The basic information you need on Muddle Creek: Oslo, Squig and six more repeating characters make up the bulk of the comic. Their descriptions on the cast page tell you a little about them but mainly summarize the humor they are usually involved in. It gives you a vague sense of what the comic is about.

What’s the first thing you really should know about Muddle Creek? It tries hard to be funny. That is with good reason because it takes a lot of work and editing to produce good humor. You can see the effort but Muddle Creek is a little off in left field.

One example from a couple of years ago is where one of the characters, Squig, has a strange hat - (I’m not sure why) it’s a soda cup. Another character asks him if he ever drinks out of it. He responds by asking “Do you ever drink out of your hat?” The punchline doesn’t match up for me. The next comic fares a little better. The first two panels work together but the punchline didn’t pay off.

There is hope. The very next comic has a great punchline “Elmo says luminol doesn’t lie” IS funny. (That needs to be on a shirt, by the way.)

The Muddle Creek comics that seem to work the best have those slice of life topics. I think the character designs and style of dialog fit that concept very nicely. Here’s another comic about names. See? There is hope. In particular, the rule is that the more panels in a particular strip, the better the comic is.

There is growth and improvement over time. Take the art - Muddle Creek starts off with pure black and white line, later adding dark black areas and sometimes a grey background pattern. You can see that the artist often trying new things to improve his art. Another good point is that the characters are quite varied in appearance and each has a fairly solid personality. And when background detail, color and a little shading is added it really brings a lot of life into Muddle Creek. The color gives each strip an emotional tone and makes it more enjoyable to read.

That begs the question - will you enjoy reading Muddle Creek? There is a certain twistedness to the comic. The more abstract comics may require a more unusual sense of humor to fully appreciate. It might even require some mental work. If you think you have a strange sense of humor, I’d say you should look it over and see if it appeals to you.

For the rest of us, the slice of life topics can be amusing. As the comic progresses, Muddle Creek is leaning more toward multiple panels and slice of life story arcs. In that case, you might check in on the comic once in a while. Rating:

Muddle Creek
http://muddlecreek.com/
by Jerry Benedict
Reviewed by Delos Woodruff
(3 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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I could go on about this comic’s incredible use of cutting edge humor, incredible art and hysterically funny gags, you know. I could, but I’d be lying. I am convinced after reading it that “Muddle Creek” is aptly named, primarily because you have to muddle THROUGH it to try and finish the never-ending archives.

With all apologies necessary to any fans and especially to the author, I have to say that this comic can be summed up in one word - DULL. I began at the first comic and after about 3 weeks worth of slow jokes, obvious jokes, boring jokes, and then ones that were worse, I literally said, out loud, “Does it get any better?” and jumped ahead to the later comics. Sad to say, it didn’t. The art is bland, the conversations stilted and predictable, and the cast is pretty much the same assortment you’d see in something like Dilbert.

I don’t know what power Bloom County had over the world, but it seems like an inordinate number of webcomics are trying hard to cash in on their style, rather than going their own direction. This one, unfortunately, is no exception.

I finally gave up more out of a sense of self-preservation than anything else, and came here to write the review.

If you like a comic that tries hard to be Doonesbury or Bloom County, then read it. Note that I said “tries hard.” It seems to be yet another attempt at a socially conscious, hard hitting comic that when all is said and done should be bottled and sold as a cure for insomnia. However, on a positive note I saw nothing that would make me warn people away from it or make it non-family friendly, though. So I give it 2 stars.

And that’s my opinion.

The Doctor

Rating:

Muddle Creek
http://muddlecreek.com/
by Jerry Benedict
Reviewed by The Doctor
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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Here I am, with my big debut as a Comic Fencer…and of course it’s reviewing a comic I can’t say I liked. At all. Darn it.

So, Muddle Creek, by one Jerome Benedict. My first impression picked up, as it always will, at the site. Not a bad layout, per se, but not the most user-friendly either. The graphics could be a lot cleaner, and the navigational buttons are a bit incomplete and unintuitive. The archives are just mean - you have to search by calender, and you can’t bookmark individual pages. Which made me a little grumpy as a reviewer, since I can’t link to these individual pages for my examples either.

