After I made my entry on the Top 10 Stupidest Complaints, a funny thing happened. People kept pointing out forums to me, where folk would basically go through the entire list over the course of a few pages. I found this hilarious, of course, so I've made a game out of it!



People who read this blog for reasons other than to work up a self-righteous fury over me slamming your favourite webcomic, join me in this wonderful game. It's bingo, of course, and for those of you who have no idea how to play it - Wikipedia it. It's not that difficult a concept to grasp, for God's sake.

You can play this on the comments of various updates and in forum threads about this blog. Now when webcomic jerks and fans stick their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALALA NOT LISTENING" you can actually get some worth out of it! Follow the thread, check off the cliché remarks and register an account just to say "BINGO" and get banned for it! I mean, if they want to play silly buggers and shit up my blog with dozens of retarded comments, I don't see why I can't encourage people to do the same for them.

I have to start this one by talking about Penny-Arcade. Regardless of how you feel about the strip, it's undeniable that it's the "inspiration" for every other gaming comic out there. Gabe and Tycho are the Adam and Eve that spawned all the tribes of Gamer Comic Israel, a peoples defined by limited (lazy) artwork, niche jokes and terrible mascots. But it's unfair to dump the blame for shit like CAD or VG Cats on the makers of PA, since they only wanted to do their own comic and never encouraged or envisioned all the imitators who were soon to follow. Their humble beginnings tapped into a huge nerd market, and it's only natural that once they started making actual money off their project, millions of stunted nerds' pupils turned into big green dollar signs as they reached for their copy of Macromedia Flash.

Amidst this endless, tedious, boring sea of pale imitators and sad wannabes, it's difficult for a particular gaming comic to stand out in its sheer awfulness. But Dueling Analogs, made by Steve Napierski, somehow manages that dubious honor. Now when you clicked that, I'm sure you noticed the terrible artwork right away. Now imagine what it would look like if it wasn't drawn in a program that automatically smooths out your lines. Yeesh. As you hesitantly click the "First" button, you'll see it's not improved at all since the first strips. Which is really a shame, since it really needs to. I love that last one. You can practically hear him going "Shit, I really don't want to draw a face!" Gee, I wonder why?

Considering the strip is late to the crap party that is terrible gaming comics (it only started in late 2005), the lack of good art is forgivable. Well, it would be, except Steve-O is a goddamn lazy hack who sucks.

I could end my review right here, really. That kind of blatant laziness and formulaic lack of creativity is hard to top, and that's not even factoring in how insufferably smug that little shit is. But I want to talk about Steve-O's writing, if you want to call it that. First of all, Despite being 2 years old, the comic has running gags, or as I like to call them, cheap gimmicks. The first one is "rejected megaman villains" and the other is "video games I'm glad were never made". Now, despite not meeting the running gag requirement of being funny or getting funnier each time they're shown (not that the maker of Dueling Analogs knows thing one about comedy), I'm told these are the most popular strips, which leads me to wonder exactly what kind of man-apes Napkinski's audience is made up of. Also note that the second running gag is in the exact same formula as recurring photoshop contests from both Something Awful and Fark, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence, since you'd have to be a total fucking unoriginal hack and borderline retard to steal from such well-known sites.

Beyond his recurring gimmicks, Steve-O also loves using the Mario Brothers, but not as much as he loves reminding you that they're gay homos who take it up the butt. With each other. LOL! Popular video game characters depicted as sexual deviants? That's totally fresh, edgy and in my face, man! I feel like I'm on Newgrounds circa 1998!

By now you might have noticed that a lot of the "jokes" linked involve gay sex or penis jokes somehow. But don't get the idea that Steve is "that way"! No way, he's a classy gent who knows a thing or two about ladies. Specifically, he knows that bitches ain't nuthin' but tits and ass. NOTHING. For reference, here's artwork of the main character from "Beyond Good and Evil", and here's how Mr. "leans-to-the-left, leans-to-the-right, grins in the last panel" draws her. Apparently, everything is better with more garbonzas.

There are almost no instances of women being featured in this misogynistic shitpile of a comic where they're not depicted as sex toys, eye candy, bitchy idiots or vapid sluts. The eye candy one is by far the most common: like a preteen who's balls have just dropped, Stevie loves to draw ladies' curvy parts, which is too bad since he sucks at it. Check out the quarterback shoulders, impossibly flat ass and spherical nipple on that redhead! Boy howdy, it's all I can do not to jizz all over my designer pants!

I know I've made you click a ton of links to that horrible comic by now, and I'm really sorry about it, but mere words can't convey how truly hideous and smug this damn thing is. I mean, he takes shots at other gaming comics like he's an authority on the subject or some shit. He drew his 11-year-old-looking main character having sex with a faceless woman (the woman is not important, you see, she's just the vehicle to receive his holy man-seed). He's borderline racist. He's a drooling fanboy. He's a smug asshole. His few comics that don't rely on tits, fanboyism, gay jokes or just bashing some random big company are trite and unfunny. I read through the whole archives without even smiling once, and I'm a pretty easily-amused guy. But then, we're talking about a guy who proudly compares himself to VG Cats, so comedy isn't really an option. Just stop making this comic, Steverino. Or at least just drop the flimsy censorship bars and make it a cheap porn comic. You've already got the market on deformed, balloon-titted women covered.

As a final laugh, here's a pin-up of Samus Aran he did. The proportions on it are laughably bad, and say more about his lack of talent and failure to grasp anatomy than I ever could. Look; she's supposed to have her hand on her hip, but since she doesn't fucking have any, she appears to be grabbing her cooch. Now THAT's entertainment!

You really have to say it in all capitals: THE WOMB. Nothing else gets across the horror. Because THE WOMB is where bad webcomics go to be born.

Comic Genesis, formerly KeenSpace, is (as it says on the site) "a free webhosting provider for webcomics". This is one of those occasions where once again the Internet has spat in the face of you, the audience, and given any jackass the option to put their shit online. No editors, no money, no fuss. Just upload and go. Far be it for me to heap praise upon the alternative system, what with those narrow-minded publishers and editors making life a misery for some, but it's still a damn good system. Almost everything on Comic Genesis, were it submitted as a serious story to a serious publishing house, would be disposed of unceremoniously. Crumpled up, burnt, used during a toilet paper shortage - generally treated as the worthless rubbish it is. Let's face it, people, if you really were a fount of talent and hard work, you would be able to get yourself actually published.

But even a place like Comic Genesis there is some kind of process. Yes, that process is to smile and nod and stamp "APPROVED" on anything that is submitted, but it's still a process. That's where THE WOMB comes in. There is a brief period of waiting that comes about when the entire Internet tries to get its epic webcomic saga on there and the staff just can't deal with a million submissions every week. While these webcomics are waiting to come into being, they exist as... proto-webcomics, if you will. Each is a malignant little foetus, waiting inside THE WOMB to be born onto the Internet.

Because of the turnover rate, it's vastly unlikely that any of the webcomics-to-be that I look at today will exist inside THE WOMB in a month's time. Or even a week. So I'll do my best to illustrate things fully, rather than just linking. It doesn't really matter, though, since everything within THE WOMB is pretty Goddamn awful.

But how to choose? That's easy. One of the glorious things about THE WOMB is the random function. It'll select a webcomic from its vast and horrible list and thrust it into your face. All I have to do is hit F5 and it'll give me something new to mock. It's hilarious, try it yourself.

I know a lot of you feel that it's mean that I pick on bad webcomics that aren't popular or successful or even made by complete assholes, but remember that these webcomics are still really, really bad. Just because they're not Megatokyo doesn't give them a license to exist and eventually become just like Megatokyo anyway.

Our first victim is Cardboard Sword, which will exist here when it is accepted to join its hideous siblings. The explanatory blurb tells us "A legend has been told, of bravery, magic, death... This is not that story. This is the story of Vereave Alcus and his adventures in his little fantasy world. More than just a world though but a potential galaxy and universe. Follow Vereave as he searches for the magical blade forged of corrugated cardboard."

What delightful cliché we have here. Beginning with talking about a very epic story - and then revealing that it's not the story that's going to be told! Oh, sir, my sides are splitting. I certainly haven't seen that done to fucking death.

Let's count off the other warning signs of a bad-webcomic-to-be. A potential universe? No, not really. Having a whole fucking universe mapped out is overkill when you're not going to see most of it. Do you people have any fucking clue just how big a universe is? Even a galaxy would be beyond this guy.

Oh, and we have the forced "wackiness" in the form of a magic sword - made of cardboard! Aha! Aha! Aha! Aha! Aha! Aha! No fucking thank you. Funnily enough, doing the "wacky" shit requires you to be very clever and very serious. You can't just go "zomg lawl a cardboard sword, im a comedy genius". Writing comedy is not something everyone can do, you moron, it's a talent. You probably don't have it, especially if you're relying on overdone clichés.

Then, of course, there's the art.


Now, I'm fairly sure I've said this before, but a good story can go a little way to saving bad art. However, I feel we have indeed established that this isn't a good story, since good stories aren't made entirely out of clichés and hype. So we have a bad story and bad art.

I don't really want to discourage people from developing their talent, but really: have some kind of talent before making a webcomic. Spend a few years working hard and you could actually do your "big idea" justice - or perhaps even realise that your "big idea" is actually not so good as you thought. Many webcomic creators start off when they're teenagers, or when they haven't matured past being a teenager, and take it from me and everyone else who's older and wiser: all the creative ideas you have when you are young are shit.

Also, seriously, Jesus Christ do not use Impact as your primary font.

"Basically nothing and everything. Things were said. Somewhere along the line, they became funny." That's the tagline for Full Of, yet another potential webcomic that is apparently built upon a foundation of lies.


Things are said, they are not funny. This is what happens when you have lolarious injokes with your BFFs on MSN and then try to make a webcomic about those injokes without realising your entire audience can be counted on your fingers. Why do you need hosting for this shit? Why? It's pointless. I'm not even going to get into how fucking awful the art is. I don't even want to look at it.

The next random comic is My Faery Princess Calendula. I can practically hear the collective intake of breath as you are about to scream in horror. I am afraid, though, that your screams will not be loud enough.


Wall of fucking text. In Comic Sans. Read from right-to-left. Covering what I estimate to be around 40-to-50% of the entire fucking strip. Which isn't so bad, since the art is animu bullshit with shiny kawaii eyes. Also notice the absolutely dire (and cliché) story. Only the pure of heart can see fairies - sorry, faeries - and children are pure of heart. Nature is the tops and cities are terrible. Except, no, children are vicious little monsters and cities are fucking awesome. Fuck you, you winged little rodent.

Why am I even bothering to explain why this is bad? Anyone who thinks it's not is fucking insane. It's an animu webcomic that uses Comic Sans and reads right-to-left because it's made by a fucking Wapanese hippy. When it appears, I'll probably review it just because it offends me so much. But still, it's not even the worst thing about THE WOMB.


Warfare is (or will be) a webcomic made in MSPaint using Battlefield: Vietnam screenshots. Do I even need to say anything else? No, no I do not. Welcome to the bottom of the bottom of the barrel.

