Really. That’s all I care about. Daniel Craig IS James Bond and I feel like a kid again. But wait, this is a webcomic review so I’d better get to the grim task at hand and get my hands dirty reviewing. When I come across a webcomic like this several thoughts come to mind. My, this took a lot of work to put together. Goodness, what precise cartooning. Lord, why isn’t this the least little bit funny! I tried many many times to pick a starting point to commence reading but each time I was beaten back by something I can’t quite put my finger on. I’m a volunteer you know, you can’t force me to read this stuff. There’s books to read and films to watch and interesting stuff to review … and comics.

Despite not being able to bring myself to actually read much of it the site is actually quite astonishing for a Luddite like me. Blog. RSS feeds. Comments. Log-in. It’s WordPress’d to the max. Extra pages of explanation too. Wow, they’re really sucking the air out of the room with this comic. Whatever happened to just plain reading something for the simple enjoyment of what it is. Do I really have to immerse myself in the full experience? If this were one strip after another with no explanation at all I think I may have managed some progress but the distractions are so many and so suffocating that really I just lost the will to live.

The most obvious question I’m left with is – is a spy spoof really called for? Hasn’t this been done to death already? There’s a time for all things, but wasn’t the time for all this thirty years ago? Is this spoofing ideas from the fifties for the young or the very very old? Even I’m not old enough to have read From Russia With Love or Goldfinger when they first came out!

The effort that has gone into constructing and maintaining the conceit is frightening and it’s made me realise I don’t actually like ‘webcomics’ any more. There’s always been something gnawing away at the back of my mind and it’s that lack of distinction between cartoons and comics on the web. You don’t find that blurring between the two forms off the web in print so I don’t see why I should have to put up with it online. I’m a reader of comics. This is a cartoon. I have no interest in cartoons in this context. Perhaps in the middle of a newspaper. Perhaps as rendered by a genius. Perhaps with some greater depth of meaning or indeed any depth of meaning. Perhaps with some social or historical context. But this superficial pounding of half an idea until it’s dead. No. This stuff makes me ill.

I apologise to the creators. I shouldn’t be reviewing this at all probably. It’s just one of those uncomfortable accidents that could do with some cleaning up. Sounds like a job for Ninja Dan! If I’ve completely misunderstood this strip it wouldn’t surprise me in the least and I look forward to the sensible and measured views of the other reviewers. Dear reader, you should know enough to make your own mind up. Give it a go and educate me later if you so desire.

Anyhow, Daniel Craig IS James Bond and I feel like a kid again. I just was never the kind of kid to watch many empty cartoons of a Saturday morning. Plenty of empty comics. But no empty cartoons. Sorry! Three stars for the sheer force of will.

Rating:

Eben07
http://www.eben07.com/
by … I’m sorry. I’d tell you but then I’d have to kill you.
review by Mike Perridge
(7 votes, average: 3.57 out of 5)

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School Spirit is an Australian webcomic updated three times a week by writer and artist Daniel Vander Werff. Co-creator Daniel Quinney has retired from the regular production but was instrumental in it’s creation and so rightfully retains his credit. The strip has an unusual history, being born out the plan for a school musical and thankfully all the details are revealed among many supplementary pages which reveals a good deal of background. Most helpful of those pages perhaps is the glossary of ‘Strine’ or the unofficial Australian language of slang terms. There is the usual archive, a forum, a blog update and even some art submitted by the children – all charmingly uncomplicated.

The stories concern the day to day small time adventures of the lives of the young pupils of an Australian school. The strips are produced in a traditional ‘newspaper’ style format with colours as primary as the pupils. The whole thing is very child friendly by necessity since it would seem that more than a few of the ideas come from the real children who make up teacher Vander Werff’s class.

The art is functional and the stories simple. A odd note is struck by the fact the school is right next to a cemetery haunted by several ghosts though fortunately they are not of the very scary variety. No doubt an influence informed by the outrageous success of one Mr H. Potter. I have to say that there is not much here for the adult audience, but I’m guessing that it might be more than amusing for the young children who read it whether in Australia or abroad.

