Tastes Like Chicken, Reads Like Tofu! Get it? It’s funny, right?

That’s exactly why I don’t write humorous greeting cards, or one-panel comic strips. I’m a funny guy, but looks aren’t everything. (Ba-da-bing!)

Josh Alves is a bit better at this type of humor than I am. He tries hard to be, and occasionally he succeeds. His art style is really perfect for this kind of comic strip – characters types reminiscent of The Far Side without being slavishly imitative, cleaner lines than Rhymes With Orange, less repetitive jokes than The Lockhorns.

And yet, I only found myself laughing about a quarter of the time. Most of the panels in the archive went by quickly with not even a slight chuckle. Comments on the pages show that somebody – many somebodies – is/are laughing and laughing a lot. I wish I could say I was.

The visual jokes seem to work the best for me, like this one as do the puns like this one (no surprise there, since I’ve already stated how much of an art form I think puns are). When the two combine, like here I really chuckled.

I also enjoyed the recurring appearance of the Potato Heads. Almost everyone who does this kind of humor finds a way to use Mr. Potato Head and his clan. So far, they’ve made I think four appearances, with this one - perhaps the funniest - and this one with the most promise but weakest execution.

There are the requisite comic book references, too, but they mostly fall short of the mark, as with one about Superman.
Overall, I think TLC is a comic I’ll check back on occasionally, and I’m sure some of you will enjoy it more than I did. Especially if you like your comics complete with a strong environmental message. Rating:

Tastes Like Chicken
http://tasteslikechicken.smackjeeves.com/
by Josh Alves
Reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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a review of Tom Siddell’s “Gunnerkrigg Court”
by Anthony R. Cardno

I have nothing bad to say.

No, really. I read through over 400 pages of archives, and I really can’t think of a negative about this strip.

Okay, if I had to find something, I suppose I could point out that Mr. Siddell, by his own admission, seems to have a problem drawing Mr. Eglamore, but perhaps that has more to do with the fact that you can’t really tell what Eglamore is up to – he seems like an upright guy, defender of maidens from dragons and all that, but also seems to have more secrets than the fruit flavoring for Powerade – and so the creator can’t get a strong handle on drawing the character. (Don’t you love it when reviewers psychoanalyze creators? I’ll stop now.)

What’s it about? It’s about Antimony Carver, a girl who is effectively orphaned (dead Mom, disappearing Dad), who is sent to live at the same boarding school her parents went to (a fact she doesn’t learn until late in the story). Gunnerkrigg Court is ostensibly a school of science that looks like an out-of-control industrial park but there’s a lot of unexplained happenings and supernatural phenomena both in the school and in the woods across the ravine. And, it seems, Antimony may have some sort of role to play in keeping the peace between technology and the ethereal world.

Siddell’s art is cartoony without being simplistic; he takes efforts to show a difference between the science world and the supernatural, and to put little touches into where the two combine. The main characters and most of the supporting characters are individualized enough that you can tell them apart without a scorecard. There’s Antimony’s new human best friend Kat , her one-dimensional friend Shadow 2, and the aptly-named Robot. There are more, but mentioning some of them might give away some of the nice twists the story has.

And there are twists, and mysteries, and questions. Like most really good series fiction, characters don’t get introduced in Gunnerkrigg without having a purpose. Almost every secondary or tertiary character introduced has something to add to the story, either by becoming a larger player later on or by sharing a piece of information that will become important later on.

You are also not subjected to 400-plus pages of intricate plot movement. While there is an overall story arc (what exactly was the relationship between Antimony’s parents and the other adults who are still at the school? Why are tensions building between the human and other-than-human worlds of Court and Wood? What is Antimony’s role in all of this, as well as that of her friends? And who really are her friends and not enemies?), there are also lighter chapters that focus on unusual classes (like Dr. Disaster’s) or small moments that build the main characters. Kat has several such character-building moments, for instance.

So what are you waiting for? Don’t take my word for it – go read a really fun adventure strip with strong plot and characters that grow and have real emotions. Five stars.Rating:

Gunnerkrigg Court
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/
by Tom Siddell
review by Anthony Cardno
(4 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)

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So let’s see:  young woman falls through random hole in space-time and finds herself in a strange new world, where unusual creatures inform her she’s now possessed of great power and perhaps a mysterious destiny.  Sounds like we’ve reviewed this one before, when you boil it down to the basics.  “Antics” had a similar premise (only with two young women instead of one), but the execution of the concept in Kukuburi is vastly different.

