One Punch Reviews: Kate Beaton

The New Yorker is infamous for publishing cartoons that are absolutely impenetrable. If you don’t have an Ivy League degree, you scratch your head to try to make sense of the joke, fighting the urge to track down the cartoonists so he can explain it to you like Elaine did on that one episode of Seinfeld. If you do have an Ivy League degree, you sorta chuckle a little, hoping that you’ve gained the acceptance of your high society friends while little realizing that they’re doing the exact same thing.

That’s not to say that humor has to be spelled out. I’m a big fan of old school Mystery Science Theater, where each episode where full of obscure references that still manage to make me laugh. And it’s true for the works of Kate Beaton, whose work is delightful, funny and endearing even if I have no idea what in the world this crazy Canuck is referencing.

One Punch Reviews: Wayfarer’s Moon

Once upon a time, a university professor with a major jones for linguistics wrote a story about a town of vertically challenged people, a piece of magical jewelry so utterly fabulous that everybody was dying to get their hands on it, fey woodland people who may or may not have pointy ears, and an old guy with a long white beard and the world’s most awesome parlor. The story went on to inspire countless other people until one day, your local Borders had twelve to fifteen bookshelves devoted to an entire literary subgenre spawned from that man’s little hobby. That university professor was an Englishman by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Today’s comic is yet another work that owes a great deal to the Lord of the Rings … though, to be honest with you, it feels more like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. So gird yourself with you Reading Glasses of +2 Perspicacity, because I’m going to take a look at Jason Janicki and Leigh Kellogg’s fantasy webcomic, Wayfarer’s Moon.

The Webcomic Overlook #42: Zebra Girl

There is no creature in the world more terrifying than the zebra.

Although illustrations are not as accurate as photographs, they can provide a window into the artist’s psyche. For example, this illustration from the 19th Century proves that zebras inspire the sort of fear that consume a man’s soul. Look at that deathly grimace. Those ominous black and white stripes. Those murderous eyes. Is it any wonder than the noble lion, long considered a symbol of goodness and honor, devotes its life in the futile quest to hunt down these monstrosities of nature?

If you needed any further proof of the vileness of these creatures, look no further than the quagga. (Notice the name sounds like some sort of forbidding Babylonian deity.) What is a quagga? It’s a species of zebra that went extinct in the 19th century. So like the dinosaurs, dodos, and sabretooth tigers of yore, quaggas were relegated to dusty zoological books. Or… was it? In the 1980’s, after some geneticists started playing around with quagga DNA, the creature was reborn. A species that had been wiped out from this world, but now brought back to life — resurrected, if you will, be science? Nothing about this sounds slightly bizarre?

The spirit of the zebra lives on, too, in the subject of today’s Webcomic Overlook. Despite its name, the long-running webcomic named Zebra Girl does not actually feature zebras. It does, however, feature an adequate and slightly less fearsome alternative: demons.

One Punch Reviews: Roza

For today’s One Punch Review, let’s take a look at something relatively kid friendly. Parents should first sit their kids down, though, and tell them that picking their scabs and opening their wounds won’t give them the power to summon butterflies. It sounds silly, I know. I respect the intelligence of children. Back in the day, though, when kids were crawling around smelly poop-infested sewers to be like a Ninja Turtle, I realized that you just cannot underestimate the power of a child’s imagination.

After you’ve had that talk, though, go ahead and lead them to Kelly Hamilton’s lush fantasy webcomic, Roza.

The Webcomic Overlook #41: The Zombie Hunters

It’s fun to follow what movie monsters are currently tapping the cultural zeitgeist. Back in the 90’s everyone was ga-ga over vampires. Anne Rice was churning out novels on a regular basis, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one of the most anticipated movies, Gangrel and the Brood were appearing out of flaming circles in the WWF, Sarah Michelle Gellar won the hearts of America with her vampire-hunting ways, and Wesley Snipes was just getting his fangs fitted for his first Blade movie. In recent years, though, vampires haven’t done much to capture the nation’s imagination outside of the latest Kate Beckinsdale movie. I blame this precipitous fall in stature on overly serious goth kids and the existence of actual vampire cultists who really do drink human blood … which, let’s face it, is totally gross.

No, in 2000, it’s all about the zombies! They’re like the party-hearty alternative to the even mopey vampires … not unlike how, in the world of Trekkies, the more sociable fans dress up as Klingons rather than as the stuffy and austere Federation officers. Vampires are always writing sad, tear-stained poetry about guilt over their bloodlust. Zombies, on the other hand, are pure id, chomping on flesh with gleeful abandon. Putting a vampire on a gameshow is rather confusing and probably a Christ allegory; chained up zombies on a gameshow where they chase fresh meat (as seen on Shawn of the Dead) … that’s comedy gold, baby! And, as Michael Jackson proved, zombies are kickass dancers.