You’re be glad to learn that I was very nearly Australian myself and having more than a few relatives out there in sunny Oz I won’t be putting this comic under the microscope like I would any other. Taken as a hobby and with the inclusion of the efforts and readership of the children I’d have to have a heart of stone to criticise it. I know nothing about the interests of children having none of my own and having been born at the age of forty-five! However, it seems a rather noble and worthy venture that deserves only support and encouragement, so that’s all it will get from me.

If you’ve got young children I couldn’t imagine why this wouldn’t be a throughly engaging introduction to the webcomic experience. It might be brilliant for all I know, but you’ll have to ask the age-group it’s intended for to find out for sure. I wish it continued success.

Rating:

School Spirit
http://www.schoolspiritcomic.com/
by Daniel Vander Werff and Daniel Quinney
review by Mike Perridge
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Thankfully this is like a week off work for me. I really don’t have to struggle to find the words to describe the talented twins Peter and Bobby Timony and their breakout Zuda smash The Night Owls. I say smash because, well, not only is it a great strip in it’s own right with an ever growing fan base, the twins seem to be building on that success and making themselves somewhat irreplaceable over at Zuda HQ. If ever Zuda needed a flagship strip then it need look no further than this one. It just seems like a great fit for both the format and the delivery schedule which was twice a week as season one came to close. Don’t worry about waiting, season two has just begun. Here though we can look back at the sixty screens of season one and despite some early concerns I might have had that the plots were a bit hit and miss with single screen gags that weren’t terribly sophisticated by middle of those sixty screens the boys were fairly cranking out the good stuff. Short arcs with humorous characterisation replacing the obvious sight gags becomes the norm and now all the gags seem to naturally appear out of the characters themselves without any recourse to puns, pratfalls or belches.

The comedy revolves around a small cast investigating bizarre supernatural crimes in and around New York City during the roaring Twenties. Ernest Baxter is the bespectacled and emotionally reticent professor who explains what’s going on. Mindy Markus is the scrappy flapper who gets ahead of the plot and makes what’s going on interesting. Roscoe the … whatever he is … acts as the comedy relief making sure we all know we are permanently in the territory of the weird. The three of them constitute The Night Owls Detective Agency and are joined by several supporting characters, normal and bizarre, good guys and villains, who are carefully woven into the fictional fabric of the story. Even though it’s only sixty screens old those characters have become pretty essential to our understanding of the whole history on offer. Nothing and no-one is thrown in or out for no good reason. Each short arc tends to build on what has gone before – slowly but surely.

Although each of the main characters could be described as an archetype but all of them are sufficiently well written to transcend those archetypes. There is a subtlety at work here demonstrated by the fact that when even the obvious happens as a reader I easily accept it’s naturalness and inevitability with good humour. It’s that fuzzy warm feeling of a safe yet entertaining environment that is not that easy to create. What supports these characters further is an understanding and an appreciation of the silent era of comedy which the Timony twins are well versed in. They not only know about the slapstick comedy of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, but they know how to use that knowledge to colour their character’s adventures, without resorting to the obvious homage. That understanding of that history never gets in the way of the plot or the humour. It’s left as a layer behind the story that you can investigate, appreciate or ignore without breaking the magic of what is going on in the foreground.

If you are not convinced by the strip itself then take a look here at The Night Owls in action! Seeing is believing my friends.

This is my favourite comic of the instant winners on Zuda so far. I wasn’t completely sure about this or any of the others for that matter, but picking this up for an instant win was one of the best decisions ever made at Zuda HQ and both Peter and Bobby have brought all their energy and creativity to bear on this – and it shows.

I showed this picture to Zuda regulars before and I think it warrants a second look here - Clara Bow in her boxing gloves – inspiration or synchronicity?

I have a rating system on my own site which does not describe how much I like a comic so much as it shows how ‘good’ I think a comic is across a broad range of specific elements. At the top of that pile rests this strip and for good reason. The simple story that you understand straight away, the Sunday Paper format that looks like black and white, but isn’t, the gentle layered humour and subtle characterisations, the sympathetic artwork that always services the story or the gag, the regular update schedule that compliments rather than hampers the flow of the story - all go to make this a compelling and winning formula.

