Again, a couple long-running comics and one begun especially for the Grind.
Chris Crosby put the first Superosity strip up on the web March 1, 1999, and he hasn't stopped yet: comics 7 days a week for more than six years. So it seemed likely to me as I started planning this week's essay that I'd looked at it before. After all, I've been reading webcomics regularly since 1998 when I first stumbled across strips like Kevin & Kell and Freefall. Crosby's one of the founders of Keenspot, for crying out loud, and I read bunches of comics that live on either Keenspot or Keenspace. So I must've looked at Superosity at some point, mustn't I've? And yet I had no memory of doing so.
So I clicked to the first week--using the oh-so-handy weekly archive feature--and started reading. And after I'd read through April 1999 without laughing very often, I skipped ahead to July 2000. Again, I read a couple months, found a few interesting moments, but around about September, it started bogging down for me. So I skipped forward to the first week of May, 2002 and bogged down even more quickly. Another click took me to the first week of April 2004, and again, by mid-April, I was figuratively shifting in my seat.
One more try, I figured, so I headed on to the first week of March 2005, the start of the Daily Grind contest. And again, I only made it about halfway into the second week of March.
Which leads me to wonder--as these situations always do--what about it isn't appealing to me? And this one isn't as easy as PvP was in my first essay where it was just a matter of me not understanding most of his pop culture references. No, this one's gonna take some explaining...
See, this strip is essentially "idiot comedy," and I've found in the past that I'm fairly particular about the sorts of idiot comedy that I enjoy. It boils down to my preference for idiot comedy that has more going on that just jokes about how stupid the characters are. Which is why I put Laurel & Hardy at the top of my list with, say, the Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello down near the bottom.
In a Laurel & Hardy film, yes, they're both idiots, but there's so much more going on: the sense of time and place; the sheer physical poetry of the sight gags; the feeling that these two guys genuinely care about each other despite all the shin-kicking and hat-stomping. The Stooges are certainly idiots, too, but they'll sometimes get a sort of feral cleverness going on that can appeal to me when I'm in a certain state of mind. Abbott & Costello, on the other hand, play characters that I find too one-note to care about, and none of the films I've ever seen them in has shown me anything approaching cleverness.
Superosity, in the selections that I viewed, showed me a few clever things here and there--Arcadia, the love interest, being every bit as stupid as Chris, the male lead, is a nice touch, for instance. But for the most part, the stories and the characters came across as just a buncha random things going on. I wish Crosby all the best with his strip, but I've got to conclude that it's just Not For Me.
Now, R. Smith put the first Funny Farm strip up on the web on January 26, 1999, almost a month and a half before Crosby and Superosity, and he's also been updating the story 7 days a week since then, too. And once again, I find that I've never read the thing.
I recall coming across Smith's cross-over with College Roomies from Hell when I went through Maritza Campos's archives for the first time four or five years ago, but that brief introduction didn't do anything for me: I didn't get a feel for the character or for Smith's writing style, so I just let it go.
Now though, since I've assigned myself the task of reading and commenting on all the Daily Grind strips, I clicked back to the beginning and started reading.
Six days later, I've gotten up into April of 2001, and I'm finding it an odd experience all around. I mean, sure, I like the strip, but considering that it's a talking animal strip in which the characters are dealing with certain "real life" issues--making a living, love and loss, the sorts of things that are flames to my moth as I put it in my first essay--I don't like it as much as I feel I ought to.
My main problem, I think, And while the characters have come alive in the two-and-a-quarter years of strips that I've read, their names continue to bother me; I mean, is "Boe" one syllable or two? Does "Gulius" really have a hard G at the beginning the way it looks?
I mean, yes, the stories are interesting, but, well, I just don't find Smith's jokes that funny--and the pedant in me wonders where this "farm" is that the title refers to, but I'm trying to keep the pedant "on ice" as much as possible these days. It's just that the four-panels-with-a-punchline structure doesn't serve the strip very well, and the humor sometimes just plain clashes with the life-and-death stories Smith tells--pretty much the definition of "the Cerebus Syndrome" that Eric Burns talks about over on Websnark: a humor comic that tries to deepen itself by moving its characters away from their humorous roots.
And while his characters have grown on me nicely, I still can't figure out some of their names: does "Boe" have one syllable or two? Does "Gulius" have a hard "G" at the beginning the way it looks like it does? I also can't help wondering about the whole "inter-species romance" aspect to his world: Mewn, the cat character, is in love with and loses his virginity to Mavis, a human woman, while another human character, it turns out, is married to a bird woman, all without anyone batting an eye. Mewn does have nightmares about a nun now and then, but what is the moral standard in a world where humans and talking animal people co-exist?
Maybe Smith answers these questions in the 4 years of comics I still haven't read. Or maybe he ignores them and keeps up the not-all-that-witty banter. I'm hoping for the first road, myself, but I know I'll be disappointed if it turns out to be the second. Either way, I'll probably keep reading till I get a better idea which way he wants to go. So this is a "wait-and-see" verdict, I guess...
Jam Torkberg has two comics in the Grind, I suppose: The Filgym Cycle, a strange and pretty funny little adventure comic, and Jam Blab, the journal comic he puts up when he hasn't got a page of the Cycle finished.
Which is the problems I have with the strip. See, he says in the first journal comic that he's taking a break from the Cycle because he's "just not having fun doing it right now." Unfortunately, that lack of fun shows in the comic itself, and since it's supposed to be a comedy-adventure strip, it does bog the story down a bit when the stress lines are showing.
Still, the Cycle has been picking up again the last few weeks, so maybe blowing off steam with the journal comic will ultimately help the story he's trying to tell. 'Cause I'm enjoying it now that his two groups of characters have met and are interacting. He gives a sense of having a story in mind rather than just making some random silly things happen to some random silly characters, and I'm all for that.
It still feels like we're in the early chapters of that story, though, and his digressions off into the journal comic make me a little hesitant to become a committed reader. But I'll be checking in--probably on Fridays when I check the other "not quite" strips I've mentioned in previous essays. I'm right on the tipping point with this one; we'll see which way I fall.
So we've got one pass and two right on the edge. I'm looking forward to reading those two over the next few weeks to see if my brain can crystalize an opinion about them.
Three more journal comics next week? Yeah, why not?
You can go back to the Third Essay from here, go on to the Fifth Essay, or perhaps return to the Book Reports' main page. And of course, there's always the Comic's Main Page as well.