8-26-05

Three from the Ground

The ground floor is a cool place to be.  Seriously.  If something takes off, and you were in on the ground, you get to takeoff with it, at least a little.  It's also a dangerous place to be.  If it crashes, everyone with a little chunk of tile in their hair looks at you for opening the door. 
          Webcomics are famous for crashing.  Sometimes a comic that took off at first and looks like it will fly well ends up taking an early landing at Suckville International and sits there taking on whole new loads of suck.  More often, comics, especially ambitious ones, will crash and burn as the authors suffer early burnout.  Updates become infrequent, then non-existent.  Then, if you're lucky, there'll be a news post remarking that they just couldn't keep it up.  Or the site will just disappear.  C'est la vie.
          This is why I'm doing three fairly new comics.  I figure, if I do three, then if one goes down, you'll forgive me for the sake of the other two.

Quirky Doesn't Begin...
...to describe Masters of the Art by Justin Pixler and Patrick Johnson.  The tale of two friends in high school, Jackson and Dirk, it starts out like every other comic about high school boys.  There are a couple idiot-jokes, a few bits based on gender confusion and masturbation, all pretty much standard.  Fairly early on, however, Johnson's writing takes a turn to the left.  He returns to the opening joke, a throw-away gag based on the anime convention of androgyny.  At first it seems to be just a follow-up bit, but it expands into a full arc featuring a mysterious "King of Perverts" and a covert attempt to enter the girls' locker room and verify the package (or lack thereof) of the unrevealed "girl" from the first strip.  From there it takes off.  MotA  is a bouncy fun ride through left field, with twists and turns that can only exist in the mind of a young man.  An attempt to escape a fast food restaurant ends up in a super-hero battle with an eight-armed Emeril LaGasse.  The aforementioned covert action results in a comedy of errors that crosses all areas of high school abuse. 
          But it wouldn't work if Johnson wasn't well-supported by Pixler's art.  Pixler is developing a fun and interesting style, despite his obvious anime influences.  The early comics resemble Krakow, but Pixler quickly leaves Krazy Krow's stiff, untutored style behind and begins to show a fluid movement and attention to story-telling that underline and support Johnson's writing.
          The total package is one not to miss.  Supplemented by infrequent commentaries and Pixler's "journal strips", MotA is a strong addition to the webcomics world.  Unfortunately, they have a problem with consistency.  MotA is listed in my links as a weekly, but that's really just my checking frequency.  Sometimes they'll post a comic a few days in a row; sometimes they'll go more than a week without an upgrade.  The guys' recent move to a shared house has not improved this tendency, but hopefully, when it all settles down, they'll work out a schedule they can keep.

If Dashiell Hammett Wrote The Snatch...
...it would probably look a lot like Thirty Pieces of Silver, by Dennis Harmon II, and Emily Mottesheard.  TPoS somehow manages to seamlessly combine traditional Film Noire with British Gangster movies, with a healthy, but unobtrusive dose of Bible allegory.  I can't speak to the colloquialisms in the dialogue—I'm neither British nor a gangster—but it seems to work.  Fifteen pages into the maiden story arc, Harmon's tale seems a bit confusing and unfocused, but it projects confidence that there is a definite direction, and, like a Hammett novel, all will be explained before the end.  The three main characters—Peter, Judas, and Thomas—like all Noire anti-heroes are fascinating without being particularly empathetic or likeable.  And the plot is captivating in that "impending doom" sort of way that keeps people watching the old films.
          Like an old film, Mottesheard's art is sepia-toned and masterful.  Her backgrounds are detailed but non-intrusive.  She has a deft hand with focus, directing the eye on a page the way Hitchcock once directed a camera.  If she has a problem, it's the inconsistency of her character art.  Sometimes realistic, sometimes cartoonish, stiff characters share panels with fluid, natural ones.  It can be jarring, or at least distracting.
          What is consistent, is their update schedule.  A quick glance at their archive map shows a quick resolution from their early instability to a determined conformance to a tight Tuesday-Thursday regimen (Mottesheard, at least, has another comic, and more the twice a week might be too ambitious a juggling act).  The most recent page is a filler, proving their dedication to posting something, even if the story page is not yet ready.  Just two months old, TPoS is showing rapid growth and development.  Let's hope it continues.

Premise Is Just a Box...
...and James Hitchinson's Crashlander proves it.  How else could such a stock story filled with stock characters be so damn good?  How many crashed aliens are there in the webcomics world?  How many curmudgeonly-but-soft-hearted grandfathers?  How many precocious little girls?  Probably a million, but none of them are as good as this.
          Crashlander started off slow but quickly caught its footing.  Perhaps it was due to Hutchinson's slavish devotion to his Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.  Maybe it's the stylized artwork.  Or maybe it's just that, after the first couple of strips, the comic is just consistently funny.  It's not edgy or particularly intellectual, and only a few minor pop culture references betray its Londoner origins and setting; it's just funny.  And cute.  And totally worth a read no matter how long it lasts.

Masters of the Art by Justin Pixler and Patrick Johnson
Updates: Weekly (sort of)
Caveats:  Adult themes, language, Emeril LaGasse
Rating:

Thirty Pieces of Silver by Dennis Harmon II and Emily Mottesheard
Updates: TTh
Caveats:  Adult themes, language, probably not work-safe
Rating:

Crashlander by James Hutchinson
Updates: MWF
Caveats:  None
Rating:

Errata:  Masters of the Art:  Pixler and Johnson share writing duties.  Jackson is not the name of the second main character; Jackson is a minor character.  The second main is named Reed.