The Webcomic Overlook #33: Fite!

Not too long ago, fellow blogger Reynard Noir asked me to take a look at a webcomic he particularly enjoyed. Now, Mssr. Noir certainly knows his funny animal comics. His blog, subtitled “The Seedy Underworld of Slylock Fox,” takes the vulpine hero of “Comics for Kids” and rewrites him as a hard-boiled detective with a thing for a particular feline dame. This pretty much assures his place in Cool Guy Heaven where he can hang with Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, and Jack Kirby. The best I can manage with this blog is Nerd Heaven, where I imagine I can shoot hoops with the likes of Curly Joe DeRita, Al Scaduto, and Voltaire.

And you just know Voltaire would win, because he’s a goddamn cheater.

But there’s another thing that prompted me to review this webcomic. From what I’d seen, the webcomic starred an otter wearing boxing gloves on his hands. Now, is there anything in the world more visually intriguing than an otter wearing boxing gloves? Probably a doctor that is also a ninja … but a boxing otter comes pretty damn close.

So put on your mouth guards and set your iPods to Gary Glitter’s “Rock ‘n Roll, Pt. 2,” because we’re taking a look at the hard knocks world of a furry brown pugilist with a big black nose and the heart of a warrior. Today’s Webcomic Overlook is the recently concluded and sensibly titled series, Fite!, written by Mike Luce under the pseudonym Thomas Blue.

Fite! begins by show us Lucco, the aforementioned otter with the boxing gloves, in the middle of a boxing match. We don’t see the opponent, but we get a good look at Lucco. He’s short and squat, yet he’s got the thick arms and thick neck of a brawler. He also has tiny eyebrows and beady little eyes. (Remember this, because it comes handy later.) At this point, I have to hand it to Mike Luce for making Lucco look very much like an otter … because it would’ve been so easy to go the furry route and stick an otter face on a muscular human’s body.

And no one wants to see that. (Crap, I just imagined it. Now I can’t un-see it.)

Lucco and his unseen opponents exchange blows, when, suddenly… Lucco finds himself in a mystical forest, full of strange and frightening creatures.

If you actually followed my iPod recommendation, please switch songs to the title track of “Lost.”

So what’s going on here? That’s the central mystery of Fite!, and the reality that Lucco is wrestling with. I had my own suspiscions, but since they may contain spoilers, I’ll share them with you in a later section. A short while into his wanderings in this proto-Narnia, he meets Guz, a knight who’s got arched eyebrows and white eyeballs with pupils. Otherwise, he, like all the other otter characters in this series, looks a lot like Lucco. The two hit it off from the moment they meet. Maybe it’s because they’re both otters, or maybe because they recognize each other as warriors. They eat together, they fight together, and they frolic naked in the water together. (What? They’re otters. That’s what otters do. Get your mind out of the gutter, perv.)

Fairly early into the webcomic, the reader encounters something unique about Fite!: there is no dialogue. Or rather, there is dialogue, but it’s mostly written in scribbles, not unlike Woodstock’s chicken scratch dialogue from Peanuts. Once in a while, Luce throws in a symbol into one of the speech bubbles — usually that of a house or a character. But none of it is written out in English or any other language. Why should it be? They’re otters! What kind of otter speaks man-tongue?

This format provides some interesting challenges. For example, the only place that references the character names is the header. What’s curious, though, how easy it was to mentally filled in the blanks. A picture, after all, says a thousand words. Luce focuses on on facial expressions and postures to convey what the characters were saying. It got to the point that I could almost hear growls, sighs, and, most surprising of all, different accents. (Seriously, check out the word balloons and see if you can’t identify certain vocal inflections.) It’s a strong testament to the power of body language, and proof positive that your momma was right when she told you to stand up straight.

It also helps that the story is fairly simple, which makes the story easy to follow, dialogue or not. True to the title, Fite! is more or less a nonstop brawl. Flying fists and double-edged swords everywhere! You honestly cannot get any more manly than that. (Cue “Eye of the Tiger” on the iPod.)

It’s very similar to Samurai Jack (which was NOT Adult Swim, smart alecks). The cartoon was similarly near-wordless and involved long fighting scenes with little relevence to the main plot. The most intriguing brawl in Fite! is against the hulking white tiger Gorgado. Unlike the army of brainless amphibians that plague Lucco and Guz, Gorgado is an intelligent, scheming antagonist. For some reason, he kidnaps Lucco and forces him to train at his exclusive gym in the mountains. When the inevitable battle erupts, it feels more personal than the previous or future skirmishes.