Zuda is a peculiar beast since it lives or dies at the moment on the interest generated by the monthly competition. Slowly there is being added a selection of instant winners who bypass the competition and go straight to generating the sixty screens of the contract without the rigours of trying to market and win by themselves. The Timony Twins and The Night Owls are definitely one of the finds of the year and important enough for Zuda to keep it and them close to it’s ample cash-stuffed bosom. Other notable Zuda successes High Moon, Bayou and Supertron lend themselves perhaps to a more print minded audience, but The Night Owls is just a great webcomic.

Rating:

The Night Owls
http://www.zudacomics.com/node/152
by Peter and Bobby Timony
review by Mike Perridge
(5 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Grumpy warning Red is in effect. You might or might not be aware that sometimes I hardly review the actual comic at all. Sometimes I just grumble. You have been warned.

Jeremy and Jonah Gregory have a big idea contained within their comic strip Here There Be Robots. It is that if pirates can be hilariously funny and aliens can be cute and stupid and that evil robots could be even slightly amusing, then slapping all three together in the same strip is going to be a sure fire winner. After all, it’s three times the fun! Isn’t it?

I put a finger and thumb to my temples and squeeze gently. It’s not really that I don’t like it. It’s just that I’ve seen so much of it’s type. Quite enough to last me a lifetime. Part of me is reminded of some of the great underground comics of the sixties, seventies and even eighties (but no later) with all their wacky violence and irreverent humour, while another part is reminded of that time in the nineties when literally anything seemed able to get published with no more than a nod at common sense. I’d like to think more about Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, R Crumb and the rest, but here unfortunately I’m tending to drift off toward the vast number of Viz knockoffs in Britain at the end of the last century. They were trying so hard to be funny there was never much of a chance of even a chuckle surviving the pressure to sell.

Some of the reasons I’m prompted to think back to those awful awful days of badly drawn, badly written, black and white print comics are right here in front of you with the format of Here There Be Robots - the lack of colour, the complexity and compactness of the layouts, the tradional portrait page dimensions, the sheer determination to make ‘a comic’ whatever the cost and the desperate whackiness for whackiness’ sake. It’s that grim anti-nostalgia that is giving me a pain. There seems to be little or no attempt to adapt to the web, to the way the web works, the way it displays images, the way that colour is not a cost factor – it’s just another ‘old’ comic clumsily shoe-horned into a computer. Has nothing changed in the past twenty years? I could dig from my collection any small press anthology from 1990 onwards and this is precisely what you’d see. It wasn’t exactly cutting edge then, but it’s sheer boredom now. For me at any rate. I think I qualify as an adult now.

As you might imagine, all that really takes the shine off of this particular reading experience, but I still have to say that for what it is … it’s quite good! I have to admit that I really appreciated the photocopier / bomb gag in the first issue – perhaps because I’m sat just across the office from of the things all day at work. It’s ability to stretch time out in the way described is perfectly realised in the pay-off that results in our criminally whacky heroes and villains being plunged back through time to the days of ‘Yar’!

I could even appreciate the art, but really it’s the type of detailed madness that requires you to press your nose up to the paper to enjoy it – sadly there is no paper and the effect of all that detail is just glowing radioactive confusion. Bah, humbug!

After issue one, if you’re still reading, good luck to you. I simply haven’t got the time to waste. If you’ve never read this kind of thing before you’ll love it. If you have read this kind of thing before, please find something better to do with your time.

After that you’ll be surprised to learn I give it three stars. One for the good writing, one for the appropriately stylised and detailed art and the last one for being just what it is. If only the creators would take a step into the present and drop that dirty ‘print comic’ attitude they might have had a great webcomic on their hands. Webcomic? What’s one of those? I’m still not sure myself, but it ain’t as simple as a comic that’s on the web tha’s for sure!!

