Arthur, King of Time and Space
Now, through no fault of his own, Paul Gadzikowski has a "tough row to hoe" with me right from the beginning when it comes to his comic.
Because I've never understood the whole appeal of the King Arthur legend. In fact, as the years have gone on and more and more pseudo-Arthurian fantasy novels have been delivered to my front door--I co-ordinate the SFWA Circulating Book Plan, y'see, so I get a lot of science-fiction and fantasy books in the mail--I've begun to get rather tired of seeing them.
It's just that the story itself is so darn depressing--all the effort this guy and the people around him put in, and it all falls to pieces within a couple years! I'm sure it's all very metaphorical and all very meaningful, but, well, what's the point? I get all the depressing stories I could want reading the newspaper every morning, and most of the fiction I've seen that incorporates elements of "Arthuriana" has been over-boiled and over-wrought, bloated with portent and self-importance, and just plain unreadable with my set of eyes.
Still, I'm not totally opposed to the story: I read and enjoyed T. H. White at one point in the past, it seems to me, so I know it's possible to do something that I'll like with Arthur and all. And I heartily approve of the "gag-a-day" format Gadzikowski is using--anything that deflates the pomposity that's grown up around all things Arthur is OK with me.
I also like the concept of the strip for the most part: Arthur is the King of Time and Space, so Gadzikowski jumps around between the mythical past of Camelot, the present day, and the far future, presenting Arthur and his whole Round Table as typical knights, as modern suburbanites, and as the crew of the starship Excalibur. His art style has a nice Jules Feiffer look to it, too, that stretchy, scratchy sort of line work that I enjoy looking at. And yet...
I clicked back to the first strip, 05/21/04, and read up through strip #58, 07/18/04, with a growing sense of dissatisfaction. I couldn't quite see how the modern stuff was fitting into the basic storyarc--not to mention that his Arthur looks much too old to be in high school--and there was a scattershot quality to the strip that began putting me off, the way he seemed to be avoiding the whole idea of continuity to focus on the gags when his concept was maybe the most continuity-driven I've ever come across. I mean, why set up this massive tripartite universe loaded with all the baggage of the King Arthur legend if you aren't gonna use it in your stories?
And then in the commentary at the bottom of the page for strip #58, Gadzikowski says: "I guess I keep flailing till I hit something." And that summed it up for me, I'm afraid. I clicked forward and read from 08/31/04 to 09/22/04 and got the same reaction, so I did my usual thing and moved forward to 02/28/05, the first day of the Grind competition. There, he spends some time doing his versions of the "sword in the stone" thing, but then it's back to the same sort of gag strips as before.
In short, I like his concept, but he doesn't seem to have really thought through the implications of it. I hope he does find the balance between stories and gags, though, and I'll check in from time to time to see how he's doing, but for now, it looks like it's a Not For Me comic.
Knights of the Old Coding/Super Store
Why pixel comics like Knights of the Old Coding are called "sprite comics," I've never known. If they appealed to me more, I might've investigated the matter by now, but, well, the art in them is usually so small, my battered old eyes have a hard time seeing the figures. And, as I've mentioned in several of these essays--mostly the First in my look at PvP--I don't play video games, so the high concentration of what I assume are video game jokes in every sprite comic I've seen leaves me scratching my head in confusion.
I did a lot of head scratching while going through Owen Kuhn's comic, I'm sorry to say. And on top of all that, when I clicked back to the first strip--dated 02/26/02, several years before Arthur, King of Time and Space reviewed above--what do I see but the names Arthur and Guenevere.
Computer game jokes and Arthuriana. That's two strikes right from the start...
But I read through to 03/11/02 before the weight of my ignorance ground me to a halt--I have a feeling he was parodying various video game characters, but I'm just not sure--then I skipped forward a year and found a couple things that actually made me laugh: Kuhn's got a good ear for a corny joke and for character dialogue, two things a reader like me can appreciate without knowing anything about Nintendo.
But then the storyline wandered too far from the part I was enjoying, and I skipped from 03/25/04 to 10/27/03 only to find myself lost among what seemed to be a completely different set of characters. Skipping up to 05/28/04 revealed a couple of the characters from the first group I'd read and a few more funny bits, but it takes so long for things to happen, I began wishing he'd go with a straight "gag-a-day" approach instead of trying to tell a story. And this from a reader who enjoys nothing more than a good story, well, that's saying something.
Moving up to Feb. 28, 2005 drove this point home for me--more gags, less story, pretty much the opposite of my reaction to Arthur, King of Time and Space, now that I think about it--and then on 04/14/05, Knights of the Old Coding sort of peters out, and Kuhn takes the daily updates over to his LiveJournal site and a new comic, Super Store, where parody versions of Marvel and DC superheroes all work in the same branch of the Super-Mart.
I read the comic into June--I keep jotting these things down on little pieces of paper and then losing them--and found another few chuckles here and there: Kuhn seems to be focusing more on the gags than on any sort of overall story, which, as I've said, is a good approach for him.
The problem from behind my eyes is, well, it doesn't do much for me. Parody comics can be terribly self-limiting as Kuhn himself seemed to realize when he let go of Knights of the Old Coding. I hope he can make Super Store into something that's more than a load of corny jokes about his source material--I always point to Ian Jones-Quartey and the things he's done with RPG World as an example of someone moving from parody into actual storytelling--but this one so far is pretty much a Not For Me comic.
Last year, I proposed an essay to Alexander Danner over at Graphic Novel Review about the different ways comics and prose fiction approach "point of view" in their respective styles of storytelling. I started work on it, but then GNR went onto the back burner, and then the Grind started up, so I doubt I'll ever have time to put the whole thing together.
If I ever did, though, I would now have to talk about Lonnie Allen's Lone Star State and the wonderfully odd things he's doing with POV, one of the basic parts of story structure. 'Cause I think this is the first time I've ever seen a comic told literally in the 1st person: each section so far is devoted to one main character, and all we see on the page in that section is what that one character sees. All we hear is what that one character hears, and that character's thoughts appear in captions for us to read.
I can only think of a couple times when someone's tried this in the more visual media--there was a movie of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake made back in the late '40s that was filmed as if the camera was attached to the main character's forehead, and Humphrey Bogart did one like that, too, but I can't recall the name right now--and I've always found them to be pretty contrived and not all that convincing. I was starting to think that 1st person narrative couldn't really be done other than on the written page or over the radio. But Allen's gone a long way toward proving me wrong, and I'm enjoying every page of it.
Now, if this was all Allen was doing, it'd be interesting enough to a structure-nut like me. But he's also telling a very effective story about the horrors of high school, throwing us into it right from the first page, then pulling back without ever letting the tension ease. And by moving the sections of his story around, showing us the same events from several different characters' POVs, he lets us, the readers, put together pieces of the story in ways that none of those individual characters can.
The only drawback I can see is the pacing: at just a couple panels a day, I'm gonna find it hard to keep everything straight in my sieve-like brain. I'll try it daily this week and see how it flows, but this one's definitely going on my list of comics to check once a week. An interesting story being told really, really well.
So one keeper and two "not quite"s. See you next week.
The Sixth Essay comes before this one: if you haven't read it, please feel free to take the link provided easlier in this sentence. In a similar way, the Eighth Essay comes after this one, and it has a link of its own in the earlier part of this sentence. The Book Reports main page has a complete listing, of course, and if you'd like to see what sort of comic I'm doing, you can jump over to the Daily Grind Main Page as well.