So Steve Troop dropped out of the Daily Grind a couple days before Christmas and about seven weeks after "rebooting" his entire Melonpool universe, throwing out several years of archives, and starting the whole thing anew with the same characters.
At the time, his starting over put me in mind of his fellow Blank Label Comics creator Brad Guigar, also a contestant in the Grind, who did a similar sort of thing to his Greystone Inn comic back in May: he jettisoned the entire "comic within a comic" set-up he'd been working with since the first strip back in 2000 and segued into the genre of superhero parody with his Evil Inc. strip.
Now, I can't speak for Guigar or Troop--and I don't read their comics for reasons I spell out in my Sixth Essay and Second Essay respectively--but making a fresh start in any creative endeavor is often just the thing to get the ol' juices flowing again. That's kind of what got me involved in this whole Contest to begin with: I do my Terebinth comic in a very measured, very precise, very controlled fashion, and I was looking to do something a bit more spontaneous.
Of course, the obvious difference in the approaches Guigar and Troop took with their fresh starts is that Guigar's still doing his comic while Troop, to put it baldly, isn't.
I hope it's just a break Troop's taking from his characters and from comics in general, and I further hope that it'll revitalize him. I know he's got a lot of fans waiting for him to come back, too, so the best of luck to him.
Now, because I'd like to make these essays something more than a mere macabre exercise in numbering the dead, I've decided to call my own bluff and actually try reporting on some of the non-Grind webcomics I read that I haven't seen written up in the review blogs--Websnark, for instance, and the several others that have sprung up in Eric Burns's wake.
So I'd like for a moment to turn my attention toward the three comics that Ralph E. Hayes Jr. does over on what until a few days ago was called Keenspace but which is now, I believe, formally known as ComicGenesis: Goblin Hollow, Nip and Tuck, and Tales of the Questor. Two of these comics I read regularly while the third I don't for reasons I'll get into here in a bit.
Now, the library clerk in me says to proceed alphabetically, so let's start with Goblin Hollow, a comic that began October 2, 2000 with the title Under the Lemon Tree. Changes in the characters and their situations, though, prompted Hayes to do a reboot along the lines of the ones discussed above, ending the first series on August 13, 2004 and starting the second on August 17, 2004. Of the three reboots mentioned in this Essay, this one seems to me the most organic, more a natural outgrowth of the comic than a case of the creator deciding he wanted to do something different....
Be that as it may, however, the comic started with Ben Bruin, a bear on the janitorial staff of a medium-sized department store in an unspecified medium-sized city in this talking animal version of America. Ben comes home from work in the first strip to discover that six aspects of his personality had manifested themselves corporeally and are now running around as miniature animal-people in his apartment. You know: the usual sort of thing...
The second month of the strip saw a puma-woman named Lily start working at the department store's lunch counter, and Ben found himself very much attracted to her. His new little friends decide to help him woo her, and the first series ends after many adventures with Ben and Lily getting married. The second series, then, chronicles their life afterwards as proprietors of their own video arcade, a place they call Goblin Hollow.
These characters--Ben, the six members of his "posse," Lily, the other folks they all run across--and their interactions drew me into the strip, got me enjoying it and looking forward to it...and that was when Hayes started using the strip to address various social and political points.
Now, I don't care much for stories based on "current events." When I read a story, I wanna read a story, not a newspaper article or an op-ed piece. But Hayes manages to walk the fine line between screed and story better than most in Goblin Hollow: for instance, when some of Ben and Lily's co-workers start ribbing them because they're remaining "chaste" while dating, I didn't feel like the author was belaboring me about the shoulders with his Truncheon of Truth. The way he plays the storyline out, it's much more a case of these particular characters making these particular decisions with their lives, and it works so much better in my eyes than someone trying to thunder from the mountaintops.
In fact, one of the best discussions I've ever read on the issues surrounding gun ownership came when Ben got mugged, bought a hand gun, and then neglected to tell Lily about it for a fair stretch of time. The way Hayes frames the discussion that follows among the various characters, it's obvious what his point of view is, but again, he doesn't hit me over the head with it. He plays the debate out as it might very well happen between actual people who love each other, and his conclusions made me think about the issue in a way I never had before. And that he does all this and still makes the strip laugh-out-loud funny, that's the kind of writing I like.