Rating:

Here There Be Robots
http://randompiratecomics.net/webpages/robots.htm
by Jeremy and Jonas Gregory
review by Mike Perridge
(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Hi everyone. Here goes my début review on Comic Fencing. Wish me luck! The Wannabe Pirates by Largent and McCrary is a comic about pirates. So it be! What is it about pirates that instantly forces you to join in and start behaving and talking like a moron? It isn’t that way with other pop culture types – superheroes, zombies, ninjas, samurai, nerds, etc. OK maybe that last one. I’m certainly not immune to the piratical virus myself. Avast behind!

I’ve been asked to review the comic, but really it seems only to be part of a much bigger project with ambitions in the arena of animated cartoons. The evidence available seems to suggest that ambition might not be so difficult to fulfill. I was completely side-tracked reading from reading the comic by the news archive which contains all matter of goodies including 3-D modeling of the main characters, models of the ship, wallpapers, background info on the development of the project as a whole and even a movie clip - all suggesting that these guys are serious and hungry to make their venture a success. I wish them all the luck too – it’s quality work.

The comic therefore is really just some supporting material that helps the main animation project along. It’s obvious to a one-eyed pirate how good the other material is, but the comic itself? Well the weakest part for me is the actual cartooning which is a good attempt but lacking in any real distinctive style. That said, the creator’s probably weren’t even going for a style, more an imitation of what is already accepted. There is very little movement in the characters at the beginning which doesn’t disturb me too much, but later there seems to be a suggestion of something approaching sprite comics where figures seem be no more than cut-outs, being moved around the panel into a rough approximation of where they should be in relation to the action. If anything it’s getting flatter and flatter completely at odds with the 3-D ambitions of the project.

At the very least it’s functional and you always know what it is you’re looking at thankfully. That goes for the lettering and colouring (proper spelling btw) – all adequate but not overly inspiring. That’s not much of a criticism though as I hardly think these guys are after that particular prize. I think they’re more interested in character and design and making this a viable pitch rather than a long running webcomic. That idea makes sense to me and I think they should pursue it. As an animation I’m sure it’ll make ten times the impact it would have as a webcomic.

There are currently three story arcs on site and in the first the writing, considering the jokey, throw-away nature of the subject is really rather good. It carried me along with it and despite having seen this kind of thing before, I laughed. I laughed at most of the jokes and found the writing pleasant to read. I found a certain wit in the choice of words. All vaguely anachronistic but pleasant all the same. I warmed to the characters and fell into the conceit of the story easily, though that might all be the effects of the pirate virus.

The following two chapters did not fair so well. It’s always going to be a struggle to create the actual adventure and fit in both character and punch line within the three to four panel format. If you describe any action it leaves little time for the joke and if you rely on the joke the story doesn’t progress. There are only so many pirate jokes and the first chapter describes them all very well. I don’t believe there is an awful lot more for the creators to say on the subject. I am reminded of the struggle TV sitcoms have in making the transition to the big screen, not that that happens much any more, but the problem always was that a half hour sitcom is really just talking heads. The gags are in the situation and the conversation and the characterisation - hardly at all in the action or the extrapolation of the story. I think the writing suffers from chasing after the plot which isn’t that strong to be honest. My sympathies lie entirely with the characters and the plot is disturbing the writing which makes the later strips fall quite flat.

What I like about the creators is that they actually refer to each other by their surnames which is rather pirate like. I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually pronounced them in pirate style as L-ARR-gent and McCr-ARR-y! I’m a sucker for endlessly repeating the same joke over and over again until the brain starts dissolving so it’s easy for me to imagine them in a studio cranking this stuff out endlessly trying to force pirate speak into their everyday conversation until the sad day it spills over into a conversation with someone inappropriate in the real world. I can see their future mapped out for them. One day pirate comics. Then slow mental collapse. An early grave. X marks the spot. Arr!

In summation I don’t think it’ll make for an unmissable webcomic read any time soon, but I’ll be ready to tune into the cartoon series any time it makes it’s début. The stars are for the comic. The project has many more. Rating:

The Wannabe Pirates
http://thewannabepirates.com
by Largent & McCrary
review by Mike Perridge
(8 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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