For our second look at the various comics participating in the Daily Grind contest, we'll again take a squint at two "long-runners" and a new one. And because it wouldn't be a proper series of essays without a breach of protocol right at the beginning, I'll also throw in a paragraph or two about a comic that's just dropped out of the running. Be warned, therefore.
I don't remember when I first read Melonpool, but I have several distinct recollections of seeing someone--probably Steve Troop himself--at a couple San Diego Comic-Cons with his Melonpool puppets long before I ever checked into the comic itself.
And it's not that the puppets frightened me off: I have several friends who are self-described "puppet wranglers," so I've had my arm stuffed up a felt-lined pseudo-cloaca more than once. No, it was more the examples of the strip that were displayed around the booth. As near as I could tell, just walking by and glancing at the stuff, Melonpool seemed to be a fairly typical pop-culture satire strip with a heavy emphasis on Star Trek and Star Wars. And, well, after 25 or 30 years of that stuff, I find it gets a little old.
Still, I did end up looking into the comic's archives at some point--probably the summer of 2003 or 2004 after the nominations for the WCCAwards were announced--Melonpool's a perpetual contender for Outstanding Science Fiction Comic and has been, I believe, nominated in other categories as well over the years. But whenever it was I finally took the plunge, I do know this: I didn't much care for it. Comedy's hard to do but almost too easy to judge: if it makes me laugh, it works for me.
To be blunt, this one didn't make me laugh.
Maybe it's just that Freefall has raised the bar so high for humorous SF comics in my mind that other comics have a hard time measuring up. Or maybe I just couldn't face yet another run through the various SF cliches: the ray-gun that makes good and evil twins; William Shatner jokes; the stupid captain, the grouchy engineer, the under-appreciated female character. And granted, some very fine comedy has been made puncturing cliches of this sort over the years. But here, the cliches seem more embraced than punctured....
I'm glad Steve Troop has a big following for the strip and I wish him all the best with it, but it's just Not For Me.
I knew nothing about Yirmumah! before the Daily Grind contest started, and even after it began, I heard more about D.J. Coffman, the strip's artist and co-writer--Coffman says that his credited co-writer, Bob McDeavitt, contributes about 5% to the overall comic--than I did about the strip itself. Coffman's inflammatory posts to the now-defunct Daily Grind message board were already legendary before I ever knew there was a Daily Grind message board, and his one word review of my Daily Grind comic, well, I've quoted it at the top of the main page there along with the other notices the comic's garnered if you wanna click over and see...
So I was all prepared to discover that Yirmumah! was another Not For Me comic. And it seemed that way as I clicked through the first, pre-Grind strips: just another post South Park pop-culture satire strip trying its darnedest to be outrageous and controversial, taking predictable jabs at the sorts of things that pass for authority figures in our modern age. And, well, that and a couple bucks will get just about get you a cup of coffee these days.
But then, in the middle of a tepid story about Bob and Drew, the writer and artist of the comic within the comic, "selling out" to someone or other--I didn't find the details compelling enough to pay that much attention--Drew has a quick musing spell about how maybe all they need to worry about is making "a good comic for people to read and enjoy." The moment is undercut by a punchline, of course, but it made me blink to see an actual thoughtful sentiment being expressed.
Moments like these began cropping up more frequently in the strips that followed, and I actually found myself laughing now and again. Not because of the fairly tired stories, but because of the two characters, Bob and Drew, the way they related to each other, and more specifically the way they seemed, for all the overheated vitriol they spew back and forth, to actually like each other. And when "Drew's hot wife" Calypso turned out to be a match for the two of them rather than the standard webcomic babe, I had to admit: this guy can write interesting characters when he puts his mind to it.
He just doesn't seem to be that all that interested in telling stories that're really about these characters. Or maybe it's just that he doesn't think his audience will sit still for them: he actually says after the first run of strips introducing Calypso, "OK! OK! No more mushy stuff, I swear!"
I guess my problem is: I like the mushy stuff. I like Drew and Calypso discussing their plans to outwit the guy at the Chinese take-out place. I like the Burt Reynolds' Day party. I like the birthday gift storyline. While the Scott Kurtz stuff, the Star Wars jokes, the parody of the TV show 24, the whole "Bob becomes the Burger King" storyline, they read to me like more of the usual wacky sitcom hijinks: I kept expecting to click onto a series where Bob inherits a haunted house or something...
So I'll check in with Yirmumah! now and again, I'm thinking, but not regularly. Coffman and McDeavitt have a good basis for some interesting stories, but I really doubt they're gonna do anything with it. But then I also doubt they care a rat's ass what I think, so let's just move on, shall we?
Frogherder appealed to me from the beginning--I mean, it's got these sorta talking animal characters having adventures: can't beat that.
But, well, it became apparent pretty quickly that Bryan Stone wasn't exactly sure what he wanted to do with the setting and the characters. Humorous, "gag-a-day" antics? He's got some of that. Post-apocalyptic musings? Yeah, he's got some of that, too: there's human living among the talking animal creatures--turns out that they're actually alien beings called Norians, and the strip takes place on their home planet--and these humans have brought the remnants of Earth culture with them to this place after our planet's been destroyed.
So is this a science-fiction strip? Kind of. Except the main character has starting manfesting magical powers of some sort. Which would make it a fantasy strip. Wouldn't it?
Now, I'm not one of those people who argues that it's somehow intrinsically wrong to try mixing genres. It's just that some are harder to mix than others, and all of them require a writer who has a clear idea rattling around the back of his skull about what the rules are for this mixed world he's creating. Fantasy and science fiction mix pretty easily, but a comedic strip that has dramatic interludes, that's about as hard a mix as I can think of. And that's what Stone seems to be after.
Sure, it can be done. Narbonic is pretty nearly the funniest strip on the web these days--it's nominated in the comedy category in this year's WCCAwards, for instance. But that doesn't stop Shaenon Garrity from pulling things in a slightly dramatic direction now and again. What makes it work in her case is: she's focused on and established her four main characters so thoroughly that the reader begins to care about them as people instead of as mere instigators of zany antics.
In Frogherder, I find it hard to pull the main characters out of the mix of all the secondary characters. And while I don't usually make comments on other people's artwork considering the way I draw--consult my Daily Grind and Terebinth comics for examples--I would find it easier to get to know Stone's characters if I could tell them apart visually. Timo and Doogan--apparently our two main characters since they're the only ones with blurbs on Frogherder's cast page--have slightly different hair styles, but they wear the same clothes as all the other Norians, seem to be pretty much the same size, don't have any real distinguishing physical characteristics, et cetera, et cetera.
Still, this is another one I'll probably check in on every couple weeks just to see how things are developing. Like I said, Stone's got some good stuff here, and I'd like to see how he ends up developing it.
So, of these three, the first one's a pass while the next two are qualified keepers.
Now, when I first started mapping these essays out, I designated next week to be my first foray into all the "journal comics" participating in the Grind. And the centerpiece of my Third Essay was going to be Philippe Gaboury's The Big Three-Oh, one of the 2 comics in the contest that appealed to me right from the first week.
But alas, Philippe's real life took precedence at the end of last week, and he announced he was dropping out of the contest. So I'll just mention my hope that he keeps up with the comic, point to it as a fine example of what a journal comic can be, and pick myself another to take its place in next week's essay. See you metaphorically then!
From here, you can go back to the First Essay or the Main Book Reports page, on to the Third Essay, or pay a visit to the Main Comic page.