More Webcomic Reviews

Oglaf: This is an often-R-rated webcomic that frequently borders on X-rated, being extremely naughty. It's also hilarious, particularly if you're familiar with the sort of source material it parodies, being a comedic fantasy comic. (Not all its strips involve pornographic material, though - sometimes it's perfectly tame, though this never hurts the humour.) Solidly drawn with beautiful colours, it doesn't really have a story per se, though it does have some frequently returning characters - the most common of which is an evil sorceress and her hapless apprentice.

Plan B: Billed as "a tale of love, revenge, and supervillainy," I don't have a whole lot to say about this comic. A usually-but-not-always parody strip, it's certainly good enough to have drawn me in and keep me reading. It's frequently amusing. The art is serviceable-to-good for the most part, with only the occasional easy-to-overlook flub. Having said that, the main reason I read it is the genre - if it were, I dunno, a webcomic about sports or video games or pretty much anything else besides superheroes/supervillains, its charms probably wouldn't be enough to hold me.

Girly: The most fascinating thing about this comic is the evolution Josh Lesnick's art's gone through over the years he worked on Girly. In the beginning, it was rather animu crap - not horrendous for animu stuff, but still way too heavily influenced by animu. As time passes, the art slowly evolves to the point that Lesnick develops a clear style all his own. At its best, the art was really worth eating up and studying in every detail - a wonderfully cartoony style that screams energy and is truly Lesnick's own.

However, I have to admit I have serious misgivings about his latest stylistic evolutions. I find that in throwing himself into the energy of his drawings, Lesnick's lost a lot of the structure - nowadays his faces are unnecessarily melty, and the action can be really difficult to follow from panel to panel.

Oh, yeah, and then there's Lesnick's sense of humour. It can range from lame to decent. He frequently jumps into lolrandom humour ("Magic whale fetus! LOL!"), which really only works when done well and he doesn't always do it well. Not a comic for everyone, but still head and shoulders better than most of what's out there. In fact, I'd have to say that the humour - and the writing in general - was of much better quality during the early and middle parts of the run than in the last parts. Between that and the way I feel his art has evolved in bad directions lately, the only reason I'm still reading this comic is due to inertia - Lesnick's been working on the final story for about six months, and will be ending the comic after that, so I figure I might as well keep reading until it's over.

It's also worth noting, for Scott Pilgrim fans, Lesnick did a back-up mini strip in the last Scott Pilgrim book. So, um, yeah. That's relevant somehow, I'm sure.

Sorcery 101: A solid urban fantasy comic about a high school teacher who's secretly a foreign prince, is an apprentice sorcerer being taught by a reluctant vampire, and who lives with a married couple (a former demon hunter and a werewolf) and their werewolf daughter (she takes after her dad). That probably sounds a lot sillier than it actually is - the strip is very often comedic, but it's never actually silly. Well, maybe the bits with the kid necromancer excepted.

This, like Girly, went through an interesting art evolution as well. In the beginning, it was often downright badly-drawn, with frequent basic mistakes of anatomy and perspective. Unfortunately, I can't really show you any of this - Kel McDonald's art evolved to become solid (at worst) to excellent (at best), and as it did he went back and re-did his early stuff so it's not available to make comparisons with. Just trust me, the stuff that's up now is much, much better than what used to be there. (His writing is always solid, though sometimes I have to overlook some spelling mistakes - I think he's said that he's dyslexic and has to do a lot of proofreading. I hope I'm not misremembering that.)