7-22-05

I blame Disney

Disney wasn't the first, obviously.  Plenty of folks before him, including Shakespeare, made a dime off of raping the old stories.  But Disney made it truly bankable, and the Disney Corporation, under Eisner, made it unforgivably popular to take one or two elements (or, in the case of Pocahontas, names) from a story and then just wrap your own crap sandwich around it to make it unrecognizable to anyone familiar with the actual tale.
          What am I on about, you may (fairly) ask?  Well, I just spent a little over an hour going through the Gossamer Commons archive in an effort to give a fair review.  What I found was a mishmash of pretentious usage and violated myth wrapped in a mediocre comic about the East Coast arts scene.  Will I still be fair?  I'll try.  But don't look for a happy review, and certainly don't look for this one in my links.  I've decided that anything that gets two or fewer stars will not go in.  My links page is, first and foremost, my quasi-bookmark list.  Those guys are there because I regularly read them and check them for updates.  That isn't going to happen with GC.
          My first reaction when reading Gossamer Commons when it first came out back in March was. "It takes two people to make this comic?"  Now my reaction is "Not only does it take two people to make this comic, but they find themselves so strained by its demands that they've taken a holiday only four months into it?"  That's right.  GC is, at this writing, enjoying a holiday break with all of the accompanying fan art and guest strips.  I have no idea why.  I assume at least one of the creators has wisely chosen not to leave his day job and is taking advantage of the vacation time provided by that work; the comic is just a collateral casualty.
          To be fair, the comic is not bad.  Unfortunately, that's all that it is:  not bad.  In terms of the arts, mediocrity is the greatest crime possible.  Showgirls was never a bad movie.  What made it bad was its mediocrity; it was like watching one of those "Portrait of..." movies-of-the-week from the seventies, with Elizabeth Berkeley's naked breasts instead of Massengil commercials.  The Blair Witch Project was a horrendously bad film.  Compare the two and try to see where I'm going.
          Which brings us back to GC.  Trying to push aside my irritation at scripter Eric Burns's decision to "redefine" the Fae, what else can I say about the writing?
          Hang on, I'm thinking...
          Okay, got one.   Burns has access to a good thesaurus and doesn't mind checking a dictionary to ensure that he is using a synonym correctly.  Seriously.  The characters are all pretty much stock, and the dialogue is very stiff.  He goes hard for the end-of-strip punch, and everything between the first panel and the last is merely a setup for that punch.  He gets very wordy in some of those intermediate panels, but it's uninteresting, it doesn't further the action, and it very definitely seems to carry the feeling that his English degree was his greatest personal accomplishment.  Very few people, even over-educated liberal arts majors, use that many multi-syllabic words in their day-to-day conversation. 
          The story reads like a college literary magazine page three short.  The protagonist, Keith Onzeker, grows up listening to his grandmother's broken and plagiarized "fairy tales", the gist of which is that any mortal who sees one of the Fae will die.  She has a loose interpretation of what the Fae are, too.  Sirens, doppelgangers and even misremembered Star Wars plots fall easily into her version of myth.  Flash forward to the present, and we find Keith on the street where he discovers and rescues a fairy child.  But he's seen her as she is, without a glamour.  And his grandmother was right, he's marked for death.  Luckily, since he did save the child, the Fae owe him a "boon" before they waste him.  It's really not a bad premise, and would make a good comic, except that it's fleshed out with stock characters and situations.
          There's Keith, the low-self-esteem, but basically good protagonist, who is probably much more talented than he realizes.  Trudy is his lifelong friend, the wise-cracking manipulator, and of course, there's Malachite, the Fey "enforcer", who looks and acts exactly like you'd expect him to, devilish, without actually appearing or acting evil.   Yawn.
          The art is serviceable, if mediocre, and if artist Greg Holkan were also the writer, or if he had to crank out a six-to-ten-panel strip every day, the art would be fine.  He does not, however, have those excuses.  And his art, while not bad by any means, is sketchy.  Now, I understand that word has a few different meanings, but I only mean it in two senses:  first, it's very inconsistent from panel to panel.  Holkan usually uses a broad brush-style reminiscent of old New Yorker comics, but he often switches styles so that some characters and scenes look like a Mike Mignola and others look like an old Henry panel.  It's very disconcerting and no effort is made to blend any of the style switches or even to explain them.
          Second, regardless of the style, his panels look like sketches.  No matter how detailed the character work or the backgrounds, the panels always appear unfinished.  Stray lines and ticks abound, errors lie unrepaired, white space distracts from...well...it's white space, and somehow it manages to distract.  You figure it out.
          At this point, I'm going to step away from the mechanics of comicking, so, if you want you can just scroll down to the thumbnail review for the final bit.  It is possible, as I said before, that I have not been completely fair to Burns, Holkan, or their comic.  If I have been unfair, I apologize for any excess.  But I am not sorry for my opinion that Gossamer Commons is definitely not a good comic; nor am I sorry for my decision not to include it in my links.  Truth is, I'm not really sorry for any unfairness, because GC pissed me off.
          What pissed me off was Burns's utter disrespect for the old stories.  I love the old stories and I collect them about me like soft pillows.  Anyone's old stories—the Monkey King, The Odyssey, the songs and tales of Cuchulain and Finn MacCoueil.  Religious overtones aside, the old stories carry the identity of a people.  They are who we were, and, by extension, they carry the seed of who we are and who we can be.  When a writer purees them in his own personal plot-mixer, it taints them, because every spoken word is believed by someone, and somewhere there are webgeeks who now believe (on some level) the crap that Burns has set forth. 
          What's worse is that he knows it's crap; he said so at least twice in the establishing pages of the comic.  Yet, he used it as his premise, anyway.  He even expands it by creating a universe where the Tuatha de Danaan are aware of and give a crap about JHVH and His Chosen People.  It smacks of gimmickry.  It's a bit of "difference" to set apart an otherwise mediocre comic.

Updates:  Semi-Weekly (don't ask me exact days—I don't care)
Caveats:  The establishing mythos are crap, tendency to pompousness
Rating: