“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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The original review for this comic was a bit more lengthy and went into detail as to why I simply didn’t like or enjoy this comic. That was, however, before I ran across the blogs (and you know who you are) in which the artists and fanboys of some of my other reviews are whining and moaning about how horrible my reviews are, how I’m an idiot because I don’t see things their way, and other assorted complaints of the “flame him for daring to express a negative view” variety. To them, I guess I don’t know what to say except “Tough darts, guys - don’t read my reviews, then.”

However, despite the risk of giving someone else’s fragile ego a boo-boo, The Doctor has rolled up his sleeves and written a new and improved review, complete with short words so no one strains their brain power. I’m sure after this one my write ups will go back to their old selves, so no worries.

I didn’t like the comic. The humor wasn’t of the type that makes me laugh, since I usually prefer gags and topics that haven’t been done to death as far as jokes go, or at least ones that aren’t so out there that you have to be in the know to get them. (The strip in which Jimmy calls various girls comes to mind; one is watching bees pollinate flowers and the other is sitting next to Bigfoot) I also felt the subject humor wasn’t original or even very imaginative, dealing mainly with the main character’s inability to deal with girlfriends, other friends or his own inept geekiness. Same basic formula as pretty much any recent sitcom, but this also had the main character cut from an Al Bundy (Married with Children) type mold, too. Some of the subject matter was a bit adult, too, and so I’d be cautious about letting kids read it. Therefore, I didn’t give the comic a high rating. I also know, however, that I am not God, and so I encourage you to take my review with a grain of salt and read the comic yourself, if you so choose.

Good place for a personal note as a reviewer, too, I think, on behalf of other reviewers: A review, unless done by a professional (which I am not, as I have stated many times) who critiques on a professional level and about professional points (such as use of color, shading, line work, etc.) is primarily an opinion. Since it is an opinion, it’s allowed to be different than those of other people. If you are the artist and don’t like it, then don’t create web comics and then ask review sites/people to review them. If you’re a rabid fanboy, accept the fact that others will have a different opinion and don’t waste time flaming them. You only make yourself look idiotic, and I suspect hurt the comic itself in the long run by driving people away.

I’ll step off my soap box now, and close by saying that hopefully none of what I have said will pertain to the creator of this web comic. I suspect that Mr. Purcell will shrug and say “Oh well…he didn’t like it,” and go on. At least, I am hoping he will. I would hate to think that my opinion bears such almighty weight that it would discourage someone from doing something they enjoy.

I give the comic one star. Rating:

The Doctor

Been Better
http://beenbettercomic.com
by James Purcell
(1 votes, average: 3 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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The first thing I looked at was the sparse cast page. There is a little data on two characters and for the rest it just links to their first appearance. It struck me as a good way to throw readers into the comic.

GC is set in a huge (and I mean vast) factory in England. There is a well lit bridge across a deep chasm to a dark forest. Then it starts getting odd.

Weird stuff abound such as extra shadows. In the “school”, there is a room labeled “no spare robot parts room.” By chance, they find an abnadoned part of a library with a secret compartment to a maze with no dead ends. The main character sleeps on Bunk 30, which is not 30th in the room. It’s 30 bunks high and reachable only by ladder.

As a parent I was not liking that at all. Maybe its an English thing or inside joke or something.

There are a lot of things like these. Like a dream that goes on and on, only to get stranger at every turn. Speaking of strange, let’s look at the main character.

It’s a little girl named Antimony, who is weird in a morose, glum way. She grew up in a hospital and her mother died. That’s a good partial explanation for her personality but she strikes me like she acts a lot older than grade school age. It is like she’s trapped in this little girl body, resigned to another decade of aging until she’s grown up. She also knows how to pick locks, speaks several languages and some martial arts. That’s a lot for a ten year old. The other characters have their secrets but lack the depth of mystery that Antimony has.

The story reveals itself slowly, mostly through dialog. There is always something happening but it always get resolved with a conversation. Nothing ever seems to have a final consequence. It also seems like you never know all the details for a given character or event. There is probably something you don’t know that really matters.

The art has a certain style which has good contrast, line and color work. It doesn’t have a lot of extra detail but it does provide a clear visual. One thing; the big eyes of the characters became a little disturbing after reading a sizable portion of the archives. I’m not sure why I got that from GC.

Overall, there’s something about it that’s not quite right for me. I have a solid sense of dissatisfaction with it, although it’s hard to describe what is causing it. Perhaps what I am getting most from it is a subtle but seething hostility. Mix in a little despair and frustration tempered by a quiet resolution.

That’s very strange, isn’t it? As I tried to figure out why, I decided to research things. There’s an interview on Comixtalk in which I found my answer.