I do, however, have a minor quibble about Fite!‘s fight scenes. (Whew! Say that five times fast.) They’re not brutal enough. I understand that’s trivial for something that seems to be an all-ages comic. We are, tough, talking about boxing. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if Lucco were, say, a samurai warrior or a medieval knight. Those roles have been romanticised to the point where you can turn battle into a choreographed dance sequence. Luce, though, specifically made Lucco a boxer. Boxing is all about power. The best boxing movies are the ones where the fighters juke, feel out their opponents, and rain punches with a mixture of feints and bone-rattling blows. I get a feeling, though, that Luce seems to be dancing around this aspect of the sport. For example, we don’t see the opponent in the first round, and this hurts the impact of the fight itself. In the middle of the Gorgado story, Lucco gets beat down by the big guy, yet we barely see the action because it’s framed in an artsy silhoutte. And when we do see the action, the punches don’t seem to connect … or at least connect in a way that shows the combatants doing much damage.

From time to time, Luce injects the generally butch story with periods of mystery, moodiness, and mystical wonder. My favorite is a scene where Lucco is free-falling, and he floats by a series of fish-shaped kites. The kites, though, morph into a school real fish, and Lucco suddenly finds himself swimming in a lake. It’s an undeniably cool transition straight out of Alice in Wonderland. Other crytic scenes involve a gaggle of spectral bird beings that never directly encounter Lucco, but seem to act as the gods of this world. And there’s also a ghostly little freckled guy, who approaches Lucco compassionately. Who are these charaters, and what do they have to do with Lucco’s quest to get to the world he remembers?

Now, as I mentioned before, the series recently wrapped up. The last panel was published in October 2007. I’m curious, though, whether or not the story wrapped up quicker than Luce had intended. The last round is “Round 8.” Wouldn’t a boxing-themed story using Rounds as chapter headers go to 12 rounds, at least? However, this gives me the rare opportunity to evaluate the series as a whole, including the ending. Thus, the next part is going to be heavy on spoilers. One if the stories biggest assets is its mystery. So, if you intend to read it, skip down to the “END SPOILERS” header and revisit this article after you’re done. Deal? Deal.

BEGIN SPOILERS

The last round begins with Lucco lying on a hospital bed in the real world. The boxing match was such a brutal beatdown that he was sent into a coma. Everything that went down in the fantasy land was all in his head.

I had already come to the same conclusion the moment Lucco stepped out of the real world and into the magic realm. I assume that most other readers came to the same conclusion as well. However, guessing the main mystery does not dispel all of the questions raised in Fite! For example, why did Gorgado kidnap Lucco in the first place? Just to have a sparring partner? Or, in Lucco’s dream state, did his memories automatically default to boxing?

And Guz … was he just really Lucco looking into a mirror?

One of the more intriguing mysteries was the identity of the spectral bird beings. Initially, I’d thought them to be the doctors working on Lucco, mainly because they appeared around the same time as the freckly kid, who seemed to exist on the fringes of Lucco’s consciousness. That and their faces resembled the plague doctor masks used during the Bubonic Plague. My current theory, though, is that they were physical manifestations of the grim reaper, and they were sending monsters to sever Lucco’s tenuous grip on life.

But, see, even that is hardly definite. Thumbs up to Mike Luce, who managed to keep the aura of mystery going even beyond its premature revelation.

The revelation, though, deepened my appreciation for Round 6. This chapter is a digression from the main quest and into the real world. Here, Mike Luce takes a peek into the life of Ricci, Lucco’s opponent from the opening fight. Ricci is a swaggering Mike Tyson type, yet he’s dealing badly with the damage he did to Lucco. What I love most about Ricci, though, is how Luce portrays him outside of the ring. He’s a posse-havin’, rule-breakin’, high-flyin’, kiss-stealin’, wheelin’ and dealin’ son of a gun. He acts the way I always imagine high-profile stars like T.O. and Kobe Bryant act in the real world … only in otter form! Ricci has the most subdued yet powerful facial expressions in the entire series.

For all its high concept ideas, though — from the lack of dialogue to the funny animals in a boxing/fantasy tale — I did feel a little let down that the ending was just so … standard.

END SPOILERS

In the end, I would probably have given the series props for daring to experiment with a no-dialogue format, I wouldn’t have cared whether it was completely successful in its execution or not. Instead, Mike Luce surprised me by showing new opportunities that open when a webcomic creator uses a dialogue-free format. The cracks I made about listening to iPod tracks weren’t made flippantly; the absence of prose all but forced me to mentally compose a soundtrack. Unlike Marvel’s gimmicky attempt in 2002 to release a silent issue of every title, the silence is used as a way to explore new techniques, not as a crutch.

Now Fite! isn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a sequel. Perhaps we can’t really go back to the fantastic world of Guz the knight. But perhaps we can see a straight up boxing story. Maybe we can see a battered Lucco defying all odds and fighting his way back to the top of the boxing world. Or maybe we can follow a certain boxing rival. Who doesn’t want to see him making it rain in a nightclub or running his mouth like that Clubber Lang nutball? (I’m imagining extra bold squiggle dialogue.) Or seeing him in a hot tub with a bevy of odd-looking otter women, only to contemplate philosophically about what drives men to compete, even to the point of self-destruction?

Because … otters with boxing gloves! That’s money in the bank, Mike Luce! MONEY!

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)