In this world where we are beset on all sides by the Shaolin shadowboxing and the Wu-Tang sword style, is there No Need For Bushido? I climbed up to the Thirty-Sixth Chamber to consult with my Master. He greeted me warmly and poured me a cup of green tea. “Your heart seems troubled,” he said calmly, his voice like the gentle wind caressing the leaves in summer.

“I am torn,” I said. “On the one hand, my soul tells me to hate this comic. The female character named Ina fills Three out of the Six Webcomic Cliches as defined by Master Croshaw: Female Characters Are Hot, Female Characters Are Violent, and Female Characters are ‘Straight.’ Not unlike her other sisters in Hammerspace (such as Akane Tendo and Naru Narusegawa), her constant mood swings began to wear on my soul. The other characters are also cliches: the clueless yet startlingly adept samurai; the not-quite-stoic blind Taoist priest; and the brooding guy with the big sword. If I tried hard enough, I should be able to find their exact duplicates in Inu-Yasha or Rurouni Kenshin.

“Then there is the humor. It is cornier than a KFC Famous Bowl. The jokes about being in Canada or the samurai mistaking everyone for a girl cause my eyes to roll in exasperation. And ‘Holy Shnkikies’? That pale attempt at a catchphrase incites within me nothing less than a boiling rage directed at the True North. This is humor I may have found funny in Grade 3 when Knock-Knock jokes were good for a laugh. However, judging from the copious bloodshed and slight instances of nudity, I gather the under 10 set are not Alex Kolesar and Joseph Kovell’s primary target audience.”

The Master cupped a small dash of sesame seeds in his palm. “Yet,” he said, “for every ying, there is a yang. You admit that the comic does have its moments. Tell me, my son, what do you like about No Need for Bushido?”

“Well,” I said, “I actually thought the relationship between Ina and Yori was pretty sweet. What can I say? I’m a big softie at heart. There is nothing quite like the relationship between the dorky samurai and his lady love. Despite being walking cliches, I actually found myself liking the characters quite a bit … which is probably why writers stick to these cliches in the first place. The guy with the big sword, Ken, may be my favorite, just for being an unrepentant jerk with a love for theater. I guess he reminds me of myself sometimes.

“Plus the comic does a good job if mixing comedy elements with serious elements. I found some of the more dramatically inclined moments difficult to read and grasp, what with the warring clans and the vows of vengeance. At the beginning, there’s walls of text explaining it all. Eventually, though, the art gets polished to the point it can carry the brunt of the story, and the dialogue gets easier to follow. I also appreciate that the different elements were present from the beginning. It felt natural when Bushido transitioned from comedy to drama to action sequences.”

“I see,” said the Master, as birds lighted onto his palm to feed. “I sense there is something else you are not telling me.”

“This review might not be totally fair,” I said. “For you see, No Need for Bushido is about 350 pages long. We were asked to review it over the busy Fourth of July weekend, which for the most part I spent under the stars and very far away from city lights. I read the first 150 pages straight, then skipped around until about the last 70 pages. The rest I tried to fill in from Wikipedia. Curiously, the ‘Plot Details’ section also omits the parts I hadn’t read. The art evolves drastically in six years. It changes from being a crudely drawn cartoony images to a highly polished imitation of anime. Both styles do have their strengths: the early stuff better serves the comedy, while the late period feels more suitable for kinetic action sequences. Since No Need For Bushido dabbles in both, either style feels appropriate in their own way, though the recent style is far easier on the eyes. Don’t you think so, Master?”

“How should I know?” the Master said. “You just made me up for this ridiculously gimmicky review.”

“Oh,” I said, enlightened. “Well, despite not having read every single page of the comic, I feel confident splitting the difference with Bushido Muyo.”

“Hmm?”

“Um, I mean No Need for Bushido.”