Go, my readers. Penetrate THE WOMB and discover its horrors for yourself. I guarantee you that you can check it daily for a year and the chances of you finding anything remotely worthwhile will be slim to none. It's the black birthing chamber of my intended targets, the fetid spawning pool of future victims. It is almost Lovecraftian in the terror it brings. Look upon it, and know fear.

I always thought there was a killing to be made in this whole transgender-fetish-webcomic business. I mean, this is the same community that keeps shitheaps like Misfile and The Wotch financially afloat. Hell, they were giving the latter more than a thousand dollars a month when it was down to updating once a week. These people have no fucking standards when giving out their money at all. Push the right buttons, update consistently, possess a level of artistic talent that outpaces its competitors (noting that this necessary level of talent can still technically be 'none'), and then market it all cynically and you have a webcomic so geared towards making money that you could have a blind retard run it and still make a profit.

Exiern, by one Drowemos, is that comic, and is run appropriately, as his ridiculous handle would suggest. Its premise is pretty standard: Barbarian hero of Liefeldian proportions infiltrates the fortress of an evil wizard to rescue a princess and is hit by a magic spell that turns him into a girl. Then they go off on some epic journey where there will undoubtedly be much humor relating to the barbarian's cluelessness, the wizard's wacky evil antics, and the parade of men unwittingly attracted to the changed woman! Pretty standard, as I said. There's even a shopping scene!

Now, you may have noticed that the art in this comic is a cut above its competitors in the TG-comic world, which isn't very hard when its competitors look like this and this. And I don't really care about any of its shortcomings because all that is completely fucking irrelevant in light of the fact that Exiern once looked like this, the first panel of which I will reproduce below.



How did this change in art happen? Was it because, God forbid, the creator put his balls to the wall and improved his way up? Nope. This is the comic a year later, the last panel of which I will reproduce below.



I'm not doing these reproducings for no reason, either, because what really happened was that he COMMISSIONED an internet art studio to take over the art of Exiern with an eye towards eventually replacing the archives of his comic with the new art. But really, the fact that a grown man thought that it was a good idea to show the artistic works above to anyone, much less the entire internet, is so ridiculous that he deserves to be laughed at in every circumstance and social stratum for that alone. I almost can't fault him for resorting to paying a stranger to make his pathetic magnum opus come to life. Almost.

I won't say anything to the artist or his inability to grasp the finer points of anatomy because I'm pretty sure he knows exactly what he is doing, and that is bringing the fantasies of pathetic Internet perverts to life for money. But hey, we all have to eat somehow. No, I'll just address Drowemos instead, because there is a possibility, however faint and contradictory to the apparent, that in the back of his mind somewhere persists the thought that he is creating entertainment, or even art, and he must be disabused of such a pathetic notion.

Drowemos, there's practically nothing in your comic that isn't a cliché of fantasy or transgender comics. There's nothing more telling of this fact than your ridiculously transparent self-insert, the Harry Potter lookalike (named Denver, of all fucking things!) who gets into a hulkrage over adventure books. He's naive, suicidally brave, has a background more ridden with fantasy clichés than Dominic Deegan (parents got killed by dragons, has a locket of his missing sister, finding other half of said locket is the device through which death of sister at the hands of monster is found out, fucking stop me when you've had enough), and is of course able to kiss the main character without being beaten to a pulp, which is in contradiction to the precedents set so one-dimensionally. It's an excellent move from a commercial standpoint though, as your self-insert can act as the self-inserts of your pathetic readers as well, and they'll end up throwing money at you to continue this tale where somebody just like them can win the heart of a man who has been turned into a woman against his will. But somehow I think that that is giving you too much credit. And the rest of the comic is excuse after excuse to show your lead in torn or missing clothes. Even the fucking monsters are not exempt from this. Not even the male monsters either, because they can be turned into female ones!

What you are doing isn't entertainment. It is gratification, appealing to the baser instincts and the simpler minds. In exaggeration I would call fiction of such ilk pornography, but in your case it is not an exaggeration in the slightest, because you have an honest-to-fucking-God MEMBERSHIP section where you show the unrated versions of the more borderline scenes and you proudly advertise this fact on every page that contains such scenes!

What insults can I throw at a man who is so brazen? Such a venture is hopeless from the start, because no insult could ever hurt as much as knowing what you have made and what it means. The realization that you can put all the tender loving care you want into your plot and characters and dialogue and this story you once wrote so earnestly that you sent it out to the world before mastering the motor control skills possessed by a toddler, and it won't matter a single goddamn bit because that is not what your audience comes for, and the audience that would care about such things will be repelled by what you are doing.

Jesus Christ (PBUH), you're so fucking incompetent that you have spelling errors in your tribute to fucking Gary Gygax, who must have been a god to your pale-skinned, fantasy-escapist kind! I'd hate to see you give an eulogy - you'd be constantly tripping over big words like 'happiness' and 'remember'.

Now I bet you're laughing all the way to the bank as you're reading this, because you've probably stopped caring about the actual content of this thing as this money-making setup you have really is foolproof. But know that the very personality traits that would lead you to thinking that it was a good idea to put out the original Exiern in the first place cripple you here, because webcomics, like any other business, require some modicum of social skill to succeed. You don't have to have much of it, because hey, webcomics. You don't have to not be an asshole, because there are few who know more about turning webcomics into money than Scott Kurtz. You don't even have to not be a narcissistic idiot, because even Tim Buckley manages. You just have to not be an autistic manchild with the mindset of a young teenager - the kind that whines about his own inability to read a business contract, some ridiculous bullshit about elitism, and something so fucking trivial it makes my brain hurt. (How fucking trivial you ask? Would you guess that it is about not getting linked from The Wotch yet? Then you are right!)

But even with all your failings it's not like I don't believe you'll achieve some level of financial success with your venture. On the contrary, I do, for I have faith. Faith in the stock that comprises your fanbase to be capable of patheticness and stupidity greater than any you could muster. Faith in their ability to plunge my faith in humankind into greater and greater depths. Faith in the universal axiom that that which appeals will sell, with no consideration of quality or worth.

So I can't really get angry at you or your comic, because you are inevitable. If not you, then someone else would have not only figured out this opportunity, like I have, but acted upon it as well. I just wish that whoever took that opportunity would have been a little less transparent, a little less whiny, and a little less pathetic than yourself.

And stop buying your shitty ads all over the fucking place. When I'm reading another bad webcomic I'd rather not be reminded of the existence of yours, thanks.

As promised (and you people assumed I was being flippant), this is the second part of the Dresden Codak review. Much to my dismay, we have utterly failed at keeping to Aaron Diaz's business model: as little as we tried to update, he still managed to update even less. We are shamed by such a master of procrastination and ineptitude.

But enough about that. Last time we may have ripped on Diaz's shitty business depending wholesale on pathetic, horny nerds (not an unsafe gamble, just a very repugnant one) - this time we'll be beating the shit out of his lackluster and morbidly dire storytelling abilities. That is, the abilities he doesn't have and probably never will. Cue a mighty wailing and gnashing of teeth from his whale-sized fantards, I reckon, but it's sadly true.

An aside, for a moment: in the world of published books, there have been some works of fiction put to print that should never have seen the light of day. Some publisher, somewhere, had looked over the entire body of text and deemed it worthy of the expense of being printed by the thousand. Now, consider that if it is possible for a system that was inherently designed to stop stupid shit getting published to make mistakes, the publisherless medium of the Internet must be FULL OF THE WORST CRAP TO EVER EXIST.

And so we have webcomics. For every talented creator who simply does not wish to submit themselves to the harrying experience of Getting Actually Published™ - and I speak from experience that the constant back-and-forth with publishers can often be as entertaining and pleasant as shitting broken glass non-stop for eight weeks - we have ten thousand who know, deep down, perhaps even subconsciously, that they are so bad that even the brain-dead publishers would turn them away. Aaron Diaz seems to be one of them.

Make no mistake, his pictures are pretty enough. He's mastered not only perspective and proportion (though a little more orthodoxy in panel/word balloon placement may not hurt), but how to draw a crackin' fine pair of nerd girl boobs. Hence the pandering, as explained earlier.

Diaz's forté as a writer, though, lies in his earlier, nerdier strips. The ones like this one. Not particularly original or smart, but harmless enough to make you crack a smile every now and again. You know the type - the type that he's said he's never, ever going to do again because his latest storyline ("Hob") is going so well. Y'know, when it's not sucking.

While I'm sure Diaz is liking the sophisticated and educated level of feedback as taken from his own forums - "Wow, amazing as always." "Also, how do you get to be so consistently kickass? Is it the hat?" "DC is so crazy I can't foresee what will happen next." - I think he may prefer some observations made by someone who possesses writing talent. Namely me, since I don't see anyone else with the appropriate qualifications willing to give it a go.

I doubt he will actually like what I have to say, since he's devolving into the kind of Internet artist who no longer despairs over not improving on a fucking Fibonacci curve and instead considers themselves "good enough" for whatever it is they do (and thus stagnate and turn into a Buckley), but tough shit. Like it or not, I'm going to explain why Dresden Codak's story is pretty much balls. Those of you who are just going to tell me that I'm untalented, jealous, wrong and also a big faggot can post your comments now. It'll add to the entertainment value of the update for those who actually pay attention to how big and clever I am, and I doubt you'll actually pay attention to anything I have to say, you ignorant cunts.

Since "Hob" is the "new" Dresden Codak and we'll be getting no more funnies out of Diaz (again, seriously, he said that - give up hope), we'll start with page one of that.

Immediate plus points: showing, not telling. There's no narration to hammer in what you're supposed to be seeing, unlike some webcomics. Coupled with page two, this gives us a gentle lead-in to what will turn out to be a disappointing story. And what makes it disappointed? Page three.

Here's the thing about characters in a work of fiction: they're people. They might be people people, robot people or even... occasionally... anthropomorphic animal people. The point is, they're well-rounded individuals with depth. Why do writers (well, good writers) make their characters this way? Because firstly, it's easier to write them.

"Woah there!" I hear a vast section of the Internet cry out, looking up from their Zutara fanfics. "You're wrong! Writing well-rounded characters with depth is hard!"

Oh, but of course it is for you, because you're lazy and you don't know a fucking thing. If you're competent, then you don't have to sit and think "What will my stupid character do next?" What they'll do next is obvious, because you know their personality like it's your own, or at least a close sibling whose mind you can read. So rather than sweat out the decisions, the prose flows from your fingertips like it has a life of its own. Every quirk and mannerism becomes second nature - they might click their fingers while thinking, or play with their hair when flirting. Whatever. You, as an author, know this person.

Kimiko "Thunderbolt" Ross is an optical illusion, however. Whatever image of depth you perceive, you perceive wrong. The main character of Dresden Codak is as flat and as tiresomely predictable as Kansas. What you see here on page three is her entire character laid out before you, to be judged like a fucking piece of meat. Which is all she is, in a literary sense.

Point one: Kimiko is obsessed with the nerdsterbation topic of transhumanism, assuming that for some reason people gotta bone robots to be better people. Perhaps a common topic amongst people with low-to-zero self esteem, but as someone who understands that humanity is fucking rad I don't see it. Powered flight to space travel in sixty years, and without robot brains thank you very much.