The art is cleaner and more distinct, for instance. Ramon Perez has a clean, playful style – not ultra-realistic(the real world at the beginning of the story is absolutely exaggerated) but also not the stereotypical manga-ness we’ve recently been reviewing.  In fact, Perez’s style really feels like a breath of fresh air.  The vibrant colors don’t hurt either.  Of course, the style really kicks into high gear when the story moves from the real world to the strange dimension, The Inbetween, the main character finds herself tossed into. The colors, if anything, get more vibrant, and shucked of the restraints of the real world, Perez’ sense of wonder breaks through – in the Inbetween there pretty much is endless horizon and no real up or down.  He gets the chance to go wild with giant orange whales, deep red-and-black manta rays, and all manner of outlandish creature, including a valley full of sleeping giants.

Our main character, Nadia, is non-plussed – she assumes the giant orange space-whales, talking chameleon named Mr. Bojangles and little fuzzy “Meep” character are all something she’s dreaming.  She learns quickly enough that it is not a dream, and that although she understands little of where she is, the threat against her is real and potent.

One of the things I enjoyed about Kukuburi is that Perez is crafting a novel, and to do that he occasionally has to pull focus away from Nadia and give it to seemingly secondary characters (L’Academie des Chapeaux on their battlewhale) and even tertiary characters (the Tillywump). Perez apologizes profusely in the author’s notes for the length of time in which Nadia’s fate is unknown, but he needn’t.  Her absence builds a bit of suspense (she’s the lead character and we’re not really that many pages into the story, so there’s little doubt she’s alive) and allows other characters to grow (and allows for a bit of slapstick comic relief as well)

The art is wonderful, the story is just really ramping up into “exciting” territory.  So like Delos usually does, I decided to take a trip into the cast and “about” pages to see what else I could learn.  Not looking for spoilers but perhaps for fun background facts.  This is the only place that my enthusiasm failed.  On  text heavy pages, Perez’ lack of an editor shows.  There are lots of punctuation errors – every page has at least one instance of “it’s” being used where “its” should be, for instance.  It made reading what should have been fun cast bios a bit of a chore.  Perez’ author notes say he’s been busy lately with lots of personal stuff, but at some point I hope he gets a good grammar/punctuation editor to look those pages over and fix those little oversights.

Overall, Kukuburi gets 4 stars.

“Kukuburi”

http://www.kukuburi.com

by Ramon Perez

reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

(3 votes, average: 3.33 out of 5)

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I seriously considered recusing myself from this week’s review, on the grounds that I’ve developed a bit of a friendship (or what passes for on on the internet) with Shaun and Dave and felt that I might be a bit biased.  Then I remembered that my livejournal reviews of ApL, Allen and a couple of other comics were the reason I was invited to this shindig in the first place.

So:  Applied Living started out as the story of two childhood friends who decide to share a college apartment.  They are something of an odd couple: Dave is forceful, forthright, egotistical to a fault.  Shaun is introspective, verbose, insecure.  They’ve got a couple of regular friends who hang around:  unpredictable Bill, and Dave’s brother Mike.  The early strips show a bit of sitcom-style writing with snarky dialogue and workplace humor, but things quickly take a left turn from reality and head into oddness.  Bill is apparently an agent of Entropy with a magic glow-stick .  A bid for more readers garners a visit from the Green Knight of legend.

Shaun’s scripting and dialogue are apparently an acquired taste.  I enjoy it.  He goes out of his way to have his characters speak in heightened dialogue that very quickly divorces itself from everyday speech.  It lends the characters a tone that sets them apart from the run of the mill roommate comedy.  And thankfully, while both guys love comics neither is a stereotypical comic/scifi/fantasy geek.  In fact, Shaun is more likely to pepper his script with puns and references to famous philosophers than he is to feature a joke about Star Wars.  Unfortunately, since the guys seem to work on a week-to-week basis, some of the scripting can be a bit clunky.  Story arcs occasionally end with a quick “yeah, we got stuck, so we’re just going to stop this here and move on to something else.”

Dave’s art has strong simple lines and bold colors most of the time, and it’s nice that he’s working in a cartoonish style that is not directly derivative of manga or whatever’s popular on CN and Nicktoons these days.  He does give all of his characters “Little Orphan Annie eyes,” which is funny considering there’s not a single female character in the history of the comic.

Dave’s art and Shaun’s purple prose are the positives about ApL.  The negative is that these guys don’t seem to be able to maintain any kind of update schedule.  As of this writing, they haven’t published a new page since the beginning of July, and even that new page was a rework of the previous week’s page because Dave had misinterpreted the script.  It’s hard to work up enthusiasm for a series that stops dead in the water mid-storyline pretty much every time a continuing storyline starts.  Still, they are talented guys and they have lots of potential.  I’d just suggest perhaps working up a full month’s work of weekly pages (that’s only 4 pages, guys!) before resuming updates, and then staying that month ahead.  It seems to work for comics like “The Gods of Arr-Kellaan.”

Final verdict: 2.5 stars.  I love Dave and Shaun, but I hate the long wait between installments. Rating:

Applied Living
by Shaun Meyer & Dave Olson
www.applied-living.com
Review by Anthony R. Cardno
(4 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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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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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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