Rating:

No Need for Bushido
by Alex Kolesar and Joseph Kovell
http://www.noneedforbushido.com/

review by Larry “El Santo” Cruz

(3 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Let’s talk about the main characters first. Katie McAllister and Mike Stuart are detectives in the Chicago police force. Katie is the impulsive hothead and Mike is the stay-cool type. By the conversations they have, it appears that Katie is more-often-than-not causing the two of them trouble. Apparently, she was promoted to detective very quickly, so she’s a pretty sharp gal. Mike, of course, is just as smart but has other resources due to his past. I wouldn’t go so far as to say these are totally original characters but they aren’t all cookie-cutter archetypes either. We get little bits of information about them as the story progresses. We’ll get to the story in just a second. Before that, let’s talk about the art.

As you can see, the drawing is fantastic. Except for the chapter covers, it is all black and white with grey tones. There is excellent, well researched background detail in all the panels. I can tell you that it takes a long time to draw a citiscape like this, especially with good photo reference. Paradigm’s art is based on real places in Chicago, so there’s an air of realism added.

There is a street map page where you can zoom in and see where a certain event happened. The neighborhoods are color coded and the crimes are pinpointed with thumbtacks. It’s a fun prop that adds to the police procedural side of the story.

Ah yes. The story. I prefer to let you, as the reader, discover the bigger reveals for yourself. By now I’m sure you’ve read a number of the other reviews and they’ve spilled the beans about a werewolf or maybe a werelion. I really don’t care for stories about werewolves, so it’s the rest of the story that held my little bit of interest. You may like the fact that Katie is having very disturbing dreams about being a werewolf but it’s just overdone to me.

I can summarize it by saying that Paradigm is partly a police-procedural type of story. These two detectives are doing their bully-the-criminal things when they get wrapped up in something far bigger than running guns or selling crack. They are a little better than the standard cop, so they react quicker and smarter and things don’t dead end as fast as they would otherwise.

As you might expect in a werewolf story, there is also evidence at the crime scenes that doesn’t add up to a normal crime. It felt a little weak to me but that might be because I’ve been watching House on dvd lately. There might be forty seven ailments that could produce wierd hairs, for instance. They leave that plot-clue hanging for pretty much the entire run of Paradigm so far.

That strikes me as odd, because the storytelling itself is pretty crisp with good pacing and action. Any other plot-clue has been mentioned and then let go until the moment to reveal. Wierd werewolf hairs defying easy classification stands out to me like something that should have been glossed over with a seemingly-at-the-time reasonable excuse and left until solved. A good counter example is how Katie throws up at a grisly crime scene and the Coroner sends her away and collects samples of the vomit. That part is done very subtly and will play itself out later, I’m sure.

Actually, maybe that’s not a good example. Please, ignore the fact that vomitting at crime scenes is totally, totally out of character for her and the others let it go without more than a murmur. Never mind that by this time she’s been shot in the gut and hospitalized, shot point blank in the chest, banged her head and blacked out, keeps having waking hallucinations, can’t sleep well and has been out drinking after work. All in the last two or three days.

I know. It’s a comic. No one really flies and animals don’t talk and the Flintstones couldn’t walk their car one foot forward. It’s just that you see examples where Mike quotes something like ‘bend to the wind’ and it comes up a page or two later when Katie has something difficult to deal with. It makes sense and it comes together at the right time. So maybe I’m jumping the gun and it’ll all come together later.

One last thing. Paradigm has that police procedural sort of setting. You expect very witty dialogue that pushes your point of view around, sort of like “oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.” Paradigm is almost there with certain lines being perfectly delivered. I’d just like to have seen it a little more often.

