After last week's essay, I decided to focus again on some journal-type comics. And the single most popular "reality" comic out there is apparently Greg Dean's Real Life. He's just won his fourth WCCAward for "Outstanding Reality Comic," after all, tying with Jennie Breeden's The Devil's Panties, another Daily Grind comic which I wrote about in my Third Essay.
I'd never looked at the comic before, however, and having no idea just how difficult this simple act would prove to be, I clicked Dean's link on the Daily Grind Main Page last Monday evening and waited for Real Life to appear.
Instead, Netscape Navigator's little hourglass sat there for what felt like a full minute--the equivalent of 40 or 50 years in internet time, I'm led to understand--before a box came up telling me that the web site wasn't responding or words to that effect. It wasn't till Tuesday, I think, that I managed to get through at all, but once on the main page, I couldn't get into the archive--none of the link buttons would do anything more than cause that little hourglass to stare out at me.
Wednesday and Thursday I tried several times to get the 1999 archives to appear, but they just plain wouldn't. I started thinking that, with most of the week gone, I might wanna substitute another comic into this essay and get to Real Life later on. But, well, since I'm the Registrar and unofficial Statistician for the WCCA, I already knew that Dean had won his fourth award in five years, and I wanted to look at his comic in my first essay after the awards were announced.
So perseverance became, once again, my watchword, and it paid off Thursday afternoon when the "First Page" button became active once again. And back I went to Nov. 15, 1999 and those first Real Life comics.
Sixteen strips later, Nov. 31, 1999, I figured I knew everything I needed to know about the comic: it was gonna be video game jokes--which, as I explained in the PvP section of my First Essay, are pretty much lost on me since the last video game I played was Tank 25 years ago--alternating with Seinfeldian commentary on the oddness of everyday items--nougat, for instance, and aluminum cans.
I found that Dean has a real talent for this low-key, observational sort of humor, but to my tastes it was drowning in seas of nearly incomprehensible video game and computer jokes, so I began hopping forward in time by changing the number at the end of the URL of the comic I was looking at--I still couldn't get the regular archive links to work. This way, I read the following chunks of strips: 02/25/00 to 03/13/00, 05/14/00 to 05/23/00, 09/13/00 to 09/20/00, 07/24/01 to 08/03/01, 01/04/02 to 02/13/02, 12/02/02 to 01/16/03, 07/29/03 to 08/18/03, 05/21/04 to 06/09/04, 11/17/04 to 11/19/04, and then headed up to the first day of the Daily Grind competition, 02/28/05, and read from there to 03/11/05.
And reading those chunks pretty much confirmed my first hypothesis. Sure, he has storylines that he runs his characters through--early on, someone invents a time machine, and our heroes go back to medieval France, and later, I read a storyline in which one of the characters takes over the world. But, like in a Seinfeld episode, the plots in Real Life seem more like pegs to hang the jokes on: none of our heroes, it turns out, can speak French, for instance, and the guy who takes over the world decides that it's boring and gives it up: a little on the predictable side, but he gets some pretty good jokes in along the way. I do like the way he and his characters get into conversations now and again, too, but, well, everything keeps coming back to these video game references that I just don't get.
So, as with PvP, Penny Arcade, Megatokyo, VG Cats and all the other successful comics that rely on knowledge of video games for their humor, I wish Greg Dean all the best with Real Life, but I hafta conclude that it's just Not For Me.
And strangely enough, a lot of the things I said up there about Real Life I could repeat down here when talking about Todd A. Sullivan's Caffcomics.
I guess I haven't really been paying that much attention to webcomics outside my areas of interest--and if I'm gonna be honest, I'll hafta admit that when I say "areas of interest," I pretty much mean those dozens and dozens of comics with talking animal characters in them--but these video game/computer joke comics seem to be fairly prevalent, too. Here, Sullivan focuses on some computer repair/sales/customer-support people based apparently on his own experiences while throwing in a lot of pop culture and sci-fi references for good measure.
His website is more accessible than Greg Dean's, his attitude seems a bit less cynical, his drawings are a good deal lumpier, his colors a good deal flatter, and his humor's a bit less low-key--characters get stuck in ventilation shafts with their pants around their ankles, for instance, or leap under desks when the computer they're working on turns out to have a lot of porn on it. But as far as I can tell, Sullivan's strip is cut pretty much from the same cloth as Real Life and the other strips of the video game/computer joke genre that have preceded it.
Which makes it another Not For Me comic. I did chuckle a few times while reading through the Caffcomic archives, but again, this is just not the sort of comic I get anything out of.
Now, as near as I can tell, John Hill's overall website is called Amazing Amoeba while the strip he's doing specifically for the Daily Grind is Fatty. I think...
Be that as it may, this has lately become a mixed strip like Jam Torkberg's The Filgym Cycle and Jam Blab--I talked about these comics in my Fourth Essay. Hill's main story involves the Fat Hot Ninja Chick with a Robot Arm--I'm typing that from memory, so I hope I got it right--getting pushed against her will into freeing the slaves--many of whom look like caricatures of other Daily Grind artists--held by the donkeymen of the planet Yirmumah--an out-and-out reference to D.J. Coffman and Bob McDevitt's Grind strip which I wrote about in my Second Essay.
On top of all that, Hill parodies several Sergio Leone westerns and a lot of action/adventure comics and movies during the first half of the story. He does a pretty decent job of it, too, as the Ninja Chick beats and/or kills five donkeys who've come after her. But then--and this is the thing that made the story for me--he pulls back and gives us a week or so to get to know the Ninja Chick: why she's on this planet; who she is; what sorts of things she normally does and doesn't do. It raises the whole thing out of being just a parody and turns it into an actual story--we now have a Person in a Place with a Problem, the basic starting point for any story, I've always found--and I find myself wanting to see where he takes things next.
Interspersed among these story strips, though, Hill has the more "journalistic" comics that I noted earlier. Some of these are parodies, too--because I wrote about her strip Normal Life in my Third Essay, I recognized Natasha Allegri being disemboweled by dinosaurs in one of them--but some of them seem to be incidents from Hill's own life--visiting Disneyland, for instance--or just random drawings of animals spouting odd sayings.
It's a nicely eclectic buncha stuff, in other words, and I think I'll be looking in on Fatty and Amazing Amoeba once a week or so to see what Hill's up to.
So, this time around, the score's two "Not For Me"s and one to check on a weekly basis.
If you haven't read the Fourth Essay yet, feel free to take the link there, or if you'd like to go on the the Sixth Essay, please take that link there. You might even head back to the Main Book Reports Page or the Main Comic Page. It's all about the interconnectedness, after all.