This Essay marks the end of my tap-dance through the comics participating in the Daily Grind Contest, so after the usual reports, I'll see what I can do about summing things up. I can hardly wait to see what I might have to say...
One of the many surprises that has sprung full-blown into my face on this whole Daily Grind journey is how many of the contestants have been doing their webcomics for a number of years without me ever coming across them.
Which sounds grotesquely egotistical, now that I think about it. But, I mean, I've been reading webcomics regularly since a friend showed me Kevin and Kell back in 1996: I still have the three-ring binder full of the print-outs I was making of the comic before Plan 9 Publishing came out with the first "dead-tree edition" in May of 1997. That's the reason my Comix Links' Page to this day is called "kk.html"--Kevin and Kell and Freefall were the reason I started that page in the first place: after all, how could I be expected to remember two whole URLs?
And while I don't spend hours and hours a day leafing through the categories at OnlineComics.net in my quest for new comics to read, I do spend some time there every week or so. And any time I find a new comic that I like, one of my first stops is its link page, a process that's furnished more than one comic that I now follow as regularly as that comic might appear.
In short, I've been spending some little time over the past eight-and-a-half years looking for webcomics. And yet, Andrew Rothery's Tru-Life Adventures, begun in March of 2001, has completely escaped my notice till this past week.
I've read the comic's first year as of this writing, and I found a lot there to like: characters who are odd but still grounded in "tru-life," a setting that I've not seen before--the various workers at a Toys 'R' Us-type toystore--and plots that zip off into fantasy now and again while still staying centered in the reality of a life working retail.
And while, as I've said before, I don't like to comment on the art in webcomics--a glance at either Terebinth or my own Daily Grind comic should show you why--I did have a little trouble getting the characters here straight in my head based on their pictures. And when Rothery introduced a character whose whole point in the story seems to be that he resembles the main character, well, I got even more confused.
This is a minor qualm where I come from, though, since the characters are written so strongly that their voices come through in their dialogue. Tru-Life Adventures is definitely another comic I'm gonna add to my list.
And while it says "Karltoons," the only one I could find on Karl Kauffman's web site was Fatstuff Comics. Still, it's his web site, so I'll use the name he gives it.
Fatstuff Comics, for its part, chronicles the adventures of Fatman, Fatlady, and Teen Fatman in their never-ending battle to fight crime and eat ice-cream, not necessarily in that order.
Which pretty much sums up Kauffman's comic, as near as I can tell....
I mean, they're certainly not bad, funny in most of the ways that superhero parody comics are funny, and I really like the cartoony style Kauffman uses to draw his characters--Fatman and Fatlady are mostly circles while Teen Fatman and the various supporting characters have a bit more to them.
But a little of this goes a long way with me, and it just started to pall on me after the sixth page of the Fatstuff Comics archive--I'm guessing from the look of things that he started the comic specifically for the Grind, but that's just a guess: there are 26 pages of Archives before we come to strips that are dated, but those dates are from July on. There is an interesting sequence where Kauffman steps in and talks to his characters, but it's got more "self-analysis" to it than it does story, and then we're back to our regular shenanigans.
If you like superhero parody comics along the lines of, say, former Grinder Owen Kuhn's Super Store, give Fatstuff Comics a look. For me, though, it just doesn't quite "zing"...
Now, in my previous Essay, I expressed an intention to take another look at the comics Phil McAndrew was doing on his Phil in the Blanks site and over at his LiveJournal to see why I was having such a tepid reaction to them--the week of Sept. 5th had proved to be a bit more fraught-with-adventure than I tend to like, and I wanted to make sure that wasn't coloring my perceptions too badly.
Well, continuing through his LiveJournal on and off through the week, I kept getting the same feeling. And then, when 2 of the 3 Grind judges ruled that McAndrew's Friday comic wasn't enough of a comic to fit the rules and therefore disqualified him, Stephen Burrell, whose Trains of Thought I reported on in my Twelfth Essay, posted a comment to the Daily Grind message board that showed he'd had a similar response to mine: when McAndrew was "on," he was definitely "on," but, well, he'd been "off" for a large portion of this contest...
Still, it was the passing of Miles Pakala's Strange Town that made me sigh the most this week: I reported on Strange Town back in the First Essay I did in this series. According to Pekala's own account, posted on the aforementioned message board, he had put his Tuesday comic up Tuesday night before going to bed, but his father, concerned that the Grind was taking up too much of his son's time, logged in and deleted the comic in order to force Pekala out of the contest.
I hope, though, that Pekala doesn't stop. Even the "one-shot" comics he'd been doing lately on Tuesdays and Thursday made me smile, and the main thing he'd been working on, this fine parody of The Never-Ending Story, of all things, I'd been really looking forward to seeing where he was gonna go with it. I just enjoy the odd sensibility he brings to his comics, and I'll keep checking the site for new ones...
Now for a summing up.
I found some good comics and some that didn't strike a chord with me, but other than that, I'm not likely to form any "big picture" theories out this whole experience. As I said in my Introductory Essay, my tastes don't seem to run along the same lines as most people's. So any conclusions I could draw from looking at all these comics over the past three-and-a-half months wouldn't be all that applicable to anyone else.
There's a lotta comics out there, I guess would be one point. And if you sift through them all, you'll probably find some you like.
As for the Daily Grind Contest itself, now that I've read all the comics still in contention, do I have any insights into who might end up standing alone at the end?
Me? Insights? You've definitely come to the wrong place, buddy...
All I'm gonna do here is divide the contestants into two groups: those who, as far as I can tell, were already updating an online comic before the contest started, and those whose webcomics appear to have begun on Feb. 28, 2005. After all, maybe those folks who had a previous committment to a comic might have a bit of an edge when it comes to the skills necessary to keep a webcomic up and running.
Not that using that as a criterion helps any sort of a winnowing process; I mean, here's the first group listed alphabetically: Jennie Breeden, D.J. Coffman & Bob McDevitt, Chris Crosby, Paul Gadzikowski, Ali Graham, Brad Guigar, Matt Johnson, Brandon Lewis, Tom McHenry, Phil Redmon,, Andrew Rothery Dalton Sharp, R. Smith, Todd A. Sullivan, Steve Troop, and David Wright.
And those are just the ones I noted when reading their archives. In fact, I'd put myself in that group since I've been doing my Terebinth comic for a couple years now, and I'd even add Joseph Bergin, Jamie Dee Galey, Edward Grug, and Ive Sorocuk since I have a vague recollection of having seen comments from them in various places to the effect that they were already drawing comics everyday, so putting 'em up on the web was just one more step in an already-existing process for them.
That's more than half the contestants left in this thing. And even then, I wouldn't wanna count anyone in the second group out, either: I mean, two of the biggest and most-established names in webcomics, Greg Dean and Scott Kurtz, have already slipped from the running. So keep an eye on all those others, too: Natasha Allegri, Lonnie Allen, Stephen Burrell, John Hill, Tim Hulsizer, Yu-Jay Huoh, Karl Kauffman, Tyler Longmire, Eric Poole, Mike Stevens, Bryan Stone, Jam Torkberg, Remi Treuer, and Bela Whigimill.
It's anyone's game, really, and I'll certainly be hanging around--reading, at least--for as long as it keeps going.
Though this is the final of the actual Reports in this series, here's a link back to the Thirteenth Essay and, strangely enough, a link forward to the Fifteenth Essay. There's also the Book Reports main page and my Daily Grind Comic's Main Page.