Point two: Kimiko is a girl, and a girly girl with girly boobs and girly parts. This is made painfully obvious later, but it's personified in page three - ironically enough. (If you don't get that joke, you're too damn foreign and I won't have you readin' this blog.) Kimiko's girlness exists for the audience (and author) to get big wobbly nerdboners over. Much in the same way that Questionable "T-shirt factory" Content works, except Jeff Jacks is at least savvy enough to have multiple flavours of female to accommodate the fact that readers have differing tastes.

Point three: Kimiko is Aspergin' like fuck. Can't talk to people without fucking up, struggles to answer simple questions with simple answers, can't rationalise with basic human empathy, is a fucking fruitcake. Show your average Internet nerd a woman that crazy and they'll be going "MAI WAIFU" and composing Japanese sonnets in her honour before you can duck behind a concrete wall for safety.

That's it.

That's her character.

There's some shit about her dad being rich and her mother being dead, I guess, but that's not characterisation. Just having your parents rich/dead doesn't make you a deeper character. It might make you Batman, I suppose. No, the characterisation comes from how you feel. Which even Batman has, even if it's entirely dependent on the current writer as to how he feels.

So how does Kimiko feel? Please let me know, because I can't tell. She shows a little anger, once, and sometimes cries and blushes but boy howdy that's not very specific. I am not a cold-hearted machine, I can empathise, but not when there's nothing to empathise with. Kimiko "Japan is so cool" Ross has yet to progress beyond a cute face that spits out technobabble and exposition. In the mean time, she'll remain exactly what she is: a Mary Sue. Apart from the "crazy as a fucking loon" thing, she's got no flaws - except if you count "oh she just needs a nice guy for a boyfriend... a nice guy like me!" Which we don't.

The one point where I held out hope for some ambiguity - the part where she smashes an old guy's head with a fucking rock - no. Turns out she was right all along, and they were pure evil, and the old guy didn't get brain damage and die.

Seriously, Diaz, what Hollywood shit have you been watching where a fucking rock to the head just makes someone be fine except for a little bleeding no more than two minutes later? Did you see the size of that fucking rock? Well, yes, you drew it, but seriously.

All right, enough rock tangent, let's get back to the point of explaining why this story is bad - as if "the main character is a shitty Mary Sue" isn't enough. (It is.)

Digest this chunk of information: every literary medium is viewed by its audience in a different way. In case you don't know what that means, what it means is that a movie is not a book. If you understand that simple concept (and I don't hold out much hope) we'll move on from there. There are various things that can happen in the text of a book which cannot be effectively translated to the medium of film. The opposite is also true. What this means is that when creating for a medium, you should embrace its nature and write specifically for it.

You do not create a WALL OF TEXT with a few illustrations.

Not if you're doing a comic, anyway. Now, I am not against text in general. Considering my job, which contrary to popular belief is not updating this blog or journalism of any kind, I'd be an idiot if I flew into a rage every time I looked at a block of text. When all you're doing is writing text, there's little else you can do except write text. No, what I am against is ugly text. In webcomics this boils down to not being able to structure your dialogue and pacing and just going "fuck it, INFO DUMP".

Writing isn't just about creating a story that's intelligent, engaging and emotive. It's about doing that with style. Having a John Galt speech of exposition sandwiched between illustrations because you can't be bothered to decompress the scene is the sign of being an incompetent writer. Fuck, Diaz, if you'd divided that up into some smaller text boxes and made a new page for it, it probably would have been fine. But no, you went for the ugly text. You went for the cheap way out.

A webcomic doesn't have to be like Dominic Deegan or Ctrl+Alt+Del in order to be bad. Dresden Codak may have nice pretty pictures (and nice pretty nerdboobs) for the masses to ogle over, but its writing is lackluster. But you, the audience, cannot tell. Because of the publisherless status of the Internet, you have come to accept the unpublishable as acceptable. Like burn victims who've lost all their nerve endings, or Americans who can't taste fructose, you simply lack the capability to discern shit.

Which is why people like me exist, to be elitist bastards who stomp all over everything people create - because it's shit and we want you to know it. I know I tend to get a bit melancholy toward the end of reviews, but it's probably because I'm trying to think of a way to sum up a great big ol' review that people are going to ignore. Chief among this legion of hear-no-evil stooges tends to be the people who could actually do with understanding that if you are trying to create art, you do not give up.

Diaz, your pretty pictures of nerdbutt and nerdboob (and robots, occasionally) have led me to believe that once upon a time you were a young lad who struggled to understand horizon lines. Do you not remember those early days, when you drew over and over to perfect matters? Do you remember studying up on techniques to make your drawings better? Did you get inspiration from other sources?

Writing is also art, Diaz, despite what you and the majority of the webcomics world might think. You can't just wing it and then get indignant when someone tells you it's shit, because it is shit. To write well you have to devote just as much time and effort as you did in learning to draw, it's not something that comes "naturally". Again, a vast section of the Internet is looking up from their Zutara fanfics, but Goddamnit it's true.

Diaz, if you persist in this pathetic excuse for a story, start putting those weeks between updates to good use. Go find some books about writing and read them. Pay attention to what I say (for I am wise) when I cuss out your Kimiko for being a flat character. Hell, just practice and ask for honest, harsh criticism. If you don't, you're as bad as Tim Buckley (except for the showing your dong to underage girls thing).

Never thought I'd be able to say this, but I found it. Or rather, we found it, for this neverending search for bad webcomics is nothing if not the labors of a community, united in mind and will. What we have found is the worst gaming comic, that puzzling enigma residing in the swamps of DrunkDuck: Powerup Comics, the subject about which these words are written. Though mere words seem insufficient to describe its horrors, as always I shall intrepidly try.

In here friends of originality, that ambrosia sought so desperately on those angry streets at dawn, will find no fellow traveller, for the well-familiar archetypes are established in quick succession from the very first strip. Two comrades, united in their mutual hobby of gaming, a couch that said hobby takes place on, and a talking inanimate object. Soon after is the strawman established, upon whom is pinned the wilted arguments and failed dreams of nemesii imagined, easily dispatched by the self-insert protagonist with gratuitous violence time and again. And the ensemble can't be complete without the sarcastic girl gamer who fails to break the cliché of breaking the cliché of female gamers not being as good (at gaming) as their male counterparts.

Gaming 'humor' in general is a black hole of comedy, and Powerup Comics only reinforces that truth, as it not only has stock gaming webcomic characters but stock gaming webcomic jokes as well. The Wii has poor graphics? How cutting-edge! What's next, Shadow and Chug? Jack Thompson jokes? That's right! Oh and Nintendo must have been on WEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDdd to come up with their crazy game concepts AM I CORRECT IN THIS ASSUMPTION!?? Why don't you fucks eat a bullet of creativity or something, by which I mean kill yourselves, with a bullet that you shoot into your mouth? Die shittingly.

Going further, we can look at Powerup Comics's first attempts at a storyline, which as expected fails to grip the reader, develop the plot, or deliver a satisfying conclusion. Not that much can be expected in the first place, but even the lowest base level of entertainment fails to be reached. Even the simplest applications of the reversal of expectation end up only reinforcing slight clichés and the flat characterizations defined entirely by gaming console preferences. Such is quite typical of Powerup Comics storylines, often recycling themes and ideas tried and failed miserably in other terrible gaming webcomics, essentially performing the role of the bottom feeder in the ecosystem that is webcomics.

Even estimating the number of gaming comic clichés fulfilled by the first few strips alone is a task better left to those of a more numerical persuasion. The blatant use of copy-paste almost reaches self-parody as new characters are assembled from parts cut, pasted, and possibly recolored from old ones. Even new poses are generated this way. This has not escaped the notice of even the DrunkDuck crowd, prompting the expected responses of men so dull in the creative faculties. Truly this, if nothing else, proves the worthiness of Powerup Comics to join the ranks of the comics reviewed on this blog, as it was rejected even by those who would accept comics of the most abysmal quality with their fives. Fives, good sir. Fives gleaming gold in the light of a constant sun.

Really, there seems to be nothing Powerup Comics succeeds at that is in any way related to worth. Through word-of-mouth they have achieved readership, but you, dear reader, should know by now that such a metric is all but useless in assessing quality. But even that readership is illusory, for it seems to consist nearly entirely of people fully aware of the comic's true quality, either expressing their distaste directly or egging on the comic to continue with false praise. There is no other explanation for certain guest comics. And it's understandable, as though the comic has a Cafepress store, without actual fans it will not be a money-making venture anytime soon. Supporting it truly is harmless, as even the lowest echelons of the internet public are loath to flock to it. After all, in a world of absolutely terrible gaming webcomics that have achieved financial success on their own, ironically supporting the one that towers above the rest on that ignoble scale can be downright therapeutic.

But inadvertent entertainment does not excuse Powerup Comics' faults, and nor does it excuse the faults of the creators as their takes on homosexuality, race, politics and history betray a worldview that is supremely ignorant at best.

All in all, I can only wish death on Chug and Shadow. That's right, death, and not the kind of death that leads to the childish hopes promised by religion (by the way I highly doubt that Chug and Shadow possess the intellectual maturity to be logic-choosing Atheists such as myself), but to actual, shitting, death. Because they are simply horrible people, and not just for the comic alone, as mentioned above. What I wouldn't doubt would be that they were libertarians, as libertarianism is the political ideology most suited for spoiled children who feel entitled to things and should also probably die because the world won't miss them. In fact I would have assumed their support of Ron Paul straight-up if it wasn't for that comic about Ron Paul. I wouldn't be surprised if they came out in support of Obama next. They're halfway there, after all, and Obama is the perfect fit for those who love imaginary friends and are twelve years old.

Lastly, just look at the comic's misogyny. Apparently women are simply props to demonstrate the desirability that proficiency in video gaming grants in Shadow and Chug's world. Alix, the only female character, is hardly developed past her gamer-girl sarcasm and inexplicable attraction to Shadow, the self-insert character of Shadow, the primary author. For these additional transgressions they deserve to die, even more than they already do. That's it, I can't go on anymore. This terrible rape-abortion of a comic by these buttshoes has broken me, has broken all of us. It's a fitting coda for this project. The following are my parting words, and possibly the last you will ever hear from us, so heed them well.

Look inside yourself. Ourselves. Let us look inside ourselves and realize that those ultimately at fault for webcomics like Powerup Comics are not people like Shadow and Chug but people like you and me. For we are webcomic readers. Even by simply reading bad webcomics to make fun of them we are webcomic readers. And most of us are not merely readers, for we continue to perpetuate the lie that these bad webcomics we mock aren't the entire medium, and that there are these mythical 'good' webcomics that everyone should support 'instead'. But let me explain this to you: There are no good webcomics. At all. Without exception. By pretending otherwise we give the legitimacy of our tacit assent to a shithole of a medium that shouldn't be in the same language as the word 'art'. Even the best webcomic and the best webcomic blog (this one) is naught but Powerup Comics translated - a shallow reflection of a culture, tepid and utterly empty, contributing absolutely nothing of its own. The only difference is the culture itself, which we cannot pretend is any better than 'gaming culture', as this culture stoops to using webcomics to express itself of all fucking things. Know that this is the absolute truth, and there is no denying it.

