Showing posts with label slice of life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slice of life. Show all posts

Sunday, May 6, 2018

Sunday Revue May 6: Waste Of Time, The Comic

Sit Back And Reeeeelax This Sunday, It's Time For

Growing up, getting by, getting a date and getting the groceries. Millenial life distilled into a strip, that's Waste Of Time. Written by Mel Cormac, Waste Of Time can be read at this link.  The story revolves around two brothers, Seth and Jon, and their attempts to navigate adulthood...with mixed results.

The Rating

Sorry lads. You've got a ways to go.


The Raves

There's a definite sense of snarky humor in this strip, fitting for a handful of young adults trying to figure out which end to hang onto life by.  It's definitely worth a couple chuckles. Treated as a gag-a-day, I'd class it as a good college strip to read between classes with a sympathetic smile.
As a reader I was impressed with the sheer persistence of the creator. They've come a long way from the semi-stick figures of 2009, gaining a better sense of style and use of color. The characters live through many relatable situations with comedic and reflective takes on situations we've all been in.

The Razzes

Unfortunately, that's where the comic's appeal starts to flag. There are a lot of things to improve. A few suggestions:

*Favicon

Even a rookie website ought to have a favicon, and a comic this old is long past due for this grace note. Adding one is simple. The html is <head profile="http://www.w3.org/2005/10/profile">
<link rel="icon" 
      type="image/png" 
      href="http://example.com/myicon.png"> 
For a little more detail, take a look at this site.

Style

There are a lot of comic styles. A very short list includes: 

Western (European, American)

Basic Comic (Little Lulu, Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Garfield)
Superhero Comics (Marvel/DC)
Classic Cartoony (Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Mickey Mouse)
90’s Retro Cartoony (Thick Black outlines, sharp edges, Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls)
Noir (Black and White, Detective, 1940’s themed)
Modern Cartoony (Thin Lines, Subdued colors, Steven Universe, Clarence)
Anime Inspired (Avatar, Legend of Korra, The Boondocks, Totally Spies)

East Asian (Japan, China, Korea)

Anime (Japanese animation, Naruto, One Piece, Dragonball)
Dong Hua Pian (Chinese cartoon, Kuibo)
Manhwa (Pucca, Hello Jadoo)

You get the idea. If I had to guess, Waste Of Time is trying to fall into the Basic Comic bin, but there's a difference between being stylistic and being in need of a little more work. For example, Ted Rall draws editorial cartoons that are quite rough, but they are saying something in their style. Rall states "To me a good political cartoon is something that makes you think about things in a new way. It’s not necessarily going to change your mind. But it might get you thinking, get you started along a line of thinking, that causes you to check things out more thoroughly. It might make you more able to articulate opinions that you already had." in his article. Like XKCD and The Oatmeal, they make definite statements that they're intending to be satirically funny with their style that is deceptively oversimplified.

Every artist should ask themselves what their style says to readers. Soft, bright colors and rounded shapes like Dennis the Menace or Calvin and Hobbes tell us that everything is safe and we can relax on a Sunday morning.  Intentionally rough work like Rall's stuff, The Far Side and The Oatmeal tell us satire is in the offing.
Hard lines and harsh shadows tell us that a rough story is coming, a la Watchmen. Mixed media and watercolor aka Sandman tell us to expect the unexpected. But what does Waste Of Time tell us?
Well, the colors are there, but the bodies mainly tell us that the artist is aiming for realism and missing. If the creator likes the cartoon style, here's some great books and resources: 






The Revue

Well, the comic named itself Waste Of Time. It's not quite that...but it's not the Mona Lisa.



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Sunday, May 8, 2016

Sunday Revue May 8th: BOHICA Blues

Ladies and Gentlemen...
Let's Take A Moment To Honor Our Service Men And Women...



...With today's webcomic BOHICA Blues by Coyote. 

BOHICA Blues is set during the 2004 Iraqi War and is loosely made up of Coyote's actual experience from his tour of duty there. The webcomic is a slice-of-life about the soldiers in the fictional 213th Combat Engineering Battalion stationed at Camp Victory.

If you've got a political viewpoint about the 2004 war, check it at the door. If you're expecting the romanticized life of a soldier through sacrifice, duty, and honor a la a grandiose Hollywood film, dial back your expectations. This comic sums it up best:


Rating


Raves


You can tell where Coyote spends his time when it comes to the art. 




There's a real love for military machines and gear, and as I was reading, I could see a lot of effort was spent in depicting them with great detail -- the soldiers' camo, weapons, humvees, and other armored vehicles. Likewise, the soldiers of the 213th Battalion are also depicted with the diversity you'd find in our modern fighting force -- there are men and women and they run the spectrum of ethnicity.




By far the aspect of BOHICA I enjoyed the most was reading Coyote's additional notes on what it was like to actually be there. At one point he writes, war is "90% boredom and 10% sheer terror" and BOHICA is mainly about that 90%. We get a condensed view of what life was like on the ground in Iraq, and it's probably not quite how we think of it. It's not trenches and foxholes, but soldiers living in trailers playing video games in their off hours (a good way to keep out of trouble, he quips at one point).


Modern shops like Starbucks, Cinnabon, and Hardees are in their camp's mall area to bring a bit of home to the front. It's odd to reconcile how we might think of war versus the reality of it depicted through BOHICA, and it's this kind of first-hand account that's interesting to me.




