We'll start with some easy ones.
I've tried 3 times over the past 4 years to start reading PvP. It has several elements that really appeal to me: that wonderful Hirschfeld-esque line work that makes me want to look for hidden "Nina"s among the panels for one thing, and Scott Kurtz's absolute dedication to a daily schedule for another. Every time I try to get into the actual comic, though...
I first heard of PvP in the summer of 2001, I think. The guy who was the webmaster at Chemerical Comics, the site that was publishing my Terebinth comics back then, mentioned it to me as the only webcomic he read.
"Other than mine, you mean?" I asked him, but he just shook his head: turned out he was following my comic from the hardcopies I gave him--I didn't have a scanner at the time. PvP was the only actual webcomic he had any interest in. So I figured I'd give it a try.
Now, I have no independent recollection of what storyline was going on at the time. All I remember is: I didn't understand it. Going back now and poking through the archives, I think it must've been somewhere in the first half of July when the little nerdy guy--Francis, I see now is his name--was putting together people for some sort of online gaming competition.
What you hafta understand is: the last video game I played was back in high school almost 25 years ago. It was "Tank," a name that might mean something to the grayer among you, and it came out somewhere between "Pong" and "Pac-Man," I find myself thinking.
It was the emergence of "Pac-Man," actually, that first made me realize I wasn't cut out for video games. All my friends at the time went crazy for it, but I found the blinking lights and moving graphics too hard to follow: my eye doctor tells me that the insides of my eyes have the biggest veins he's ever seen, and whether this actually means anything, I choose to believe that it somehow makes my eyes maladjusted for the enjoyment of video games.
I've tried. My brother worked on several of the "Sonic the Hedgehog" games while he was at Sega, and he used to bring the things with him when he came to visit so he could show us the monsters he was designing and such. It all looked to me like sharp-edged bits of swirling, multi-colored fog. When he would freeze the screen, I could make out the various characters and backgrounds, but once he set everything to spinning again, I had no idea who was doing what to whom.
Knowing next to nothing about video and computer games and all that surrounds them, therefore, I found a story about characters with whom I was unfamiliar getting ready for a video game contest a little uninvolving. So I went back to the beginning of the strip with the thought that I really shouldn't try to spring so suddenly into a story three years after it had started.
Again, I have no independent recollection of how far I got in the archives after clicking back to May 4, 1998 on that July day in 2001. But I know it didn't grab me because, well, I didn't start reading the comic. Before writing this column, though, I went to PvP, clicked back to the first strip, and began reading again, just to see how far I might get this time.
I got to May 17 before realizing once again that this strip is just Not For Me. It's something I find a lot in the SF and fantasy books being published these days, too: they're aimed at a demographic to which I just plain don't belong. In those two weeks of strips, I chuckled once or twice, but the characters didn't really come alive for me nor did the setting catch my interest. Like squinting at the TV and trying to pick out which blue blur is Sonic, I blink at PvP and just don't get it.
What I find even stranger, though, is that one of my favorite webcomics continues to be Ian Jones-Quartey's RPG World, a comic that, I'm told, is essentially a parody of the "Final Fantasy" games. In that comic, though, the characters immediately appealed to me before beginning to reveal their larger dimensions, and the setting--a generic fantasy world that some of the characters realize is a generic fantasy world--is just filled with possibilities for stories. The comic isn't about computer games in general; it's about this specific computer game, and that specificity really helps me, I think.
PvP, on the other hand, is about computer games in general. And about working in an office in general--maybe I wasn't reading closely enough, but I don't recall learning that these characters put out a gaming magazine called "PvP" anywhere in that first 2 weeks of comics. So maybe it's just too general for me...
In short, I guess I just don't know. I wish I did enjoy PvP; like I said, Kurtz's art always makes me smile. But my subsequent attempts to read the strip--determined to try again last year, I forced my way through February and March of 2000 without being able to jump-start an interest in the strip, and when the Daily Grind contest started at the end of February 2005 and I saw Kurtz was among the competitors, I went back to the beginning of 2005 to give it one more go. January 2nd featured a joke about Warcraft, a game that I think maybe I've heard of, and January 3rd featured a joke about iPods, something I don't have and don't have any real interest in.
So maybe I'll look in again in a year or two, give the strip another try. But Scott Kurtz has done just fine without me so far, and it looks like we'll just hafta keep it that way...