So we realize that there is only one course of action left to us, and that is to wash our hands completely of this particular sphere of the internet. Delete your bookmarks of webcomics and anything related to webcomics such as forums, podcasts, and blogs. Yes, even this blog, for after today there will be no new updates. We hope you join us in leaving this wretched world of online sequential art behind and look forward to the new day tomorrow when we all will webcomic no more. Free at last, we webcomic no more.

It has been said on this blog several times: Good writing can save bad art. What has not yet been said is the nuance, and that is that these good writers understand the limitations of their art, some even having chosen these limitations, and make up for it by actually knowing things about panel composition and timing, as well as making their writing not only fit these limitations but sometimes even take advantage of them. Perhaps it hasn't been said yet because it's so fucking obvious, but if you don't understand this as you upload your 'ironically bad' pixellated stickman comics to DrunkDuck thinking that they'll be the next Order of the Stick, then you just might not have the good writing to save your bad art, or even good writing at all. And if you try to tell an epic adventure story using copy-paste puppets so terribly drawn that they would be able to scare children, you just might be Cheshire Crossing.

The epic adventure story in question is set in the year 1910, and centered around the three female protagonists of The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan in a multiverse where the fantasy worlds of late-Victorian children's literature exist. Though the concept might sound annoying it can be done right, but a look at the cover of the first comic immediately dispels any notion that this is such a case.

And as you can see, I wasn't kidding about the scaring children part. Really, it's kinda neat how the cover neatly encapsulates all that is wrong with the comic's art. It's all there: the terrible copy-paste to the point where all the characters are based on the same template; the templates themselves being horrific in both senses of being bad and inspiring horror; the soulless, pointless, looking-yonder expressions; and the fucking crossed arms, Jesus Christ.

You may also notice the box in the upper-left corner giving an issue number and a release date, which is surely a sign from the stars that I am tied by fate to keep mentioning The Wotch, as it reminds me of the fact that my arch-nemesis does the same with its chapters. But Cheshire Crossing takes this almost cute mimicry of actual comics a step further, by actually releasing in whole issues of 20-odd pages. Which is a pretty stupid thing to do because when your comic looks like Cheshire Crossing, you're going to need all the immediate art feedback you can get. But considering that the wholly-copy-paste method is almost chosen specifically to avoid improvement forever, and the fact that the author is already working on issue #4 with no improvement, and the fact that webcomic readers in general never give criticism much less good ones, I suppose immediate feedback wouldn't have helped anyway.

You see the thing is that the creator, Andy Weir, actually knows his art is bad. He even calls himself the "World's Laziest Cartoonist", a title I dispute only because what he does is to cartooning like what the shit I took this morning is to sculpture. But since there are seventy-four pages of this shit spread over two years, it must be that like a million other webcomic jerks, Andy looked at what he had and thought, "Good enough." No. It's. Fucking. NOT. Aside from looking just fucking terrible, it becomes fucking ridiculous when it's trying to tell a story. Action scenes become lifeless, dramatic scenes become laughable, and emotional scenes become eldritch horrors from the darkest depths of the Uncanny Valley, the visual equivalent of a freshly-reanimated frankenstein trying to mimic its master's speech, its black, swollen tongue rotting in its mouth as it stumbles over the syllables, ultimately resulting in an inhuman, disharmonious wail that somehow reminds all of its listeners of their own terrifying mortality.

But as bad as these templates are, with all the women having freakish proportions and all the men having the bodies of prepubescent boys, somehow through what can only be bad-webcomic-magic the art manages to look worse when it goes off-model. And nobody crosses their arms this fucking much God dammit.

If your art fails so catastrophically at its goals of evoking excitement, sympathy, or even fanservice, then it is not 'good enough' to tell your story or any story ever. It doesn't matter how grandiose or well-crafted your vision is if you build your webcomic house out of bricks of shit, because then all you have to show for your blueprints is a pile of shit.

And I can't even judge the quality of the blueprints because the art is so bad that I can't tell where the writing ends and the shitty art begins. Is the pacing off because the plotting sucks, or because the artist only has one angle and one level of detail at his disposal? Is the dialogue bland because it's badly written, or is it because it's coming out of the mouths of disfigured puppets who all look exactly fucking alike? But it almost doesn't matter, because the end result will be the same good writing or bad if you force it through the comicking equivalent of the little-known Photoshop filter called 'Cover everything with shit'.

So for the love of God, Andy, either start learning how to actually fucking draw or get an artist to do it for you. Even if all you can scrape up is some 13-year-old from devianTART it would still be an improvement over what you have now, because the 13-year-old at least has a chance to improve, however small, while what you're doing now is setting yourself up so that you'll never improve, ever.

It's not hard to reach into the grubby, dark barrel that is the world of webcomics and pull out a gaming webcomic. Gamers are, for the most part, fucking stupid and will appreciate anything mundane and boggle over anything complex - much like most webcomic artists. Before any of you threaten to beat me to death with a Wii controller, let me remind you that any video game that's remotely clever or interesting regularly fails to sell well, while any bland FPS shitfest with zero plot simply can't be put on shelves fast enough. Remember when LucasArts used to make witty adventure games with engaging plots? Remember the fantastic voice acting in Grim Fandango? Of course you don't, you're a brainless dullard who hoots and gibbers while mashing the button to skip the plot cutscene since all them thar fancy words hurts yer thinkin' parts.

Still, dumb as you both are, the window-lickers responsible for gaming webcomics are fractionally smarter than your average gamer. After all, they're canny enough to realise they can make up for their lack of talent and humour with game references. You'll leap up and down, screeching "HA HA! THE CAKE! IS A LIE!"

(I mean, for fuck's sake, out of all the amazing dialogue in Portal you seize upon the one part that was only amusing for about five seconds the first time round - which was in the game itself. Why? Oh, wait, because you're fucking stupid.)

So look at God Mode, look at it good and hard. It's the proud result of your "gaming culture" - a steaming pile of shit that has been crapped into the Internet's heart, and you dickholes are rolling around in it like a bunch of pigs. You'll smother yourself in that filth, lick it up and ask for seconds. Because even though it's not clever, or funny, or well-drawn, or anything whatsoever, it's about video games you guys. Even my dog isn't so easily amused, for Christ's sake.

Because, again, I know you wankers are going to jump down my throat with how wrong I am, and how it's just my opinion that this webcomic sucks, I'm going to give some examples.

First, it's not clever. Let's see: the joke here is supposed to be that Square/Enix are the Borg. Y'know, just like how Microsoft are the Borg. And everything else that's remotely large and disliked by sweaty dorks who take computers too seriously. All right, so I can see the reasoning behind this, regardless how lame that reasoning is. But... it's not a joke. It's just "THIS BIG CORPORATION IS THE BORG." It's essentially telegraphed in the second panel, and doesn't really flow anyway. Keep on browsing through the depressingly large archives and tell me that this is a unique event and the rest is all hilarious. You can't, unless you're either willing to lie or you're a gamer and thus incapable of understanding what the difference is between "a joke" and "referencing video games".

God Mode does not have the kind of sharp and snappy writing a gag comic needs to exist. What it has is the kind of Ctrl+Alt+Delete spend-four-panels-beating-one-concept-into-your-thick-head bullshit. I know I said that gamers are stupid (and you are) but I think this shit could have been done in half as many panels and far, far fewer words.

See, one of the things you people don't get (because you're fucking stupid and can be entertained by pretty flashing lights and electronic beeps) is that something text-based, like a book or a blog entry or a podcast (text can also be read aloud, before you hurr at me), has to have words in. It has nothing else that can relate information. Visual media, like films and webcomics (emphasised so you may perhaps understand), have images. In case you never heard, a picture is worth a thousand words. That means in a four-panel comic, you're already at 4000 words. If you're thinking "Well, if I'm at 4000 words, it won't matter much if I add on another 500!" then you are Tim Buckley and you are a drooling mongoloid with severe ego problems.

Second, it's not funny. Fuck, just see above. It doesn't just fail at clever humour, it fails at all humour. All it does is pander, pander, pander. It panders so much that it eats bamboo and the Chinese want to grind it up and make it into a pill that cures impotence. It does nothing but simperingly try and appeal to gamers, which it accomplishes easily because gamers are morons. Have I said that enough in this review? Because it's true. This, gamers, this is what the rest of us see you as. Losers who goggle over wannabe-Japanese animu bullshit because you got your first boner over Metal Gear Solid. Pasty, gargantuan nerds permanently stained with Cheeto dust who practically wet themselves over a "joke" that's nothing but "wacky violence" and a dated pop culture reference. Repressed misogynists who can't deal with women who aren't impossibly-figured, wearing enough material to make only half a roll of dental floss and utterly fictional.

Not to mention the million times that a joke concept is ruined by overstating it, over and over and over again, until what humour was in there has been ground into a stain and rendered totally unfunny. No great loss with God Mode, though, since none of the joke concepts are good. Ever. It's a never-ending parade of mediocre shit as portrayed by none-dimensional characters who are pretty much all drawn the same.

It's also nice to see God Mode being even worse than CAD by making this strip. Why, yes, that is the exact same joke that was done in both CAD and Penny Arcade, except a whole two months after CAD and four months after Penny Arcade. No use jumping on the bandwagon when it's already gone, you idiot. Unless you're not imitating Penny Arcade at every available opportunity, like CAD does, but are instead trying to emulate Ctrl+Alt+Del. That's a scary thought, but would explain an awful lot.

So, let's sum up: so many gamers are stupid, I may as well say that all gamers are stupid. Not only that, but the same is true for bad webcomics: so many bad ones exist, that it's almost redundant to say "bad webcomic". But if we are lenient and call the least offensive mediocre, then God Mode is still a bad webcomic. It's supposed to be funny - apparently. How the Hell can you tell, though? There's nothing resembling a joke, much in the same way a stain on the ground doesn't resemble a dead horse.

Basically, fuck God Mode, fuck the incompetent and dimwitted moron who shits it out, and fuck all gamers everywhere for being the third worst human beings possible, right after furries and transgender fetishists. Between the three groups, you are responsible for 90% of bad webcomics.

If you haven't already noticed, I've decided to make this blog my job, much like Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak decided to do for his webcomic. In fact, we're using the exact same business model! After making my decision, I then decided to put off updating for a couple of weeks, and after this update is done I'm going to go off on a vacation. But don't worry, I'm selling you guys t-shirts, which is a perfectly acceptable substitute for actual content, at least according to Aaron Diaz.

Since a lot of you people seem to be utterly incapable of appreciating or even understanding subtlety, let me spell it out for you: Aaron Diaz is treating his webcomic, Dresden Codak, as a business. This "business" involves selling you t-shirts (that are mostly based on his older, funnier strips) and forgetting to update his comic. Get all that? Need me to grunt and paint some crude pictographs for you?

As of this update, the latest strip is dated March 2nd. The previous, January 28th. Now, I understand that if you're being an artiste and only drawing when you feel like it, you can update however infrequently you want. But Aaron Diaz, you are no longer drawing for fun. You are running a business, by your own admission. You are failing to run a business.

I know a lot about update schedules, I attempted one for this blog and then gave it up - mainly because I don't want to give any of you jackoffs a sense of entitlement. I didn't want to make this a business, I do already have a job and I'd rather not make a source of fun for me into work. Diaz still wants to see his webcomic as a business, but he has not given anyone a sense of entitlement, nor expectation. People do not consider Dresden Codak to have an update schedule, because it doesn't. This makes it a shitty business. Am I going to have to explain why? Because it seems pretty obvious to me.

