Better late than never.  Sorry I’m a few days behind posting this.  The usual poor hotel internet connections and a few other personal issues (it’s amazing how much time advertising your new novel takes up!) slowed down my process of reading through this comic’s archive, which as others have noted is quite lengthy.

First of all, congrats to John Rios on keeping this strip going in one form or another since 2001.  I know plenty of cartoonists who juggle a full time job, family life, owning a house and doing a classic three-panel gag comic (not me personally, mind you, because I can’t draw to save my life) and they find it hard to maintain a consistent update schedule for the strip when the rest of life presses in.  There is something to be said for bullish commitment.  And Rios obviously likes the fan base (“really cool indie readership,” he calls it in the FAQ) he’s developed over the years, another important trait in a creator of any kind of art.  I’m much more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to an creator who likes and respects his fans.

What do I like about Dead Days?  The art, especially as it has developed in the last year or so of the strip.  The hard angles and somewhat vague backgrounds give this strip a bit of a distinctive look from what we’ve been reviewing here.

I also think it’s a little creative (even if that creativity was born out of the author’s sort-of laziness) that the two main characters do not have names.  There’s the brown-haired one and the blond haired one, two “typical college guys” — not fratsters, not jocks, not nerds, just average guys.  Okay, maybe a little less than average, considering how long they’ve been in college and they’ve only just discovered how stoves work.

What don’t I like about Dead Days?  It’s a gag strip, but I’m not laughing.  I tried, honestly.  I think I did smile a few times (once, towards the end of the archive, when the characters once again show how aware they are of being in a comic, could just as easily have been a shot at certain genre television shows in which the characters go seven seasons without doing much more than changing their uniforms or the length of their hair).  Maybe a slight chuckle.  Now, I will admit that while Dead Days doesn’t work for me, it will probably be hysterical to many of you.  I base this partially on the truth that my sense of humor tends more to the punny than to the potty, and being a college comic there is plenty of potty humor.  I also asked a couple of the college students I know to take a look at the comic, and they found it far funnier and more “real” than I did.

So I’m going to give the strip 3.5 stars … for the art (which I liked) and for the fact that at least two other people I know liked it more than I did. Rating:

Dead Days
http://www.deaddays.net
by John Rios
reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno
(1 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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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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