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
(2 votes, average: 4.5 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
(6 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)

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You know, I like aliens as the protagonists of stories. And I like robots as the protagonists. And I even like pirates most of the time (I mean, really, what’s not to like about Johnny Depp and Errol Flynn? But I digress.). I also like all three categories as the antagonists of stories. I’m also a fan of time travel stories and we all know how much I love random pop culture references. What bothers me is when two or more of these things are thrown together just to be able to say “hey, kids, look! Robots! Pirates! Aliens! Time Travel! Random Family Guy-like pop culture references! All in one place!”

I hate to try to figure out the intentions of a creator – unless they tell you themselves in an interview why they did something a certain way, you can never really know (and don’t get me started on the whole sub-genre of literary analysis that says you can’t actually understand a work of fiction until you’ve ferreted out every possible worldly thing that influenced the author during the writing of the work. Bleh.). However, to me “Robots” feels like a mish-mosh of anything that could possibly lure a reader in, including more than one reference to the classic TV Show What’s Happening!!! (The answer, by the way, is Dwayne Nelson, not Rerun. Perhaps Oscar is reading a mis-printed Trivial Pursuit card.) The comic really does include everything but the kitchen sink. And given time, I’m sure that will turn up as a robot alongside the chest of drawers and pop machine.

There are some very nice pages, art-wise, like this doomsday scenario. And the art does seem to get smoother, less rushed, as the story progresses. The more recent pages seem to feature heavier, more defining, inkwork.

Overall, while the creators may be having fun tossing everything they can think of into each page, I wasn’t having fun reading along. To paraphrase The Doctor, your mileage may vary. For my own part, I’m going to have to give this two stars. It just didn’t pull me along. Rating:

Jonah and Jeremy Gregory’s “Here There Be Robots”
http://randompiratecomics.net/webpages/robots.htm
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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MacPherson, Boatwright and Mauer’s The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

When I first joined Drunkduck to read my friend Scott’s now (hopefully temporarily) defunct webcomic, one of the first comics I saw advertised was “Edar Allan Poo.” I think I may have checked out one page (randomly, of course, because when browsing random webcomics, it would be too sensible to start at the beginning) and for some reason never went back. Not because it was bad or wasn’t my thing, but because I sort of got caught up in a bunch of other comics, kept forgetting to take a second look at Poo, and eventually it slipped my mind. So I’m actually grateful that our beloved Moderator put Poo on the reviewing list for September, because he reminded me to go back and finally take that second look. A second look that was well worth it.

First of all, what’s not to love about a story that starts out in an outhouse, with a loud splash? And not just any outhouse. It’s an old wooden campground-style outhouse in the shadow of a grand Gothic mansion – sort of reminded me of the way Steve Bissette and John Totleben drew The House of Mystery and The House of Secrets in those classic issues of DC’s “Swamp Thing”written by Alan Moore.

Aside from the running joke about the main character’s name (WE know he’s been flushed from the real Edgar’s subconscious, even if he doesn’t), there is some other toilet imagery that recurs. For instance, in an encounter with the sea serpent Jormungandr the creature is dispatches with what certainly seems like a flush; and SpindleTown at least looks like something built in a London sewer.

The story quickly moves beyond that, though. In the tradition of writers like Moore and Neil Gaiman, the creators are not at all concerned about mixing eras or mythologies. The Norse Jormungandr is a minion of the Greco-Roman god Poseidon. SpindleTown is largely Dickensian, but the Temple of The Maghi sounds Middle-Eastern. Thetis and her Water Nymph Warriors at one point make an entrance reminiscent of an old MGM Esther Williams musical. This just makes the adventure all the more surreal; the reader has to at some point opt to accept this odd mixture or to stop reading. I obviously opted to accept it. The journey of Edgar Allan Poo to discover who he is, and what happened to his “Daddy,” takes some unexpected turns. The author has obviously got it all (or at least, most of it) planned out into several volumes, the first of which has just ended as we write these reviews.

The art absolutely matches the intentions of the story. It’s a scratchy, nightmarish style that maintains equal weight whether drawing the human Poe and Poo, the ghostly Virginia, the anthropomorphic Irving the Rat and his fellows, or the entirely unreal Nightmare King and his minions. Full credit to artist Boatwright for “getting” the author’s intended mood and bringing it across visually. One of my favorite pages, artwise, has to be the one with the ravens, creatures that have to show up in every story dealing with Mr. Poe.

“The Surreal Adventures” absolutely gets 5 stars from me. Definitely my kind of story. Rating:

The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo
http://www.drunkduck.com/The_Surreal_Adventures_of_Edgar_Allan_Poo
by Dwight L Macpherson
art by Thomas Boatright

lettered by Thomas Mauer

Review by Anthony R. Cardno

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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