It's a good thing that Dresden Codak mercilessly panders to the "pathetic, lonely nerd" demographic of the Internet (98% and rising) because otherwise its audience would have given up the first time it became apparent that Diaz is an unreliable hack who probably puts more effort into masturbating than he does his webcomic. Since he'd have to beat off less than once a month for that to be false, it's a good assumption to make.

Masturbation is the key, you see. The principle character of Dresden Codak is Kimiko "Thunderbolt" Ross. That's a Japanese name with a comic book reference, be still my beating +2 Heart. Not only is she immensely attractive and prone to dressing like the fine-ass piece of bitch she is, but she also gushes with girlboners over the concept of The Singularity.

If you don't know what that is, apparently Diaz envisions a future where people are popular nerd celebrities who have been struck blind by a wrathful compu-god who is probably going to be Kimiko, unf unf unf. For someone who apparently spent the whole month of February furiously masturbating to the concept, Diaz paints a rather lousy picture of the Singularity. I suggest people go check out the works of Charles Stross. Maybe if you'd simply just like to see competence.

That's really the only reason people come back to Dresden Codak. The unrealistic, "I wish she was real and mai waifu~" sentiment that its readers get when Kimiko flounces across the bizarre panel layout and fills the air with a wall of fucking text about how ridiculously Aspergian she is. If there weren't people on Wikipedia staunchly opposed to it, I guarantee you that there would be an article on her and this fucking awful webcomic ten times the size of the ones on Hitler, Stalin and Lex Luthor combined.

Dresden Codak can be, and has been, a good webcomic. I liked the earlier ones, before it became the ridiculous nerd fantasy wankfest starring Ms. Fap-To-Me Fantasy. I mean, Goddamn, a nerdy Japanese girl with no boyfriend? In the next update, when she inevitably takes on Evil Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew of (equally evil) cripples, I wouldn't be surprised if she wields not only a katana, but also a pair of railguns.

So maybe by about June, then. Until then, buy more t-shirts and support Aaron Diaz's noble quest to be paid for doing as little work as he possibly can!

While on the lengthy, lengthy hiatus that had many of you assuming that we'd all died, I had time to think. To contemplate. I looked back at what this blog had been and what it had become, and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of ennui. This blog... was boring me. I couldn't be bothered to look at bad webcomics every week and write about how bad they were, only to have their moronic fans and a legion of cocks from 4chan post whining comments about how I was too mean, or not mean enough, or whatever. There was no point.

I was all set to leave this damnable blog on hiatus forever, hopefully tricking most of you into holding out some vain hope that you could once again return to post shitty comments about how big of a gay dong-licker I am. But that's obviously not the case. No, what happened was I took a good look around and realised that there are still bad webcomics and nobody else is bothering to call them out on their shit. So I'm back. The blog is back. Everyone's back. I didn't really want any of it back, but it seems like people just aren't going to fucking learn.

There will be no schedule, no warning, no apologies and no bullshit. If you want to contact me, e-mail me and I'll mock you in public. If you want to relive the glory days of the comments section circlejerk with all your retarded friends, go make a "fan" forum and stay out of my sight. I'm not doing this to create, especially not for the likes of you. I'm doing this to destroy, to grind shitty webcomics beneath my heel by showcasing the fetid heaps of ignorance and incompetence that they are.

Maybe it's because I watched both seasons of Dexter last week, but I'm beginning to think of myself as a webcomic serial killer. I select my victim, strap it down and then proceed to hack it to bits - and everyone freaks the fuck out. Because God forbid I say one word against a webcomic.

It's funny, you can find hateblogs of all types these days. People bitch about shitty video games, shitty movies and everything else, but none of them ever have to put up with a few hundred people throwing fucking hissy fits just because they said something bad about a movie. Which is weird, because you pay for movies and video games (in principle, anyway) and webcomics are free (in principle, anyway). Why people form these powerful bonds of emotional attachment over something they have no other connection to is as baffling to me as basic empathy to a serial killer, except for that fact that basic empathy has an actual grounding in logic.

So - and know that this is not by popular demand, this is my own decision- I am turning the comments back on. I need to know why you people shit your pants when I say bad things about bad webcomics, and the only way to do that is to study your rampant stupidity. I was going to finish off with "Go nuts" but then I realised you all already are, so nevermind.

It may be my own highly cynical nature that makes me wary of anything that incorporates an exclamation mark into its title, or it may be the fact that history has proven time and again that anything that incorporates an exclamation mark into its title is either Airplane! or utter shit. Since Zap! is what I'm looking at today, that kinda narrows down the choices.

Formerly Zap! in Space!, which had twice the exclamation marks and therefore was a better title for warning people about its content, Zap! started off with that strange kind of art where you're unsure whether it was done in MSPaint or not. It probably was. But hey, look at it these days! It's polished, professional and practically pleasant to look at. What a pity that is literally the only positive thing it has going for it.

Being able to draw something nice is negated when you've drawn something that's also stupid, then made it do stupid things and capped it all off with some stupid words coming out of its stupid mouth. Practical knowledge of anatomy and perspective is utterly worthless when you're putting it into drawing pictures of eight-dicked anthropomorphic tigers shitting into the mouths of anthropomorphic dragon-dolphin hybrids wearing diapers. Fuckin' Shakespeare could have written an epic play about two households, both alike in flatulence, and no matter how flowery the language, no matter how clever the wit, it'd still be three fucking hours of fart jokes.

Zap! is neither furry porn nor fart jokes, although that might at least have gotten it a larger audience. It's still just the same kind of colossal waste of space, however. What little plot it has is lifted right out of the collective Japanese cultural subconscious and transplanted without any alteration whatsoever. Check this: the main character, Zap, has amnesia. Not only that, but he's got spiky blond hair and a mysterious mystery villain/nemesis who used to be his friend and has long, effeminate hair.

For those of you thinking "Hey, wait, isn't this Final Fantasy 7?" you are entirely correct but no sweat brah it's all cool because instead of ridiculous-looking swords they have psychic powers that manifest as glowy shit - and sometimes guns. Space-guns. In space! But you know, it's actually not quite as horribly stereotypical as you might gather from that link - no, it's worse. The ridiculous space-crew (in space!) that Mr. Zap seems to be rolling with for the purposes of exploring this cliché plot - pointlessly, because you know how it's going to end since it's just that cliché - comprises of Sassy Intellectual Robot, Big Furry Strong Guy, Beautiful But Jaded Female Love Interest and Spunky Tomboy Engineer Girl. Combine that with Zap being Hero With Powers He Never Knew then by God I think we're so deep in cliché territory that I can barely breathe due to the overwhelming unoriginality.

Zap! Is! Shit! That's all you need to know. There's nothing about it that isn't shit. In fact the only entertainment value you're likely to get out of this crap is how laughable it is. For example, there's a character who's a feline alien - that is, a catgirl. She's on the villain's side and acts pretty much exactly how you'd expect "villainous catgirl" to act, just a lot more dull. But the best part is that she sports the most retarded wardrobe I've ever seen in a webcomic. She wears an ass-cape. That's a cape. For her ass. While I'm sure Tetsuya Nomura is furiously jackin' it to that very concept, us normal human beings have to go "What the Hell, an ass-cape?" The rest of the cast all wear varying degrees of ridiculousness, but the chick with curtains covering her backside wins by a mile.

But, besides a monotonous re-hashing of FF7's plot as enacted by a group of badly-dressed mongoloid circus freaks, what can you - the humble reader - expect from this piece of shit? The answer is nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever. Any moment of action feels like a mundane cutscene, any moment of drama feels like a mundane cutscene, everything just feels like one fucking never-ending cutscene. Which means it succeeds at being exactly like FF7, I suppose, but it accomplishes nothing else. The characters are so mired in their stereotypes they're actually capable of irritating the fuck out of you with how scripted their behaviour is. Every move they make is telegraphed painfully, you know what they'll do before they do it because the stock character is burned into your mind. You cannot empathise with them because they are just so fucking cliché. Being able to sum up the main character as "happy-go-lucky guy who is very powerful with his powerful power but he does not know it" is basically like barfing up the last three decades of shonen animé without the slightest trace of the originality that made 2% of those shows worth watching.

The writer or writers (I didn't bother to check how many people were involved, because I don't care) are utterly superfluous to this endeavour. There's no reveal, no mystery, you don't think "Oh my, I wonder what will happen!" You're basically reading Frankenstein's webcomic, sewn together from the mouldering clichés of existing plots and then brought to life with 1.21 gigawatts of blatant greed. That's all there is to Zap!, it's just a homogeneous front for Paypal donations. Find me one iota of creativity that went into making any part of it and I'll take back every word I said - a hollow promise, since it can't be done.

That's really quite the sad thing about Zap! - it's not repugnantly misogynistic, like Dominic Deegan or Shredded Moose. It's not devoted to creepy Internet fetishes, like El Goonish Shive or The Wotch. It's just overwhelmingly bland and tiresome, which makes it most like The Broken Mirror. There are differences - Zap! gives off an air of desperation, of "I want to be Japanese SO BADLY" instead of Broken Mirror's feculent stench of "I am a brilliant writer, all my cats tell me so". But any difference in the flavours doesn't change the fact that they're still bland peas in a pod.

I suggest you go read something that's more exciting and original than Zap!, like Ctrl+Alt+Del. Or, y'know, a good webcomic. They exist! They're out there! They're absolutely nothing like Zap!, of course, but that's the very reason why they're good.

You know, as both the youngest and the weakest out of the Elders of Zion, it seems I get stuck with all the shit jobs. I'm the one who reviews the comics that are not merely bad due to incompetence or terminal stupidity, but those that are bad due to the sheer vileness of their creators. Take Chugworth Academy as an example. It's like Shredded Moose and Dominic Deegan had a precious retarded baby that never quite lived up to their parents' reputation but still managed to be a soul-crushing shitfest.

This atrocity combines shit jokes with shittier writing and characters so one-dimensional they make cosmic strings look like hypercubes who also happen to be super-shiny noseless animu people. Though it gets less blatant, the noseless thing is never quite fixed, despite the fact the artist can actually draw noses. Attention, Mr. Cheung. Two scribbles in the middle of the face do not a nose make. The art, while not especially shitty, starts out as amateurish animu shit that relies on highly stylised visual cues to convey human emotion and gradually evolves into polished animu shit that STILL relies on those same visual cues. Please note that almost every single character has the exact same facial features with the tiny pointy nose and the big eyes and the gaping mouth and the prettily pointed chin. The differences are purely superficial - hair and eye colour, freckles and lack or presence of glasses. Some characters do get original designs, like the producer (who wears a beret because hey, he's an artist! Pinnacle of humour there, Cheung) but those are fairly rare and are not part of the main cast. This is made worse by the fact Kiyoshi (the male lead) is meant to be at least half-Japanese. And yet he has the exact same facial structure as everyone else. The only concession to his father's ethnicity is slit-eyes. As in actual fucking slits. Not racist at all, eh?

