Dalton Sharp's Crown Commission site and his LiveJournal
I started out reading Dalton Sharp's Crown Commission site, but the archives there left me unsure which comics he'd done for the Daily Grind and which ones he'd done beforehand. The only dated comics are in the section labeled "Daily Grind," conveniently enough, but that section only has comics for the first two weeks of the contest and April 1st. The story called Love is Lava, on the other hand, has nearly 170 pages sitting there, more than would be possible at a rate of one page per day of the Grind so far.
Still, I read through everything, then went back to the Daily Grind Main Page to take the link to his LiveJournal. To my surprise, I discovered another 50 or so pages continuing Love is Lava--as near as I could tell, he's stopped updating what I thought was his main site completely and has been working the past few months only on his LiveJournal.
Now, I try not to let technical issues like this sway me when I'm reading a webcomic, and it's not like I don't run into them fairly regularly: getting into the archives on Greg Dean's Real Life was a bit of a challenge last month when I was writing my Fifth Essay, and I got myself all confused trying to figure out which site to look at with Jam Torkberg's comics in the Fourth Essay and Jamie Dee Galey's comics in the Sixth Essay.
But Galey at least had a link to his LiveJournal there on the front page of his site so an interested reader--such as me--could click right on over to see what else he was doing. Maybe I missed it on Sharp's Crown Commission site, but I couldn't find any mention there that Sharp even has a LiveJournal let alone a note saying that the story I'd been reading was now being updated on this other site.
Of course, as I've said before, creators don't owe me, the audience, a single thing except the best work they can. And any creators worth a grain of salt will be doing their best work anyway--whether they have an audience or not-- because anything less than the best they can do, I mean, what's the point of spending time on this stuff if you're not putting your all into it? Sure, if a creator's selling out, that's one thing, but in webcomics, the audience is so small and fragmented, selling out's likely to get you just about enough for a cup of coffee and a cheese-filled danish. If you're not enjoying the work of doing a webcomic, you might as well go into some line where there's actual money--like plumbing or car repair.
All I'm saying is: a link to Sharp's other site woulda been nice. As a creator myself, I like to make it as easy as possible for any interested audience to get ahold of the stuff I've done, and on the web, it's just takes a little HTML to direct readers over to the LiveJournal. Do people still talk about "netiquette?" Or did that go out with the phrase "informtion superhighway"?
Anyway, once I managed to find all of Love is Lava, I kind of enjoyed it. It really reminds me of this fine, odd book from the mid-'90s called Clouds End, written by Sean Stewart, one of my favorite novelists. Both stories start out small and expand in odd ways into real fantasy epics...and both made me have second thoughts while reading them.
With Stewart's book, it took me a couple weeks after finishing it to decide that I did in fact like it, and I'm feeling just as uncertain right now about Love is Lava. I'm not entirely sure what's going on from page to page in Sharp's comic, but he's definitely telling a story here, a story full of lies and half-truths and weird magic and plain ol' every day weirdness, all told in a very clean and elegant black-and-white minimalist style with small panels of nearly uniform size.
But it moves so very slowly, and I'm not getting any sense of a "through-line" even two hundred and some-odd pages into it. He's set up some story and character points, but he just keeps setting up more without even hinting at any resolutions to the ones he's already got. I find myself thinking I'll check in with Love is Lava every now and again, but at this point, the story seems to be accreting material rather than growing at a steady rate--like a coral reef or a lava flow rather than a tree or a stalagmite. I guess I'm just more of a tree person...
Tim Hulsizer's archive, on the other hand--I think I detect a theme this week--is laid out on his main page day by day, the link to his first Grind comic at the bottom and the latest comic at the top. Simple enough that even a schlub like me can figure it out...
He's also got a fine fantasy story going on: Etsu it's called, and it's one of the reasons I only check his site during my "weekend round-up" on Fridays. See, when he's putting a page together, he works on it over the course of a couple days, adding panels every day till it's done, and I prefer to read the whole page at once to get that "satisfying chunk" of story that I've talked about before.
But Hulsizer does so much more than that, as wide a variety of comics on his page as any I've seen anywhere on the web--"mixed media week" a couple months ago was one of my favorites, and he's done a couple "Cthulhu Jr." comics that stand out in my memory. And even though he does "take it to the potty" now and again, he does it in ways that I find to be actually funny, a hard thing when you're dealing with a wizened, old prude such as myself.
In short, Chemical Comics Daily is a nice grab bag of stuff--you never know exactly what you're gonna get, but you can count on it being well-drawn and either funny or interesting--and I'm all for that: after all, my Saturday morning radio program is called "The Darkling Eclectica," so eclectic is one of my watch words. If you like John Hill's Fatty at Amazing Amoeba and you're not already reading Hulsizer's stuff--or vice versa, for that matter--I'd like to recommend that you give the other a look.
When I first found the old Daily Grind message board a week or two after the contest started--there's a new message board now if you'd like to go visit it, but the old one's been consigned to "the bit bucket" for a while now--I picked up three pieces of "conventional wisdom" in my lurking: 1) it was totally unfair for Scott Kurtz to have entered the contest since he was obviously going to win; 2) D. J. Coffman was useless and mean-spirited; and 3) Yu-Jay Huoh's comics were the worst things on the internet.
Well, glancing at the Daily Grind home page shows me Kurtz listed among the Losers. As for Coffman, well, he may be overly fond of stirring things up, but even when called my Daily Grind comic "CRAP!!!", he explained his reasoning in a way that I completely understood. And now that I've read Abrandoned Kids from the beginning, I've gotta say: I've seen worse.
Which isn't to say that Huoh's comic is For Me: it's Not. I'll admit that I laughed a couple times while clicking from one end of his comics to the other--he doesn't have an archive page at all, to touch briefly on this essay's "theme"--but Abrandoned Kids for the most part strikes me as South Park without the heart.
Huoh's crude little computer-drawn stick-figure kids and their parents are just that--crude. They've got nothing else going for them. And while I can find crude to be funny in small doses now and then, I need a little more than that in a comic to hold my fickle interest. So I'm giving this one a pass.
Which gives me a "hat trick" for this essay, if I might use an inappropriate sports metaphor: one "maybe," one "yes," and one "no."
Now, back in my Third Essay, when talking about Natasha Allegri's journal comic, Normal Life, my main point was that "I don't know Allegri yet even after almost 4 months of Monday through Friday strips." Because I still feel that that's a major part of the whole journal comic experience: it's another way to get to know a person and his or her world through that person's own eyes and ears.
Of course, I'm not really getting to know this person, but the best personal essayists--Robert Benchley, for instance, or E. B. White or Dave Barry--they present a personality in their work that draws me in and makes me feel like I'm getting to know them. It's as much a part of this kind of non-fiction writing as plot and character are to regular fiction.
And in the month and a half since I wrote my Third Essay, I feel like I've gotten to know Allegri and her world a lot better through her comics. Whether she's getting more into the form or I'm just now finally picking up on what she's been doing all along, I can't say. But her stuff's recently started to click in my sieve-like brain, and I wanted to make a note of it here.
It just occurred to me that with my previous Seventh Essay, I passed the "halfway mark" of comics left in the Grind; I should be done with these things by the middle of September. And the Ninth Essay advances things even further!
Anyway, if you've missed any of 'em, they're all arrayed on the Book Reports main page. And let's not forget my Daily Grind comic's Main Page.