The comic itself is done in the classical newspaper funnies format and sticks to that format like superglue. The art, well, when I started at the beginning of the archives I easily marked up a list of comic “don’t”s that this comic did. Of course, by the time I got caught up to the last couple months, Mr. Benedict had stolen a lot of my fire by correcting most of these major errors. Well, gymnasts and figure skaters are scored on the presentation of their entire routine, not just the last few seconds, and I don’t see why comics should be any different. So, let’s bring up the deductions:

No-no no. 1: Fonts. Free fonts all over the internet. They’re so much fun that you want to use them all, right? Well, don’t. One easy-to-read font is all you need. Breaking out of it for a good “GYAAAAAAAAA!” is great for emphasis, and in some cases, using another font for large, impressive creatures or gods or sommat works well. But for the first few years of archives, Muddle Creek tended for different fonts for different characters every different strip. Unless you’re trying to showcase what’s available on free-fonts.com, I really don’t see the excuse for this. Furthermore, a lot of the fun and funky fonts were at a tiny sizes. Making me lean squinting towards the screen is not an effective way to convince me to read your comic. Stepping away from the lettering and into the speech bubble itself, Muddle Creek also suffered from poor bubble placement. This comic is hand-drawn, scanned, and the bubbles are added in the computer. Nothing wrong with this method except it seems that the panels were not plotted out to actually have text in them. As a result, the speech is often banished to the far corners of the panels. More often than not, I read the row of text bubbles above the panels, and then the row below. Which, of course, was out of order. The line-work, while regular and complete enough, is plain and not at all dynamic, and doesn’t draw the eye in the correct reading order, which is the only way you could really get away with this kind of text placement.

Mm, which brings me to the line-work - looks like ink on bristol. Nothing wrong with that, except let me give you a small hint about black and white comics: Black on white, please, not fuzzy gray on white. My technical guess at what’s happening here is these are raw scans with no contrast adjustment compounded by the fact that what we get to view are gifs. I don’t trust gifs and the random over-sharp and over-blurry of lines, both original ink and computer additions, is a prime example of why. These are further compounded by gray and newsprint fills… Muddle Creek, I guess, for muddled gray. What the heck am I looking at here? And why do I care? Page after page of this, and my eyes just glazed over. This was somewhat improved once the comic switched to color, but it’s still dull, boring, poor contrast choices with the color.

Not that I’ve ratted on the presentation, on to technical merit! Wait, this is a comic…let’s call that “content.” Supposedly we’ve a cast of characters that work and live in a small town. It’s a good thing there’s a cast page to tell me so, as I wouldn’t know that these regular lumps were actually characters and not strawmen from the actual strips. (And apparently “Molly” and “Mouse” are the same person - the nickname wasn’t explained in the strip, but I guess I can feel better for thinking they looked similar.) Although there are a couple brief attempts at “storylines,” there’s only the barest of continuity from strip to strip. I guess that only leaves the jokes as possibility for content.

…uhm…huh. Jokes. Kay. Now, given the average American comedy, be it movies, sitcoms, whathaveyou, it could be safe to say that I have no sense of humor whatsoever. I did not laugh at a single one of these comic strips. I kinda smiled at that one that I copied up there, because I still feel bad for that poor Trix Rabbit…wait, that has nothing to do with this comic? My bad. I could leave this at “this comic isn’t my kind of humor” except that some of the “humor” got me ticked. Specifically the “girls are immature and behave badly” jokes and the “religious people are stupid” jokes. They weren’t really jokes, as there was no crafted punchline or painful truth. The situations were just presented to me as “jokes.” Maybe this is that bizarre “random is teh funniiie” bull?

So, I guess my final verdict for the comic as is will be go muddle through something else. But I’ll give 1 and 1/2 stars, as it did in fact fix the text/font and speech bubble placement by the current strips. Now it just needs to fix the contrast issues and actually be funny. Oh, and I’d suggest trying more than a handful of stock facial expressions. Rating:

Muddle Creek
http://muddlecreek.com/
by Jerry Benedict
Reviewed by Sly Eagle
(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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