I don’t know, maybe I’m not intellectual enough.

“Dresden Codak” just doesn’t work for me. At first, I thought I’d be intrigued by the “Little Nemo in Slumberland” style to the art, the little non-sequiturs and absurd looking characters. On most pages the art has excellent detail. But after about 12 pages, I realized that I hadn’t really processed anything I was seeing. Nothing was making me laugh, nothing was making me go “hmmm — that’s food for thought.”

It’s not that I don’t like intellectual humor – I can usually find something to chuckle at most days of the week in “xkcd” and that’s a pretty intelligent strip. And it’s not that I don’t like absurd strips that you have to read twice or three times to get – I’m a fan of the aforementioned “Little Nemo” and one of my favorite webcomics is the often-absurd “Applied Living.” Somehow, the combination here, even with the very good art, is just not clicking with me.

The cast page lists a small group of recurring characters, and I read enough pages to see most of them in action … but for the most part they seem to be names in service to whatever point the author is trying to make, rather than characters making a point.

I have to give “Dresden Codak” only one star. Just not my type of strip I guess. Rating:

Dresden Codak

http://dresdencodak.com

by Aaron Diaz

Review by Anthony Cardno

(7 votes, average: 4.57 out of 5)

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This will probably be one of my shorter posts, as compared to some of my others. Why? Because although I didn’t really care for the comic itself, I don’t necessarily have anything bad to say about it, per se; actually, I don’t have a lot to say about it, period.

The comic was, to me, confusing in the extreme, and that took a lot away for me. I suppose it’s because it may have used a lot of gag references or subject matter that I simply didn’t get, or simply because I’m from another time and so I don’t get a lot of references, period, that modern and edgy comics made. When I read through archives and the prime thought that keeps going through my mind is either “Huh?” or “What the–?!” (that’s a hidden reference for those of you in the know) I can pretty well figure that I’m not going to get a lot out of it. My apologies to the author on that score.

The art, also, was a bit on the jangled side, to my eye. Like a sentence that leaves off in the middle or is needlessly convoluted, it never seemed to follow any kind of pattern or layout other than having frames that divided the page and art inside the frames. That makes it a hard comic for me to read, let alone enjoy.

I also didn’t find it especially funny or engaging, as I mentioned above. There wasn’t really anything to bring me back to read it again and again, but also nothing jumped out at me as being particularly family-unfriendly or out of line, either. It simply didn’t appeal to me.

For generally being confusing and not seeming to have a lot of humor or intrinsic value, I give it 2 stars. Rating:

The Doctor

Dresden Codak

http://dresdencodak.com

Review by The Doctor

(3 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Dresden Codak has bright colors and a cartoony style, but is not your typical webcomic. It (now) has a storyline but pretty much revolves around one idea after another that grabbed the artist’s (Aaron Diaz) attention. So what can we say about Dresden Codak as a whole?

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