That may leave you with the impression that I didn’t like the comic. Aside from the werewolf thing and the inconsistencies it introduces, Paradigm actually has a solid story told very well. You’ll probably enjoy it just fine. You’ll want to start reading it here, at the beginning. [ratings: 3.5]

Paradigm Shift
by Dirk Tiede
http://www.webcomicsnation.com/dirktiede/ps/series.php
review by Delos Woodruff
(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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Gordon McAlpin’s “Multiplex”
reviewed by Anthony Cardno

Anyone who knows me will not be surprised that I like many of the jokes in this series. I’m a huge movie and pop culture geek after all. I never worked in a movie theater, and only briefly in a video store, but my mind works very much the way the character Kurt’s does: I don’t troll the internet for movie info as much as he does, but I do geek out over a lot of what I find. And like Jason, I am a fount of little bits of trivia that most people would rather not clutter their brains with. Of course, I’m a good twenty years older than most of the cast of Multiplex (okay, maybe I’m only ten years older than managers Neil and Allan), so I’m not sure if being able to identify with them is a good thing or not.

Multiplex’s major strength is also its’ greatest weakness. It is not one kind of story, but several. It’s pop culture referential comedy (most of the time the references are current as well), it’s teen dramedy, it’s situation comedy. Mix Dalton Ross’ snarky old “Hit List” Entertainment Weekly feature with “10 Things I Hate About You” and stir in a large heap of the workplace portions of Nickelodeon’s “Drake And Josh” and you come pretty close to Multiplex. The strength of this is that if you’re bored with a particular portion of the story you can rightfully assume that the focus will shift eventually. The weakness of this is that sometimes McAlpin lets the drama spin out a little too long and the comic starts to drag (for example, the sequence that starts here.)

The cast is well-rounded and all-inclusive: we have white movie geeks (Kurt and Jay, neither of whom are “creepy Tarantino wannabees”); we have Pan-Asian characters (Jason and Angie); we have black characters (Franklin and Calvin). We have Christians (goth girl Angie and bubbly blond Sunny); we have atheists (Jason). We have straights (most of the cast) and gays (Neil and Chase). And we have the girls who love the geeks (Melissa, Becky, Davi). If you start at the beginning and read through, almost every race, creed, and orientation is represented either among the main cast or the supporting cast. It’s nice to see a series that really does attempt to be representative of all of society. McAlpin occasionally gets bogged down in trying to dispel stereotypes, but most of the time that doesn’t get in the way.

McAlpin’s not afraid to go for the broad joke or the gross-out either. Plenty of the workplace practical jokes revolve around horror movies. Most of the really comedic bits come from the friendship between Kurt and Jason, who have that classic comedy team rapport. And of course he’s not afraid to poke fun at ye olde reviewers / bloggers either.

The art may be occasionally repetitive (especially when you scroll quickly through the archives looking for a particular page), but the characters are all distinguishable from each other and the consistent backgrounds become familiar enough after a while that you notice things like what movie posters are hanging in the background.

I give it 3.5 stars. I enjoyed it, I’ll keep reading it … and keep hoping that the comedy that was so prevalent in the early archives will assert itself and regain equal ground with the teen drama. Rating:

Multiplex

by Gordon McAlpin

http://www.multiplexcomic.com/

review by Anthony Cardno

(7 votes, average: 4.71 out of 5)

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Kidnapped By Gnomes is all about these two little blue gnomes who consistently get things not quite right. One is named Ed who is an American patriot, self proclaimed dictator of Delaware and strong political conservative. Ed is also thinner, taller and more outspoken than Wilson. Wilson is shorter, stouter and purplish. Wilson is more naive and liberal but has a secret agenda to change Ed.

Sometimes the strip is about political elections, immigration and foreign trade. Other times it is about day to day concerns like when people leave the toilet seat up or something from the History Channel. There is also a strange fascination with Ann Coulter and Benjamin Franklin. Sometimes they even speak to the artist, which is amusing. KBG is a bit whimsical.

I’m not a political humor fan, although Ed’s urge to conquer Delaware and then take over New Jersey is amusing. I am also amused by Ed’s extreme personality and Wilson’s satisfaction with tagging along on Ed’s latest hare-brained project.