As opposed to, say, the sort of writing Hayes does for the most part in his Nip and Tuck strip...
Nip and Tuck, also begun on October 2, 2000, is the story of two fox brothers living in Malarkey County, a talking-animal version of the American South along the lines of the old Pogo comic strip. Except the dominant political bent here is even more to the right than Walt Kelly was to the left.
Which would be fine if Hayes handled the characters as well as he does in Goblin Hollow. And in truth, when he's just telling stories, I do enjoy the strip: the whole romance between Tuck and Thelma, a young possum the brothers have known their whole lives, for instance, has developed very nicely over the course of the last five years.
But the way Hayes approaches politics here is almost the exact opposite of his approach in Goblin Hollow: the Truncheon of Truth flies far and wide, and it's just plain Not For Me. Maybe if Gilly, the token "liberal" in Nip and Tuck, was more than a straw-man, more than a collection of every wing-nut idea that comes along, the real and metaphorical beatings he gets would be funnier or at least more meaningful--I had some hopes early in 2005 that Gilly might develop into an actual character when he became infatuated with the new female disk jockey at the local radio station, but nothing really came of it...
Still, if Hayes did the same things in Nip and Tuck that he does in Goblin Hollow, what'd be the point in doing both strips? One size definitely does not fit all, especially in the wide world of web comics, and Hayes is obviously pointing the strips at slightly different audiences. As for me, I check in with Nip and Tuck about three times a year, click through the more eye-rollingly obvious strips, and follow the characters' stories.
Now, these two strips are more or less reality-based: I mean, yes, all the characters are talking animals, but they live in a world that's just a couple bubbles off from ours. From its beginning on November 18, 2001, though, Tales of the Questor has been a full-fledged fantasy. And a very well-done fantasy at that.
Nearly all the characters in this strip are raccoon people living in the sort of medievalish world you might find in a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, but the Rac Conan, as they call themselves, are separated from the rest of this world, their lands ringed around by deep and trackless swamps. On top of that, the Rac Conan are adept at the manipulation of lux, a natural force like electricity or magnetism, that no one else seems able to detect: lux is very powerful, and it can not only be bent to the will of a Rac Conan skilled enough to wield it, it can also be attached to objects so those not so skilled in working with the stuff raw can still use it through these objects to make their lives easier.
The upshot of this is that humans think the raccoon people are all magicians while the raccoon people deny that magic exists: Hayes lets us sit in on a class one of the characters takes at the Artificers' College, and we get the whole history and practice of lux manipulation and how it's played havoc with Rac Conan/human relations.
Out of this background steps our hero, a young Rac Conan lad named Quentyn who has almost no ability to work lux but who wants more than anything in the world to become a Questor, the sort of hero-for-hire that he's only read about in the equivalent of cheap novels because there hasn't been a Questor in the land for quite a long time...
This one's got all the classic elements: a stalwart hero willing to put himself on the line for what he believes, a fascinating and well thought out world, and a supporting cast of allies and enemies interesting enough to merit the side-stories Hayes gives them now and then. This is also the only one of the three strips that Hayes does regularly in color, and he's got an eye for it that I'd call second to none. He keeps his Truncheon of Truth sheathed here, too, and as I mentioned above, that's always a plus in my book.
Still, I had what I call an "Eek the Cat" experience the first time I tried to read Tales of the Questor: I got 3 or 4 pages into it, decided I didn't like it, and went on to something else. It was only later when I gave the strip another try--I'm always giving things multiple tries; I mean, I want to find good stuff to read--that I discovered how the first 5 pages are actually one of the cheap novels Quentyn is reading and have nothing to do with the actual rest of the comic.
So, Goblin Hollow and Tales of the Questor get my highest recommendation, and if you're one of those folks who enjoys talk radio, give Nip and Tuck a try. Ralph Hayes Jr. knows what he's doing, and he's definitely one of my favorite cartoonists out there today.
You can find the previous Essays in this series on the Book Reports main page, or you can just go to the one immediately preceding this, the Fifteenth Essay or the one immediately following it, the Seventeenth Essay. My two comics, by the way, are Daily Grind and Terebinth.