You know, the art isn't bad enough to make Chugworth stand out as a terrible comic. It's bland, uninspired, devoid of any personal touches and annoying to look at for too long, but it's nothing special. There are thousands of webcomics out there with art like this, usually drawn by talentless hacks who learn by imitation. Sure, it's crap, but it's not worthy of notice. The problem with Chugworth lies entirely in the writing.

Character writing especially.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that every single character in Chugworth Academy is a stereotype. There's the stupid guy and his long-suffering "TOTALLY HOTT" girlfriend who loves him anyway - they do break up later on in the comic, but she doesn't magically acquire a personality after this event and nor does his IQ increase. The guy, of course, has an enormous cock. 12", ladies! Line up and wait your turn! Our hero is a true example of manliness! Dumb as a cork and hung like a horse! Now, this may be hard to comprehend for men who've never had sex with a woman they didn't have to pay but a big dong doesn't magically give you mind-blowing sex skills. It just gives you a blunt weapon that hangs between your legs and scares off women whose vaginas are not made out of rubber.

And anyway, the whore in that old joke was right. It don't matter how much ya got, honey, as long as you know how to use it. To be honest, I would not trust our prematurely greying protagonist to not put it in my bellybutton.

Right, where were we? Ah, yes. Stereotypes. Like the Japanese father of Mr. Flesh-Club. Because he's Japanese, he has a "hilarious" Japanese accent and believes in honour. Har fucking har! And let's not forget stellar characters such as the dumb-as-chicken-shit metalhead! Who likes violence! Or how about the spotty, arrogant nerd and his fellow tabletop RP players: the ghetto-as-fuck black dude, the wigger, the "azn sensation" and the weaboo? And for finish it off, would you like a side helping of shrill yaoi fangirls?

Now, Cheung could claim that he's sending up moronic animu comics which are full of stereotypes and dumb jokes, but I just don't get that vibe from Chugworth Academy. I do get a strong "brainless slimy penis" vibe from it. Either it's not a parody or it's such a bad parody that the point becomes moot. In both cases, Cheung sucks at writing and the dude who's "working on scripts" with him does too. I should not be able to describe a good flat character in anything less than a full sentence. A sentence with fucking clauses. Well-rounded, complex characters should merit an entire essay. Cheung's entire cast can be summed up in a monosyllable: "urgh".

You know, I was gonna mention something about the story or the humour, but I realised that it's totally pointless. The story's both stupid and confusing and I'm not about to play High School English Teacher and grind it down for you to swallow and later throw up on request. You want to know the story? Read it yourself. You see, when I have to suffer, my only consolation is that later I'll be able to share the pain with my unwitting audience. Really, you can say that this is the entire point of this blog.

As a final insult to my intelligence and an almost fatal blow to my love of humanity, Chugworth Academy is ... well ... what do you call a guy who draws hyper-sexualised, slutty and very definitely underage girls? Come on! They're even wearing school uniforms in half of these! How much more blatant can you get?

Cheung also sticks a childish face on a well-defined teenage body and the endows the resulting abomination with the mind of a five-year-old. And he lets us know the truth about blonde women who are able to get jobs: it's because they're hot and stupid and willing to be spanked by someone who'll pay them.

The word for people like this is "creep". If you're me, that word's turned into a phrase: "motherfucking creepy pervert who should be taken behind the barn and shot in the balls". Reading Chugworth and seeing all those cutsey, childish faces juxaposed with pantyshots, cleavage and almost endless fucking makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel like I'm committing a crime simply by giving this fuckstick's site any hits. I mean, check out his deviantArt gallery (warning: NSFW, but you should know that already from reading this review and having two braincells to rub together). It's full of nothing but extremely explicit pin-ups of his characters. His school-age female characters with faces like little kids. I hope this point really doesn't need to be driven home with a jackhammer.

Incidentally, Cheung and Cheung's rabid fans: I do not hate sex. I do not hate men or women, except in specific cases. I am neither Christian nor prudish and I don't believe that keeping the lights on is the most exciting thing one can do in the bedroom. I'm just very clear on where an empowered female character who just happens to enjoy sex becomes a juvenile vehicle for fanservice and wanking.

Cheung, you're a creepy motherfucker (as evidenced by the fact you used to draw guro for a living) and your comic's a piece of shit that's only notable due to you letting your creepiness spill over into it. I recommend that you either undergo a complete personality and morality transplant or take down your shitty site and go jump into a vat of nitric acid.

Like some kind of celestial occurence, the lives of the Elders of Zion have overlapped. Out of the vast number of things we have to get done, this blog rates fairly low on the list. Let's face it, it's webcomics. Nobody gives a fuck about webcomics except the people whose lives would be meaningless without them, like Robert A. Howard.

I'm kidding, Robert A. Howard's existence is utterly meaningless anyway.

In any case, we haven't the time to spare to read bad webcomics and talk about bad webcomics and have people cry about it. So for the next undefined period of time, YWB shall not be updating. The hiatus will end when we start updating again, which could be a week or a month from now.

I'm sure that there are a few of you out there who are moaning about that, either because you want to tell us how much you love us (unlikely) or you've got more "John Faggomon" jokes to bust out as if you're Chuckles P. Laughmeister the Komedy King. Well, tough fucking luck, because you can't. Ha ha ha.

I'm in something of a unique position to talk about this next webcomic, since I made it. It's Dominic Durgan, a short-lived parody that existed for one glorious boring afternoon and then I stopped caring. While we wait for people to stop shitting their pants in astonishment that I'm actually reviewing it, let's have a little backstory! Not often we get to see into the actual origin of a bad webcomic, after all.

One afternoon, an afternoon before the boring afternoon I mentioned, I was posting. Posting on the Internet, if you'll believe that. I'm sure you all know of my grandiose loathing for bad webcomics by now, and Dominic Deegan was currently in my sights that day. To illustrate how the piss-poor drama merely relied on overdone sentiment and fuckloads of crying in the rain, I chose a recent-ish strip and redid the dialogue to draw attention to the fact that, yes, everyone was just crying in the rain. Someone replied with "You should do more" and that boring afternoon I saw that reply and thought "Why the fuck not? Got nothing better to do today."

The basic idea was to reverse Deegan. Dominic would be, instead of a grumpy genius who made good friends, an overzealous moron who everyone hated. Everything else more or less fell into place. The entire lot of dialogue was written on the fly as I erased the text from the original images, and the whole lot took me a few hours, not counting snacks and frequent breaks. Yes, I seriously had nothing better to do with my time that day. Yes, I should have spent my time doing something else. What's done is done, let's move on.

I hope all those people who were shitting their pants are back now, in time to realise that this update will be the excuse they need to jizz themselves with righteous fury that I am a hypocrite who cannot judge his own stuff. Well, even though I am a hypocrite, I'm not going to give you that satisfaction. Dominic Durgan is a fucking lousy webcomic with terrible art (hur hur hur) and lame writing.

As I mentioned before, all dialogue was written as I went along. I didn't even check past strips, I just winged it. That is a fucking terrible way to write a webcomic. It's inexcusable even for a shitty parody. There's no cohesion, no structure. If you're trying to tell a story - even a story comprised of jokes about homosexuality and racism - you have to have continuity. Doing without it results in crap. Look at Countdown from DC - you've got "lmao piper iz gayyyy" all the time and it also has no continuity and, let's face it, it's probably worse than Dominic Durgan. Better art, though.

Plotting out the structure of your narrative - again, even a joke narrative - is not an option. I know that so many people out there seem to assume that thousands of years of human storytelling experience doesn't apply to their God-given talents, but no: structure that shit. Being "artistic" doesn't mean you can be haphazard. Build your webcomic out of bricks or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll fuck your shit up.

Yes, I know this. No, I didn't do it for Dominic Durgan. I was bored, not serious, lazy and generally not treating the webcomic like anything but a massive joke. On Terracciano. That doesn't suddenly and magically make it a good webcomic. Just because I know what I should do doesn't mean I automatically crap out gold bricks and sunshine lollipops. The best intentions cannot save a poor narrative from being a poor narrative, nor can fancy art, which Durgan doesn't have anyway. So it's a terrible webcomic.

The entire premise is pretty bad. It's based around the fact that you've read Dominic Deegan and so you can appreciate that the main character's traits, such as his unending goodwill to all men and Godlike intelligence, are reversed and mocked. Ha ha, balls to that. This is flawed as fuck. Firstly, anyone who's actually managed to read Dominic Deegan is either a fan or not wanting to look at it ever again. While webcomic fans do have no taste whatsoever, they are also all fucking insane, so their ability to clap like seals for anything with panels and text is not going to let them take a mockery of one of their favourites all too well. So this means anyone who can understand the attempted humour behind Durgan is either going to hate the art because it's reminding them of Dominic Deegan, or they'll hate the writing because it's not the emotionally charged, award-winning skaldic epic that is the soapbox-ranting, cliché-ridden, orc-raping mess from Terracciano's head. Either way, you're out of a fucking audience, and webcomics are supposed to have audiences. Fiction is produced to be viewed, fuck anyone who says different.

Secondly, if you haven't read Dominic Deegan, it just reads like a fucking terrible animu-art webcomic with a fucking abysmal storyline and an overdose of gay jokes. I really can't explain the attraction with that. It's almost like an primal urge. Erase the text of a webcomic and start putting in new stuff - you will be inexorably drawn to making them talk about something filthy or crude.

But again, primal law or not, a bad webcomic is a bad webcomic. A foundation of pop culture references and mocking the mawkish sentiment of Dominic Deegan is seriously house-of-straw level webcomickery. Even Penny Arcade, the webcomic that people love to hate for no real reason, has a better foundation than "game references and mocking games". I know, you're vomiting with rage over that statement. But it's true. A lot of PA's humour comes from the two principle characters, Gabe and Tycho (known to certain parts of the Internet as Pig-faced and Bald). That's why it succeeds where its derivatives - such as CAD - fail so miserably.

In CAD, the main characters are simple one-word archetypes that are so simple they're not even proper archetypes. They're just "Manchild" and "Girl" and "Fat". In PA, the characters have a greater depth to them. Not phenomenal depth, but enough to bring about recurring jokes and instances of character humour. Character humour, for all those webcomic creators out there, is when the character is funny because of his regular behaviour. If you can't understand how CAD doesn't do that, I pity you. Oh, I so pity you. Because you're dumb as fuck.

Still, Durgan doesn't really do that. In fact, Durgan has around the same level of characterisation as Deegan. Which is to say, slim to none. Everyone's a walking one-dimensional mouthpiece for quick lines, and only the barest micron of depth tainting the way they speak. It would be a waste of time to put any more effort into a mockery of Dominic Deegan, but guess what? That's right, it doesn't change the fact the webcomic is bad. Even though I'm in a unique position to explain why it is bad on a level that no other review prior to this one (or after it) will have, I'm still going to keep saying that it's bad. Because it is. And maybe some of you will pay some fucking attention to the fact that nothing is sacred as far as I'm concerned. Bad is bad, regardless of who is responsible.

So why did I, a man who is so fiercely critical of his own work that he has literally burnt it on occasion, make a bad webcomic? The answer is that there is a distinction between a real work of fiction and just "something on the Internet" in terms of effort and pride. Except, no. There really isn't. When you create something anywhere, in any medium, you should treat it all the same. Perhaps this means I am just as guilty as the person who thinks that Magical MSPaint Catgirl is "good enough for the Internet" but at least I fucking cop to it. Not to mention that I have repaid the debt by putting something that's actually good on the Internet - and before you start, I do not mean this blog.