I can usually find something to appreciate in just about any comic. There’s always something new or unique to discover. In KBG, the gnomes are stand-ins for the mysterious, real life antics of house cats and the different political views of the artist. There are comics where the artist pokes fun, but she’s also not afraid to make fun of herself and her views. It is far more common to make fun of other people.

Still, it just isn’t my cup of tea. Overall, I did find KBG more amusing than not. You may enjoy it if you like a bit of whimsy mixed with your politics. Rating:

Kidnapped By Gnomes
by Kathy Peterson
http://www.kidnappedbygnomes.com/
review by Delos Woodruff
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)

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I don’t usually like to talk about my political leanings in my reviews. As the old proverb says, religion and politics are off-limits for polite discussion, doubly so if the discussion is about flippin’ webcomics. But since we’re reviewing the politically charged Kidnapped by Gnomes, it’s only right that I disclose a little something about my beliefs. Here’s a hint: in my desk drawer downstairs, I have a nice certificate issued to me by the NRA. The one that’s not the National Restaurateur’s Association. Based on one of the comics’ story arcs, my guess is that Kathy Peterson would not approve. So from this point on, feel free to dismiss any statements you don’t agree with as close-minded partisan bias. I’d totally understand. We cool?

So here’s my first, senses-shattering controversial statement: The artwork in Kidnapped by Gnomes is not that great.

I am not a fan of comics where the characters are seemingly copy and pasted from one strip to the next like Colorforms, with only slight changes to the faces to indicate “emotion”. There should be a rule somewhere that only Ryan North is allowed to do this. I hate it when it’s done in video game webcomics (*cough* Buckley *cough*), but at least there it makes sense thematically: computer characters that didn’t register any recognizable facial emotions until about the mid-2000’s. Yet Kidnapped by Gnomes is, for the most part, a political cartoon. This is the realm of Thomas Nast and David Horsey and Gary Trudeau, all artists who masked the deathly dull nature of their subject matter with eye-catching visuals and attention to detail.

Kidnapped by Gnomes, on the other hand, is static and dull. Ed and Wilson, the two gnome characters, are difficult to tell apart, and their expressions barely change from one panel to the next. I think they’re supposed to look like stuffed animals in a novel juxtaposition of childhood id and adult sarcasm, yet for the life I me I can’t get over how much they look like Veggie Tales. Is there anything in the world more off-putting than hearing political opinions coming from analogues of Larry the Cucumber and Bob the Tomato?

As for the aforementioned political content, Ms. Peterson is opinionated and is not afraid to show it. Her views are a little left of the middle, a liberal if you will. (Or “progressive”; I’m not entirely sure what the proper term is nowadays.) However, Kidnapped by Gnomes is no Mallard Filmore or Minimum Security, and THANK GOD FOR THAT. While Ms. Peterson chastises right-wing politicians for the most part, she has no patience for extremists, right or left. Politics, after all is full of idiots from both sides, and part of the problem is the screwed up system that got them there. If there is a central theme of the comic, it’s “Don’t be a pompous jerk.” Frankly that’s something we can all agree with, no matter what our beliefs. As a result, Gnomes comes off as less petulant than its peers.

An example of the strip’s relative geniality: one of the strip’s running jokes is that Wilson, the liberal gnome, harbors a crush on notorious conservative writer Ann Coulter. I halfway expected this particular joke to devolve into the standard “Ann Coulter is a transvestite” response. (I don’t care if you like or hate Ms. Coulter: those sorts of insults are grade school at best.) When Gnomes get a chance to take a dig at her, what does Peterson come up with? “She only dates macho men with bulging muscles and a lust for maiming woodland creatures,” which is then follow-up by: “… not wimpy liberals who cry at the end of the ‘Joy Luck Club.’” Creative digs and self-deprecating comments? I approve!