For those of us in the civilian world who remember 9/11 and the ensuing wars, we probably remember a lot of the rah-rah politics and anti-war sentiments of the time. There's probably still a sour taste about all those WMDs that were supposed to be there and subsequently never found. Coyote's divorced those opinions and politics and instead given us a focused and direct depiction of army life. It's non-Hollywood. No glorious speeches about honor and self-sacrifice. The 10% of sheer terror is portrayed with confusion as IEDs or mortars going off in the distance, 4 AM alarms, and the occasional firefight with local insurgents.

Razzes


As much as I liked the diverse cast of BOHICA, the characters always felt secondary. I'm reading this comic primarily as one soldier's memoir of the Iraqi War. The characters of the comic serve to highlight various gags about army life and life during wartime, but I never cared for the characters themselves. Part of the issue is because there were so many of them and they started to run together. It probably only matters that Joe Rock has any meaningful character progression (which he does) since all of the gags loosely happen around him.

At one point Coyote notes that BOHICA is a new rendition of some gag comics he did while stationed in Iraq. Maybe if he were to consider the material again, he could condense the characters so there are less to keep track of and have story threads that tie the gags together into something more coherent. I'm guessing it might feel like a modern day M*A*S*H.


Website

I read part of BOHICA on my smartphone, and while the site is mobile responsive and perfectly usable, I found that the two giant ads on the sidebar show up over top of the comic. It might be a nice touch to use a CSS media query to show a different image (this would require putting the image as a background image in a div).

I found the History and About section empty, so I wonder why it's there. There's a link to Patreon but it appears to go nowhere. The guy wearing the BOHICA shirt would be nice if it lead to a store, but it doesn't. In other words, there's a lot of dead links making the site feel unfinished. It might be better to stub something in. Also, The archival search is broken when I tested it. 

Revue

If you're interested in a first-hand perspective from a soldier who was on the ground in Iraq, then definitely give BOHICA Blues a read.

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Saturday, May 23, 2015

Saturday May 23rd: Piece Of Me

Ladies And Gentlemen!
                   Let Me Introduce You

                 To A Most Interesting Fellow!
Introducing, Piece Of Me!


I've always been one of those people who has to read something with their breakfast. Time and again as a child I was told to put the book down and eat. As an adult, morning is my time to catch up on my favorite gag-a-day strips.
But you really shouldn't sip your tea when you're reading 'Piece Of Me', because you will invariably spit out said tea when you burst out laughing. And cleaning spit and tea off a phone or computer screen is no fun at all.
This romp of a strip, the creation of  Lukas Draxl, can be found here. It falls into the slice of life category, but only barely; there are plenty of fun asides and dimensional jumps to keep things interesting. And the creator's takes on life are no slouch either; their takes on the creative life and life in general will keep you grinning.

The Rating


A wonderfully dry, clever and off the wall take on life.


The Raves

Here's a good explanation of how much I enjoyed this comic: as I wrote this piece I jumped onto the page to check the url for adding here....and got distracted by the comic. Twice. I read a few strips each time before a lightbulb clicked on: 'hey, I was supposed to be WRITING about this, not READING MORE of it. I'm addicted, aren't I?' and at this point I indeed am.

From the beginning, the strip has had a wonderfully deadpan sense of humor. The oneshots usually follow a similar formula; an intelligently worded setup, followed by a witty payoff out of left field.




 
Though occasionally the humor is a bit more direct.


I especially recommend this comic for other comic artists and writers in the crowd, because the creator often reflects on things that fellow creators will definitely identify with. The strips regularly comment on drawing problems, writer's block, and all the other embarrassingly or painfully funny issues of living with creativity. It was one of those that made me spit out my tea laughing, by the way.
The art, despite the creator's often illustrated opinions to the contrary, is wonderfully crisp and well done, capturing scene and moment in a few graceful lines. The use of color is vibrant and lively, but I think the best feature is the slightly exaggerated facial expressions. The creator borrows a bit from the anime school of exaggeration when it comes to expression, and in 'Pieces' that works to wonderful effect, underlining jokes beautifully. But their more natural expressions are also one of my favorite things about this piece.

Oh, and as an aside, have I mentioned the Lukas is also a coder and a geek? The jokes for those two groups are just as good as the ones for comic artists. And as a quick aside, the site for 'Pieces' is GORGEOUS. I particularly covet the design of the archives page, which makes finding things wonderfully easy. It makes me wish I could do more with code than...well....



The Razzes

Beautiful as the site design is, one thing CONSTANTLY got on my nerves. Webcomics have trained us to a universal truth: hit the comic image, see the next one. When I find a comic that doesn't do this, I can hear my own mental gears grind. And ESPECIALLY on a gag-a-day comic, that extra half second to scroll up a bit and use the nav buttons IS A PAIN. Note to creator: Please, please use those coding-god superpowers and let the reader click the bloody strip to go forward.
Aside from that small coding glitch, I found the occasional joke just tried too hard and didn't pan out, though that does happen to everyone occasionally.

 And I hope the creator's girlfriend is really, really understanding, because she ends up looking like a twit more often than not in the comic rendition of her, and it's a little sad to see. At the beginning of the comic, there was a little more variety of joke, with some recurring features: Fun With Hitler and The More You Know, for instance. But over time, they petered down to a single feature, 'Actual Conversations With my Girlfriend'. I'd really like to see some of that variety come back. Give the poor lady a break!

The Revue

Definitely one that goes on my personal reading list. But I'll set my teacup down first...
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