The artist is seemingly fond of horror. He read a line of books by Alfred Hitchcock when he was younger and One of his first comics was about Freddy Kreuger and Dracula. What that lends itself to are many elements used or mentioned that I just don’t like. I’m just not a horror fan.

(Remember Dash’s teacher from the Incredibles? He was insanely sure that Dash was tacking his chair? Imagine me ranting away in that same tone of voice:) Please note that there is an element named the same as the lead character Antimony. It is metal deathly toxic (like arsenic) and one of its poisoning symptoms is depression. The alchemical symbol for Antimony looks like an upside down version of the symbol for female, as well. There is more, but I’m pretty convinced that the name of the main character was no accident.

GC is a well done,original work and does not have a predictable story, but it is definitely too dark for me. Rating:

Gunnerkrigg Court
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/
by Tom Siddell
review by Delos Woodruff
(12 votes, average: 2.92 out of 5)

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I have tried to rewrite this review many times and no matter how I do it, it never seems as honest as this one. So here goes. I didn’t like this comic, really, at all, nor would I recommend it to others to read. Why? Here’s why:

1. It has all the earmarks of a Harry Potter knock off, for one, complete with spooky locales, scary people (two she ran into in the library looked like zombies with eye sockets instead of eyes, or as though their eyes had been torn out) and bizarre happenings. All I could think of as I read it was waiting for someone like Snape to show up, or Nearly Headless Nick to come by and make a joke and then go off again, or a book to scream in Harry Pott….I mean, sorry…Antimony’s face. I was surprised she wasn’t named Hermione, to be honest. The comic also was very dark, much like the Potter books became. There is real, concrete evil in the world - I don’t need to be immersed in it in a webcomic. That was a definite turn-off, just as something like The Care Bears is a complete turn-off at the other extreme.

2. Characterizations - The characters themselves seemed like contrivances, honestly, in the way in which they were created and seemed to develop. (Read that as “unimaginative”) Antimony reminded me way too much of Daria, a character from the old MTV days who I simply could not stand in any capacity. If you don’t know who Daria is, look her up and you’ll see what I mean. Never smiles, you can almost HEAR her speak in that flat monotone, and you get the feeling she tolerates the people around her who aren’t as “with it” as she is. I kept having the urge to reach into the comic and slap her and tell her to get OVER herself. I can’t help but wonder who it is that actually identifies with a character like this? Her “best friend” is every bit as bad, not only being the obligatory anchor for Antimony but having all the earmarks of also being a romantic interest, (oh, yay) as is the “guy who turns into a wolf and still talks” - standard inclusions for stories of this nature.

Suffice to say just once I’d like to see a happy, well adjusted person in one of these comics who still has odd things happen to them instead of the typical “smarter than everyone else/out of step with everyone else” character like they have here. Contrary to popular opinion not every intelligent or learned person is either (a) totally out of step with reality, (b) a complete social pariah or (c) cynical and depressed sounding because the people around them are just SO un-intelligent.

3. Far too much of the supernatural/mystical/mythological stuff to even make for an enjoyable read. One comic in particular has her talking to one of the beings who supposedly come to take any and everything away that die. I believe they are called “psychopomp.” (I hope I get geek bonus points for knowing that, or something) As expected, almost no one else can see them, and so that makes her “special,” somehow, rather than the horrified person she’d be if she REALLY saw supernatural entities of the kind described here. In the beginning of the webcomic she gets an extra shadow, and then - surprise! - it starts to talk to her. Of course, she takes it in stride and helps the shadow out. Excuse me? Fiction or no, isn’t that just a bit of a stretch to expect people to swallow? She didn’t even bat an eye, as though this stuff happens all the time. It smacks of shoe-horning to get to a desired point, rather than good storytelling that brings you there with the characters. Kind of a “Even though it makes no sense at all, I’ll have her just ‘oh well’ the extra shadow so we can get rolling.” Sloppy.

4. The overall background and coloring was drab, and then some. If depression were expressed as a comic, this would be it. Can you imagine actually ATTENDING a school like that? God help you. I have yet to see one, myself, and pray no one would ever send their child to such a dreary, dark place as the school depicted here, fiction or no. It makes me wonder, at the risk of being offensive, just exactly what issues the author is dealing with, themselves.

I’m sure there are people out there who think that this comic is just the living end. To me, it’s yet another send off of established stories, mediocre art work and a comic that tries FAR too hard to be something symbolic, heavy, and dramatic.

I give it 1 star. Rating:

The Doctor

Gunnerkrigg Court
http://www.gunnerkrigg.com/
by Tom Siddell
review by the Doctor
(21 votes, average: 1.81 out of 5)

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