Trust me, it matters. I don’t always agree with Ms. Peterson (what being a neo-con soulless corporate sell-out and all), but the way she presents her views, I am willing to listen. Kidnapped by Gnomes is not an inflammatory comic howling that your beliefs are wrong, and you’re stupid for believing what you do. Instead, it’s a pleasant debate you have with friends at a coffee shop, a call for civil conversation. Ed is portrayed as a Libertarian, and Wilson a Green Party liberal. Yet they’re portrayed as best of friends. Perhaps the best message of the comic is that despite our differences, we can all get along … not unlike Reverends Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson in that super bizarre commercial from the Alliance for Climate Protection.

Rating:

Kidnapped by Gnomes
by Kathy Peterson
http://www.kidnappedbygnomes.com/

(4 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Slogging Towards Destiny:
Tales of Pylea, reviewed by Anthony R. Cardno

I have a friend who abandons almost every webcomic project he starts, complaining that his latest awesome idea has already been done by someone else, that he can’t seem to find a truly original concept he can call his own.  I’ve told him several times that, as the saying goes, there are no “new” story concepts – that what he needs to worry about is putting his own spin on a concept and exploring where it takes him.  That’s what webcomics (and novels) are all about now: finding a twist to an old story rather than finding a new story to tell.

Tales of Pylea is an excellent example of how hard that can be.  At its most basic, it’s just a reiteration of a story that has been around as long as spoken language:  the Quest of a young hero to find something or someone, which leads him to his destiny. In this case, the young hero is F’Nor.  At sea on a more personal quest (to find his long-missing father), he has a chance encounter with the beautiful Arianhod. The young lady is being chased by a powerful being named Uthnar.  It only takes a few pages to set up the core triangle, as F’Nor’s personal quest becomes a subplot to a larger quest (for three powerful artifacts).

Pylea is a fairly standard fantasy world:  medieval-level society and technology (the fastest form of transportation is still a horse; the longest-reaching hand weapon is still a bow and arrows), replete with walled villages of thatch-roofed huts, open farmland and dark forests with dangerous creatures.  Magic exists but does not seem to be commonplace (although all three main characters and several supporting characters appear to have strong magickal connections).  Series creator and artist Aimee Chow has developed Pylea over a number of years and pretty much hits all the standard tropes as far as world development goes.  She veers a little from the standard by making the worst monsters in the physical world a band of vampires (who seem to be able to walk in daylight with no problem,) a nice change from orcs.  There are Elves, but they seem more warrior-minded than ethereal.  There are also gods who seem to be more real than they are myth.  And of course there’s a larger threat that will put the good guys to the test and help the bad guys to succeed – in this case, a race of demons from another world.

And there’s the twist, of a sort: what starts out as a standard fantasy of good striving against the return of a Big Evil begins to evolve facets of Judeo-Christian story (the big bad is a fallen god, aligned with demons; the young hero has a mysterious past and demons are afraid to speak his name) that may lead the characters, and the reader, in some unexpected directions.

The art, unfortunately, is hit or miss.  More recent pages fare better thanks to the coloring work of Alice Fox (such as this sunset), a strong addition to the team of creators.  But many of the pencilled pages look rushed (and Chow admits as much in quite a few author’s notes).  When she takes the time to really strengthen her initial pencils, pages pop with energy.

The story itself drags a bit.  Chapter One is way too long considering how much shorter the subsequent chapters are.  Part of this seems to be the result of a rotating crew of script-writers that Chow has brought on board to help her with dialogue, which seems to have resulted in quite a few long sections of exposition.  Exposition is necessary sometimes, of course.  Current writer Matt Summers seems to have a stronger concept of how to get information across while allowing his artist to do what she does best: draw scenes that are more than just talking heads.

I’m going to give Tales of Pylea three stars, mostly on the strength of where it could go than on where it’s been.  F’Nor is slogging towards his destiny, Arianhod is moving towards hers, and Uthnar is … well, he’s got an agenda too.  If the creators can pick up the pace and put together some more consistent art, TOP could be a series to watch. Rating:

Tales of Pylea

http://talesofpylea.com

by Aimee Chow and Matt Summers

review by Anthony Cardno

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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