I hadn't heard of Todd and Penguin till I started reading Websnark back in November of 2004. The comic looked interesting--I mean, little talking penguin guy: right up my street. So sometime that December, I settled in, clicked over to the site, and began reading his archives.
Almost immediately, it struck me how the standard four-panel comic strip structure didn't suit David Wright's storytelling style at all. Just four panels ending with a punch-line weren't enough for me: this world, these characters, the whole rhythm of the strip, it just didn't seem to fit very well into such a small space.
It made me think of the concept of the "satisfying chunk," something I'd first read about in Heidi MacDonald's column in the Comics Buyer's Guide. She was talking about comic books, but the gist of the theory holds for any kind of serialized entertainment: a storyline that presents itself in smaller bits over the course of any sort of time span had better give the reader a certain sense of satisfaction at the end of each of those bits. The reader should get some sense of closure, some small feeling of completion from every installment, or said reader is likely to decide that the story's just getting too sprawling, too complex, and possibly even figure it's not worth the effort to keep up with it.
Now, a lot of webcomics tell long stories in short bursts, and a lot of them are able to make each individual strip a "satisfying chunk" all on its own: Kevin and Kell comes to mind, and Goblin Hollow. Maritza Campos takes the practice to the very edge, to my way of thinking, in College Roomies from Hell, those couple panels every day almost too little to keep me able to follow her stories, the latest of which are literally taking years to tell.
Some comics, though, I don't find as satisfying in the short term: Lost & Found, for instance, and S.S.D.D.. I like the comics, enjoy the stories, but I usually just check in with them every couple months to catch up on a bunch of them at once.
And Todd and Penguin seems destined for this category as well even though the stories Wright tells are generally much smaller and more personal to the characters than the dimension-spanning arcs of some of the other comics I've mentioned here. Still, the perfect length for a Todd and Penguin story, it seems to me, would be the 22-minute animated episode of a weekly TV series...
As it is, though, I'm very glad that the "weekly" feature works in the archive section, so it's easy for me to stop by every other Friday and read the past 2 weeks on 2 pages. Until someone wises up somewhere and gives Wright that TV series, I think that's gonna be the best way for me to read it.
This is one of the 2 comics from the Daily Grind that grabbed me from its first day.
Why? Well, to be completely honest, because it was telling the brightly colored story of a squirrel-guy out to avenge the death of his girlfriend at the hands of a criminal pig. Anthropomorphic animal characters in dramatic situations: I am the moth and stories like that are the flame.
They don't have to be as "grand guignol" as Jack where David Hopkins has cast the eternal struggle between Heaven and Hell with characters who could've sprung from some 1930s Warner Bros. or Disney cartoon. No, just take talking animals, those icons of children's literature the world 'round, and give them something approximating real lives. Give them families that don't always get along. Give them mortgages to pay. Put them into situations where they have to transcend their stereotypes, and you've got my interest most of the time.
After all, that's what I try to do with my own stories--and with my comics, too, though my drawing abilities aren't quite up to the task. And webcomics like Fuzzy Things and The Suburban Jungle--not to mention the ones I've already mentioned in this essay--those are the ones that I enjoy reading the most.
Of course, it turns out that Miles Pekala has more on his mind with Strange Town than anthropomorphic animals: he's done a couple weeks of individual, stand-alone comics--some of which work better for me than others--and he's told a quietly effective story about a father visiting his son in the hospital. But whatever type of story he chooses to tell from now on, I'm with him. He told that one story right at the start that hit on just about every cylinder in the little "putt putt" engine of my brain, and I'm ready to see what else he's got in mind.
Trust is a very important aspect of storytelling, after all, and it's a part of the reading experience that relates to the whole "satisfying chunk" thing, too. If an author has already given me a story that I've enjoyed, I'm more willing to trust that author if the next story starts out a bit slowly or off-puttingly. I'm ready to be convinced that I might enjoy this even though it's not my usual cup of tea because the previous beverage this author offered me hit the spot so well--and if that's not an example of beating an analogy to death, well, I don't know what is.
In short, I trust Miles Pekala as a storyteller now. And I'm ready to follow him wherever he decides to go.
So of these three, I'm passing on the first, taking the second with certain conditions, and I'm along with for the whole ride on the third.
You can go on to the Second Essay now if you're of a mind to, or perhaps returning to the Book Reports' main page might be more to your liking. And of course, there's always the Comic's Main Page as well.