Bad webcomics can come into existence from anywhere and anyone. No one is exempt, but the circumstances change. Sometimes people can put their whole heart and soul into a webcomic and it'll be the worst fucking thing in existence. Sometimes people with talent can knock some shit off in a day and it'll be fucking awful. I'm not looking for excuses, for extenuating circumstances. I'm looking at bad webcomics and I'm saying this shit is bad. It's not subjective, it's scarcely even opinion. Bad fiction will always be bad fiction, in any medium. Making a fucking comic on the Internet isn't the paddling pool, people - you will be grilled mercilessly for it as much as you would be for anything else. If not by me than by any of the others on this blog, or any number of people with the common fucking sense to tell you that your shit stinks.

People have told me before that Dominic Durgan is bad. Yes, it is. It is bad. It is very bad. Not only because it relies on Deegan's art, but because it's a waste of space I put next to no effort into. It might not be on the same level as many of the other webcomics I've reviewed, but it's still bad. What else can I say? I made something bad, I accept that it's bad and I'm now telling you all in no uncertain terms why it's bad.

Essentially, Durgan has so many flaws it is constructed from those flaws. It has a terrible plot that is derived from a haphazard attempt to invert a pre-existing terrible plot, executed in a single day and by fuckin' God it shows. The art is Deegan snoutface, no need to explain how fucking awful that shit is - a more decent parody would have used original art and a more general dig at Deegan's many failings, but I don't think it's really worth it just to make fun of Dominic Deegan. All bland fantasy webcomics, perhaps, but not Deegan on its own.

John Solomon, your webcomic is bad and you should feel bad. I object! What? Though my webcomic is bad, I do not have to feel bad! On what grounds? I am accepting of its badness, but I am also responsible for greater and better things! Denied! Screw you! Screw me, you mean. What? This is too confusing, I'm ending the review. No, don'

Jesslyn Stormheart seems to think it can play dead long enough to avoid us. We are not a bear, "Brian R", we will be watching your webcomic until it so much as twitches. Save yourself the humiliation of even trying to continue your demeaning webcomic and run away. Run away!

Now onto the main topic of discussion. Someone recently asked me why I read the comments. Good point, I said. So I'm not going to anymore. Anyone wishing to reach me to tell me how much I suck can now use badwebcomics@gmail.com to funnel their immense hatred of me, one man they know nothing about who posts on the Internet about Internet comics on the Internet, into e-mail form. Do keep in mind that I don't actually have to read your e-mail and I probably won't, and also that gmail has a built-in spam filter so it won't work if you try and sign me up for horse porn and gay midget dating sites. I know that's going to make some of you try harder, but what the Hell, I can't get through to people that fucking stupid.

Now you can recommend me webcomics via e-mail, although chance are I'll still ignore you. But who knows? I knows. But I'm not telling.

While I'm receiving fresh new death threats, those of you who don't view me as mankind's pariah for talking about webcomics can e-mail me more pleasant things. What things? Images! Because YWB is having its very first super-special competition.

The theme is "Amalgam Webcomics" - combine two bad webcomics through photoshop, MSPaint or your own horrible drawing skills. Perhaps you'll have Shredded Mirror, or User Security - the possibilities are as numerous and as hideous as the originals! Though I won't judge your artwork (much), I will judge your entries - and the winner gets something special! But I'm not going to tell you what it is. It's a surprise.

Besides, nobody is going to send anything in that isn't a gigantic flash .gif saying "YOU'RE A FAGGOT, JOHN SOLOLAME" so why should I tell you what the winner gets?

In the mean time, I will leave you with what is quite possibly the worst thing I will see this month. Enjoy!

Now folks, we were going to review Jesslyn Stormheart this fine Wednesday, but the author left the Internet in tears, so you're getting this short opinion piece instead.


Lust

Spherical, shiny boobs. Do I need to say more? It's when the artist decides that the best way to gain hits is to draw every woman like she's Katie Andre, complete with enormous, inhumane pout and spear-like eyelashes. Oh, and the tits. The bigger-than-her-head tits.

I hope even the densest of you can appreciate why this is such a grave offense. In case you're a Shredded Moose fan, I feel I must explain: drawing women as nothing but wank-material will not endear you to most people and will show you as the eternal virgin creep you really are. I don't mind well-endowed women appearing in any media, as long as they have a fully fleshed-out character to go with the monster knockers. And I mean a character beyond “tee-hee, I'm a nympho!”

I understand that some people out there have huge trouble talking to the opposite sex and therefore get all their knowledge second-hand from people who have slightly less trouble regarding conversation with women, but that's no excuse. Unless you have full-blown panic attack every time a woman comes near you (and in this case you should see a shrink), you should really gain some female friends before trying to write a female character.

This particular sin also encompasses presenting women as barely-characterized stereotypes, a la the recently-lambasted Hookie Dookie Panic! (incidentally, what a fucking stupid name that is), where the girl is a misandrist and likes ponies and that's the extent of her character. Seriously, people, use the brains your mothers gave you: if you never talked to a girl before, either have an all-male cast or don't bother writing at all until you're capable of facing up to the opposite sex.

Gluttony

“LOOK AT ME EVERYONE I DO A WEBCOMIC!” sums this one up perfectly. It's when an author shamelessly promotes himself/herself in everything they do and say. This is not necessarily a bad thing (there are comics which deserve promotion) but it's an almost constant feature of those folk who wouldn't know taste if it hit their hands with a hammer. When those people bring up their webcomic, it's almost a given that they're not looking for critique or readership. They're looking for hits and praise and some more hits and praise and then maybe a little bit more praise. They want to be the centre of all attention and the one everyone looks up to. They want their gigantic, diseased ego to grow fat on the milk and honey of positive comments from fanshippers.

The difference between readership and hits is that it's a lot easier to measure the latter than the former. You may be getting 10 000 uniques a day, but how many of them are staying? A comic's true popularity isn't measured by its traffic but by how many people will go back to it.

Those guilty of Gluttony are often guilty of Lust too, as in a desperate search for praise and hits they resort to fanservice in the form of TITS TITS AND MORE TITS.

Even though he's just a pretty shitty reviewer and probably never drew a straight line in his life, Robert A. "Tangents" Howard is guilty as hell of this. He tries to ingrain himself in every single thing to do with webcomics. He reviews everyone. And you just know he's only doing it for praise and maybe to get into someone's panties, or, since he can't afford to be picky, boxers.

Fishing for compliments is really, really fucking annoying and so is fishing for attention. Your art should speak for itself and if it's good, people will tell you so without being prompted. The rule of thumb here is: if you have to ask, it's not good enough yet. So cram a sock in your mouth and study anatomy, composition, and for those folk who fall asleep in English classes, spelling and grammar.

Greed

Insane donation runs. Selling wallpapers, books, commissions and the huge, ever-present (usually taking up 1/5 of the screen) gauge showing current donations and amount of money desired.

Well, I'll be honest here, like the previous sin, it's not necessarily a feature of bad webcomics. Some good webcomics do donation runs too. The issue here is the quality of the comic. If it's good, a discrete link to a paypal donation page is acceptable. If the comic is crap ... well, why bother?

Two words, folks: The Wotch.

The Wotch adores donation runs. Its creators actually earn money for something other than hosting via donation runs. It is ridiculous and a kick in the groin for people whose art is actually worth a shit: some guy's half-hearted, badly plotted doodles provide a reliable source of income.

As nauseating as that is, it's understandable. The Wotch is a fetish webcomic, catering to a fetish for which there is little decent porn (or so I'm told). Comics like that are a licence to print money. The thing that baffles me still is the fact that JDR is able to make a killing on her comics. JDR, you insane pile of lies and insecurities, the Devil shall collect his due in a few years.

Really, it's the difference between trying to make money off your comic and being a money-grubbing arse who happens to shit out a comic three times a week.

Sloth

Copy+pasting. Using hackneyed plot lines. Sprites. “Dead Piro day”. Probably one of the most annoying sins in this list, Sloth is when you just don't bother. It's criminal, especially when, like some people I could mention, you make a living off it. It's also a hack thing to do. Real artists do suffer for their art, at least by sacrificing time and paying minute attention to what the fuck they're scribbling on the page. Real artists also take classes and do life drawing and always seek ways to improve. Of course, some real artists then forget their roots and start copy+pasting and using GIS images for backgrounds, but it's nothing a good, sound blow to the head won't fix.

It is possible to make a good comic with limited artwork, but it's not easy and your writing better be damn good. The beauty of sequential art lies partially in the fact that good writing can save less-than-perfect artwork.

However, all the brilliant artwork in the world won't fix a badly-written comic and most people seem to be unware of that. I've seen excellent artwork ruined completely by poor, stilted writing. This stubborn refusal to admit that maybe, just maybe, giving the task of writing to someone else will be better than painfully extracting every word out of your keyboard, as if pulling rotten teeth, only to find that people's eyes glaze over the second they glance over your bloated word balloons.

I digress.

Fillers are annoying and another facet of Sloth, but they're much more excusable – sometimes you really don't have the time. (Hint to people who put up a lot of filler and aren't crippled by an illness: buffer.)

Don't copy+paste. Don't try to cut corners. For the love of god, unless you're positive that you can make a sprite comic something other than eye-bleedingly bad and hideously misguided, do not use sprites.

And seriously, don't use GIS. That's what Buckley does. You don't want to be like Buckley, do you?


Wrath

Very simple sin to fall into: starting feuds with someone. Mostly “just because”. Just because they're more popular than you. Just because they didn't link to you, reply to your emails or some other shit. I'm not quite sure if author feuds are as popular as they once were, so I'll instead mention the wrathful fans of many comics.

Oh yes. We've all seen it, right on this blog. The people who just cannot accept that their beloved comic is shit or, hell, even less than absolutely perfect in every single way. And if you dare to pour some chlorine into the infested pool of webcomics, they shall rally like piranhas and attack with brilliant methods such as sucking up to the webcomic's author even harder, commenting with poorly-thought-out walls of text and yelling pathetic insults into the ether.

But that's fanbases for you, I guess. The old joke about committees applies here.

Envy

This one, oddly enough, does not get much mileage. What we get is the exact opposite – people trying to sycophant by saying things like “I'm so jealous of your talent, I draw so badly compared to you!” Except, you know, with poorer spelling and more Internet slang. It is the beating heart of the Culture of Nice, the knowledge that if you give enough handjobs, someone will finally reach for your metaphorical, sweaty and STD-ridden penis and give it a good hard rubbing. And then maybe you wouldn't be so alone.

It's not real jealousy – it's empty words thrown around like bait, seeing if someone will rise to it and shower you with happy-clappy, fingers-in-ears, strained praise that will further cement your fate as a bad artist, bad writer and your comic's fate as the pefect candidate for our blog.

Sometimes, one does come across people who are eaten up by jealousy to the extent that they steal art and put their own name on it. Those people are known as “veritable goldmines of drama” and my day feels brighter every time I stumble across one of them.