Even I have not been immune to the charms of these gentle reanimated corpses. I’ve enjoyed both the new Dawn of the Dead movie and, paradoxically, the laughably awful House of the Dead, directed by the notoriously awful Uwe Boll. I even liked I Am Legend, which was basically a sanitized zombie movie for the masses. I’ve been both a zombie minion and a hapless survivor in the free online text-based MMORPG Urban Dead (which, by the way, inspired a short but fairly decent webcomic called Necrophobic). There’s even a movie about zombie strippers which .. well, honestly, would get me kicked out of the house if I ever rented it, but it’s OUT THERE PEOPLE!

So what culturally precipitated this shift of affection from vampires to zombies? I’ll leave it up to CNN and Fox News to speculate whether or not it’s a reaction to fears and anxieties stirred up by 9/11. My own absolutely unsupported analysis is summed up by pretty much the same answer I give to explain any youth-centered phenomena in our current decade: video games. Specifically, first-person shooters. We like to have plenty of faceless bad guys to mow down without worrying about whether or not we were committing murder. And which monsters are more faceless than zombies? Vampires are generally depicted as intellectual equals. On the other hand, zombies are already dead and are more animal than human. Time to turn off your conscience and fire up that rail gun!

This theory of mine, soon to be published in reputable scientific periodicals under the name “The El Santo Awesome Theory of How Everything Works,” is put to test in the subject of today’s Webcomic Overlook: Jenny Romanchuk’s take on the zombie apocalypse, The Zombie Hunters.

A review of The Phoenix Requiem on ComixTalk

My review of Sarah Ellerton’s mystical Victorian era webcomic, The Phoenix Requiem, is now up on ComixTalk. It’s about a mysterious stranger who stumbles into an idyllic village and the pretty doctor who fixes him up. If you want the short version, I thought the illustrations were absolutely stunning, but the storytelling aspect was rather slow and unrealistic … and I’m not talking about the part where the people’s faces fall apart.

Check it out!

The Webcomic Overlook #40: Alpha Shade

Welcome back to the Webcomic Overlook! After a longer-than-expected hiatus — where I traveled across the country, went to the final Sonics game, injured my foot, and wined and dined like there was no tomorrow — it’s time I plunge myself into the weird, wonderful world of digital comics.

But first, let’s talk about anime.

In today’s Saturday Adult Swim world — where blonde haired ninjas dress up in orange jumpsuits, squiggly-shaped characters do battle at the bidding of their trainers, and guys with spiky hair scream real loud and spend some ninety episodes beating the crap out of each other — it’s easy to forget that there was a much smaller but very devoted anime fanbase in the 1980’s. Now, I personally wasn’t part of this fanbase. I cut my teeth a decade later when I watched a little series about where a boy turns into a girl with a splash of cold water. I also made the mistake telling a girl in college all about it with naive, unbridled enthusiasm. (Her piercing accusing eyes … they still penetrate my soul.)

There was a time, though, when anime was filled with space-faring adventures, huge plasma rifles, men who piloted transforming robots, ominous spaceships, and women whose hair looked impossibly shellacked. In short, a time when all anime was pretty much influenced by Star Wars. Robotech is the most famous of these cartoons. There were many, many more, though.

Which brings me to the subject of today’s Webcomic Overlook: Alpha Shade, which looks and feels inspired by those 1980’s sci-fi anime.

Save Our Erin (Winters)

Okay, so I had originally planned a two week hiatus, but it turned out to be longer. Here’s the funny thing: it turns out that you can actually be busier on Spring Break than you are on regular working days. Lots of spring cleaning, planning, and what not. Plus, I had this terrible foot injury. Doesn’t sound like it should affect my writing, should it? Except that it takes five times longer to do regular things, like going out and getting groceries, then it does when you have two feet.

Enough of the excuses! I’ll be back sometime later this week with an actual review. Right now, I’m still taking it a little easy. Kicking back, resting my foot, popping the extra-strength Ibuprofen … you know, the life.

Still, there was a piece of webcomic news that broke last week I couldn’t ignore, mainly because it concerned a character that I felt got an awfully raw deal.

On his blog, John Allison (Scary Go Round) mentioned that there was one character that he was never, ever going to bring back. That character was none other than Shelley Winters’ mousy little sister, Erin Winters.