Three regular "story" comics this week. And I'll try to keep the manifestoes to a minimum....
Phil Redmon's been doing TartPop at regular and irregular intervals since March 11, 2003. His early stuff was mostly abstract four panel gag strips that slowly coalesced into a storyline, but then he began doing more full-page comics using some of the characters and settings he'd come up with. And by the time the Daily Grind Competition started, he had a stable of characters and images that he's been deploying into some fine, odd comics.
To be honest, though, I'm still a little "on the fence" when it comes to Redmon's stuff. I was really getting into the early comics as I read through his archives this last week--though Sunday afternoon as I put the finishing touches on this essay, his archive link only took me to a 404 page with a nice slice of pie drawn on it--but as soon as he went to the full pages, I just plain found it hard to read sometimes, his swirling black lines and solid colored shapes mixing with the dialogue and making me stop and squint to figure out each page's flow.
Fortunately, the effort would usually pay off--I like a lot of things about Redmon's peculiar sense of humor. But, well, when you get right down to it, I'm a lazy bum, and the question I kept coming back to was: is the substance inside Redmon's images worth the time it's taking me to decode? The answer would come up "yes" whenever I asked it, but I found I could only work through about a week's worth of his comics at a time: staring at the computer screen, reading the dialogue, figuring out the pictures, trying to understand how the whole thing fit together...
Now, I can imagine someone who's more visually oriented might not have this problem, but for me, I was kinda glad when Redmon started the month of August by returning to a more "four-panel" style of comic. In many ways, they're even more abstract than his early ones and are certainly the most abstract things I've seen in the Grind so far, and I find myself interested in seeing where he'll go next.
So I guess I'm coming down on the positive side of the fence. For as long as I can manage it...
Now, one of the problems with doing these report things and putting them up on the web is that people read them.
OK, maybe "problem" isn't the right word to use. But folks do read the things, and I started getting e-mails on them a couple weeks back. Pretty good e-mails, I'm happy to say: even when folks disagreed with what I've written, they've been very polite in telling me so. Then Tyler Longmire went a step further and started a thread on the Daily Grind Message Board to make his nice comments.
Of course, I hadn't actually gotten around to looking at Longmire's comic at that point, and that always brings out the "worry-wart" in me. I mean, what if it turns out that, after he's said nice things about me, I can't do the same? It's a situation I've been in before back in the days when I was writing reviews of science-fiction and fantasy short stories for Tangent Magazine, and it always makes me unhappy.
Fortunately, though, now that I've read through Tasty Human Meat, I can happily report that he's doing some very fine stuff over there. The strip starts with the title story, running from 02/28/05 with a few breaks through 06/02/05, and it's your usual webcomic about a guy and his robot roommate living in a world of human hamburger and talking sausages.
Longmire makes it seem easy, introducing his odd people and the odd universe they live in with such straight-forward simplicity, the story just seems to start happening: I didn't even realize I'd read three months worth of strips when the first chapter came to an end. Just in terms of structure--the way the story seems to come together through accretion rather than progressing step-by-step--it made me think of Dalton Sharp's Love is Lava, but since Longmire's setting his story on a much smaller scale, the technique works a lot better for me here.
One page into Chapter Two, though, in the second week of June, Longmire abandons Tasty Human Meat and begins Alternate Universe Comix, a title he'd used previously when he felt like doing something not related to THM. And after a few days of random comics, he starts a story so wonderfully odd, just the basic concept makes me very happy.
See, there's been a nuclear apocalypse here on ol' planet Earth, but instead of vaporizing everyone and everything into a vast atomic wasteland, it turns all the people into sea creatures: jellyfish, whales, squids, et cetera. But since human beings are human beings no matter what, our modern society slowly begins to re-establish itself under the sea.
I don't know how long Longmire will stick with this, but all I can really say is: go read it. I'm very glad I finally did.
Robin Bougie's Daily Comic is Not For Me.
Now, when I say that, all I mean is exactly that: it's Not For Me. I'm not saying that Bougie's comic is bad. I'm not saying that Bougie should be doing some other sort of comic. I'm not saying you shouldn't read Bougie's comic or that Bougie should be censured or censored or anything else like that. In the grand scheme of things, after all, what's important is: Bougie's doing stuff he enjoys, and I'm guessing there's a lotta folks out there who're enjoying it, too.
It's just...I'm not one of them.
Now, it may be that I'm a prude--I called myself that back in my Eighth Essay, I know, and I've probably done so in other places, too. But mostly, I think, it's a similar phenomenon to that which I've mentioned before with regard to comics that rely mostly on video game humor for their content. They don't do much for me because, while I've seen videos games here and there, I've never really played one, not in any meaningful sense at least.
In the same way, I look at Bougie's sex-laden comics, and, well, let's just say that if I'd trademarked the title "The 40 Year Old Virgin" six months ago when I became qualified to bear it, I could be fruitlessly suing a major motion picture company right now.
For the record, though, I only read the first month-and-a-half of Bougie's comic, so if he gets into something other than sex jokes after the middle of April, I haven't seen 'em. But I was glad to see in his entry for April 7th how well the Grind experience is working out for him, and I hope it's continued to do so since then.
Using one of the many math-based mental processes, I've determined that in these ten essays, each devoted to three different comics, I've written something about 30 Daily Grind comics. Of those 30, only 1--PvP--has dropped out of the contest. So the decisions I've been making about which comics to look at in any given week seem to be paying off. Let's hear it for random selection!
A little more math tells me that, as of this moment, there are 9 comics in the contest that I haven't yet written up--not counting my own, of course. So if everyone who's still in the Grind makes it another 3 weeks, it'll all come out nice and even from my point of view.
This, then, is addressed to those of you whose comics I haven't gotten to comic yet: if you feel like you're about to drop, please either hang on till the middle of September...or do what you can to take 2 other contenstants with you when you go. I'd hate to break my pattern, after all... :)
Although, now that I think about it, I'm still gonna be "one up"--I've reported on 29 of the remaining 40 comics, so taking mine out, that still leaves 10. Darn those math processes!
Anyway, see you figuratively next week.
As has become traditional, here are the links: the Ninth Essay, the Eleventh Essay, the Book Reports main page, and of course, my Daily Grind comic's main page.