of comic (the newspaper strip in general, but also the college newspaper strip) is never funny and is always less amusing than not reading the comic. Thats the trouble with strips and newspaper strips - they are just kind of cute at their best, at their worse they are boring, not funny, and they try too hard to be as generic as possible. So John Rios followed the formula perfectly.

I read page one through page thirty. Page one begins cutely with John Rios’s brain apologizing for a crudely drawn comic… that sucks. Those are the artists words. I agree, the comic in its earlier days did suck, it was amateur, it read like every other college strip about college I’ve ever groaned at for its awfulness. The artwork was crude, generic, no style. The only thing it had going for it were the greytones. And the comic itself did suck, too much exposition for instance. In strip number eight, for example, a character talks about falling down an escalator that was going up for a number of hours. The artist could have shown us this cartoony scenario with his pencil as a drawing, instead he penned it as dialogue. In strip number nine, a rapist and a superhero college undergrad get into a fight, but rather than show us the fight, we get a text box that makes fun of itself for not showing us the fight. This sort of amateur exposition in a visual comic is annoying.

The strip established within its first thirty pages a pattern of showcasing the character based on John Rios as a homophobic biggot. Just thought I’d throw that into the review for kicks, but its true. He goes out of his way in one strip to disavow his first gig as a cartoonist, which was drawing gay pornography for the first John who came along and asked him to draw something for him. Check it out, strip number 15. Way to burn your bridges John Rios, you’ll never work in the gay pornography business again.

So I decided i didn’t care about the cute observations John Rios was making about his college, about the different kinds of soft drinks or liquours that different majors sucked on. I moved on, i skipped to the very last strip. And it was very different. Not good or anything, as this kind of strip can only be horrible in my opinion. But it was better. The artist from strip 30 to strip four hundred and whatever it seemed, had improved.

First of all the drawings were refined, had a unique professional feel to their style. The backgrounds were soft, blurred and exhibited sophisticated atmostpheric perspective. Even the word baloons had style with their thick outlines. and sometimes two word baloons were connected at the hip, not seperated by borders. and the artist pulled off two characters having dialogue with each other within the same baloon, and it made sense. that is a feat that has merit in itself. And rather than general slice of college life garbage so generic that who cares - the final strips focused on greek life. maybe the greek system cared. the later comics read more like a formulaic sorority sit com web comic than they do like a college comic strip. so for the artists character arch from generic amateur to polished professional (in the dumb field of strip comics), I game him a few stars just for improving.

I read backwards, strip by strip, until I came to strip that was basically the same lame joke as one of the first thirty that i read, the title character in the comic based on John Rio mistaking a college student for the wrong gender. and then I realised I still didn’t care about the comic. I had been tricking myself into giving it a shot merely because it was better than it was ten years ago or whatever. too bad it was the same thing, just drawn with a little more style.

Altogether I read a sampling of about 45 of the strips out of 400. I never would have read that many of this strip just for fun, but I’m reviewing it, so i forced myself too. of course I’m terribly biased against strips. It has to be a pretty phenomenal strip to make me laugh or to amuse me or whatever a newspaper strip’s supposed function is supposed to be. But I bet nobody ever laughed at DEAD DAYS by John Rio. I bet everybody just kind of fake laughed or whatever. Thats the function of newspaper strips, i just decided, to help the readers practice their fake laughing.

Two thumbs down. And three stars, because I’m in a good mood.

It should also be noted that I’m mad that Mike Perridge doesn’t review on comic fencing anymore, and I’m taking it out on John Rios.

Rating:

comic title DEAD DAYS
www.deaddays.net
by John Rios
review by Rudy Guara
(4 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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