Pride

Finally, we come to the mother of all Webcomic Sins – the one that will forever hang like a noose around anyone who succumbs to it. Pride is personified as the knowledge that you are the best, the very best and even your shit smells of roses and cinnamon.

It is a death knell for all talent. Anyone infected will be stuck in a rut, rehashing their old style and never adding a molecule of experimentation, never improving because the fans like it or because they believe that their webcomic was whispered to them by some god or other and to change even one little thing about it would be a sin.

The first step to shedding the other sins is to shed the pride. Sadly, that requires deflating your ego and not listening to fans quite so much and that seems to be an impossibility. Just look at what Shortpacked! turned into.

I know that there are people out there who constantly look for every poor argument they can use to snipe at us, the Elders of Zion, as we destroy their precious web-based e-comics. They'll probably start whining about how I will be, again, judging the jerk as well as the work. But understand that I have actually spoken with this jerk, attempted reason and eventually realised they were a horrible person who nobody should defend. I was not alone in this. Three fucking forums said exactly the same thing. Not that this will placate you, of course, but I feel that this time I can just point to this paragraph instead of bothering to communicate.

The title of this webcomic is The Broken Mirror. The epic title of this epic webcomic, I should say, because that's how it's presented. Epically. It's planned to be an epic 850 pages long, which is such an epic fucking number for such a fucking epic webcomic. It's an ongoing epic saga of the epic lives of some epically generic characters as they do epically tedious stuff. It has some seriously epic dialogue that will require an epic amount of epic endurance to read without feeling like you're going to get an epic migraine from trying to tackle such an epic wall of text. Goddamn, son! This shit is just way too epic!

Now we've reduced the word "epic" down to the level of nonsense sound that Broken Mirror uses it as, let's be serious. Broken Mirror is quite possibly one of the most boring, bland, mundane and badly-structured things I've read in my life - and I have read both Dominic Deegan and Pastel Defender Heliotrope, may I remind you. It's an exercise in arrogance - Elanor Cooper, the architect of this pablum, is one of the most conceited people in the world. She enjoys using fifty words where five will do, all about herself. She likes ignoring even the nicest and most polite level of criticism - people who are the Mr. Rogers to my Charles Manson. It isn't the method she disagrees with, it's that she cannot understand that anything is wrong with her work. Anything. She'll disparage every writer under the sun as being not being up to her eloquent standards of literary finesse, especially not anyone from America, which is apparently a country that has never produced a single worthy piece of fiction in any medium. Well, at least not to the level that Cooper holds everyone to, the level that she only exceeds in her own deluded mind. The other half, the artist, JJ Nääs, I have not had the pleasure of speaking with. It doesn't matter, anyway, since Cooper is the one who wears the diamond-encrusted codpiece out of the two.

In the beginning, Cooper created a webcomic. And the webcomic was without pictures, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And Elanor Cooper moved upon the face of the webcomic. And Cooper said, Let there be dull narration: and there was dull narration. And Cooper saw the dull narration, assumed it was good: and Cooper divided the dull narration from the title page.

That's six strips. Since Broken Mirror is on a MWF schedule, that's two weeks where nothing happens whatsoever. Remember that this is supposed to be an epic 850 pages long. That is 284 weeks. That is five and a half fucking years. Out of the half a month we've just gone through, only three pages actually had any actual webcomic on them. The other three, a whole fucking week's worth, were absolutely pointless. But that's good, since the actual webcomic is also absolutely pointless.

The story truly begins at the start of week three. Finally. I doubt anyone actually stuck with it for those first couple of weeks, though. They'd either have been driven off by the turgid writing or the long wait. I know I seriously contemplated giving up by page six, and it was only my desire to document the numerous failings of this piece of shit that kept me going. But we have one minor piece of relevant information: it is set in Devon, in England, in 2010. It is a crisp autumn day and, going by panel four at least, our protagonist is a poor boy born without knees. Thankfully he gets some a couple of panels later or it would be awkward for him to continue to trudge through all the dead leaves and narration boxes that clog up the path.

Yes, narration boxes. Cooper believes in telling, rather than showing. Or even telling you even when showing, since apparently her artist cannot be trusted to draw a recognisable sunset. Telling you through a clunky, third-person narrative that makes it look like some 16-year-old's derivative attempt at a 10,000 word "novel" has become hopelessly tangled up in this mediocre webcomic. Don't kid yourself, though, this worthless purple prose is here to stay for the duration. Cooper revels in what she views as a talent for writing moving descriptive passages to tug the heartstrings and affect the emotions of her reader. This talent doesn't actually exist, as you may find yourself aware of a mere half dozen pages in. She's young, inexperienced and in that wonderful deluded state that many webcomic writers find themselves in when they haven't been exposed to one jot of actual criticism in their entire fucking lives.

Let me fill you in on the story so far, because I know many of you probably don't want to read any more. Our hero is Galen, which is a very uncommon name indeed. I could assume that this is a reference, but it's more likely that it was chosen because Galen is a unique and special (and epic) snowflake who cannot be called "James" or "Paul" or anything remotely normal. Except apparently, everyone in 2010 has a stupid name. Lord only knows what happens in the next three years, but it seems that British sensibility has been overtaken by animu fever. Perhaps this makes it more epic, I never thought to ask.

Despite the fact this is written by a girl, Galen is the self-insertion character. He has parents who just don't understand him. They are so mean! To the point where he is physically assaulted. This is basically exactly what Terracciano did with rape, in that it's done without any understanding of what it's actually like. Heaven forbid that Cooper admit she is not the divine medium that has descended onto the mortal world and actually do some fucking research. It's so badly done it's unbelievable, especially at the point where all Galen does afterwards is lie in bed and stare at the moon. This is some epic symbolism, I'm sure. Pity it's utterly hackneyed and cliché to the point where it's meaningless. The only redeeming feature is JJ's art, and despite the rather amateur feel to it, it has some nice colouring. You have to assume that with a surname like "Nääs" the only reason he goes along with this is because he doesn't understand what the script says. It's okay, JJ, nobody else does either. It's trite, stupidly wordy and banal.

Still, I don't know what the point of this is. The beating takes place at 29 pages in. If we discount the two weeks of uselessness at the start and the chapter break, then we've had 21 pages to get to know Galen. That's not enough. Despite this being seven weeks of real time, it's been hardly any time at all in the webcomic itself. What have we even discovered, anyway? That his parents are one-dimensional authority figures, an insipid machine for him to rage against? That he apparently isn't doing well in school except he just lurves English? (That's pretty subtle! Wait, no it's not.) Oh, and girls just wander up to him and ask if they can jump his bones. Wow, you guys! This shit is super-realistic as fuck.

Let's not get into the argument that science fiction doesn't have to be realistic. Apparently this is science fiction, although it's not exactly making it clear. Maybe it's just sci-fi on such an epic fucking scale that I can't begin to fathom its epic depths. In any case, realism in writing doesn't mean you have to exclude the incredible. You can have giant robots flying through oceans in space or whatever. That's cool. But if you have your people not act like real people? Unacceptable. What you're looking at is pretty much the uncanny valley of characterisation. If you try for a complex character, but don't make them act like a real person, they won't be seen as real by your audience. Unless your audience is fucking retarded, of course, but this is webcomics: any significant portion of any webcomic's audience is dumb as fucking bricks. Chances are you're one of them, if the voluminous amount of obnoxious comments are anything to go by. Anyway, I'm talking to the smart people here, so you dumbasses can go back to eating paste.

After 21 pages, I know this Galen guy about as well as I know anyone else in the webcomic: not very well at all. It doesn't help that everyone speaks in the exact same stilted manner, spitting out dialogue that no real human being would use except to give an example of how people don't fucking talk. Nobody has an individual voice to them. If you look at the dialogue without the art, you can't tell the difference. For example, guess how many different people are speaking these four pieces of dialogue:

"We have to write a poem about something for our English homework over the summer holidays."
"You don't know how much it hurts to know you don't really care about me anymore."
"I'm telling you because I needed to talk to someone."
"Shouldn't I furtively thrust a wad of fifties into your palm before heading to the sewers... clandestine, intent on pursuing my perilous trade?"

If you said "one" then you are correct! That one is Cooper herself, since she can't make people sound unlike her. Because she's terrible at writing. I can't stress that enough. To clarify, #1 is a little girl, #2 is a young woman, #3 is a middle-aged man and #4 is a young man. Now, maybe I'm being just a little pedantic here, but when you're writing an orange-haired wannabe junkie who dresses in leather jackets and listens to death metal, you don't make said junkie say shit like "furtively" and "your palm". Even an educated motherfucker like me doesn't use "furtively". It's not just being incapable of writing dialogue for different people, it's being incapable of writing dialogue entirely. People don't say shit like that, it's not how they talk. They don't even use stupid words like that if they're trying to be epic.

Galen uses the same terrible speech as those other four characters, the same as all the other characters. It's only the pretty pictures that let us know this never-ending torrent of tedium isn't all the ramblings of one guy, who is also insane in addition to being painfully and insufferably verbose. So we can't get a good voice on him, he's only been around for a few weeks, he's as much a nonentity as any given background character. Except, of course, the background characters are probably not arrogant little cunts like Galen. So this attempt to deepen the character through personal tragedy fails because, funnily enough, the character isn't deep enough.

Besides, Cooper has already told us we can expect several billion more pages, so what's the point in jumping the gun and trying to get us to feel sympathy for a non-character? Oh, yes, she's a terrible writer.

There are plenty more of these botched attempts to make deep and interesting characters. It's all rather sad, really. It's like watching a young child try and cook dinner, except instead of sulking when they can't do it, they laugh and go "BITCH, I'M FLAWLESS!" and then demand you eat the horrible shit they've mangled together out of salt, ketchup and tapwater. Generally all this "character development" shit seems to indicate that Cooper's dial is stuck permanently on "personal tragedy". You've got abusive parents for Galen, except then they die and he cries about it. Also he loses his girlfriend (who he's been with for years) when she degenerates into a crazed druggie in the most laughable way imaginable. She played him fine! I was half expecting her to go "KUH-KUH-KUH-YEEEEEAH!" until I realised that'd be hilarious and awesome and therefore not within Cooper's ability. Xara, another victim of the animu naming scheme, has a sister who dies of CJD - the human variant of mad cow disease. I laughed. Especially since brain damage apparently doesn't stop you from talking like a failed English major. In any case, somehow all this winds up bringing us to what I think is the main plot of the story. On page 115.

Now, for those of you still keeping up with the "thrice weekly" formula, that's after 38 weeks. Little lengthy for a prologue, isn't it? Not to mention we've got around 750 pages to go. I don't know about you, but I'm excited! Aren't you excited? Let's all be excited. An epic seven hundred and fucking fifty more epic pages of epic bullshit!

The plot is about "Domino", or "DominO", which is the radically unique (and epic!) plot device of a virtual world! I'm not going to rag on the virtual world thing in general, no sir. I'm going to point out that a piss-poor hack like Cooper is going to crib heavily from existing media. The Matrix if we're lucky. Second Life if we're not. Since I've learned that it's tempting fate to be optimistic about this shit, I'm betting we're going to see wall-to-wall shitting dicknipples by the time they enter this virtual world. Which should be around page 340 at the earliest. That only leaves a mere 510 pages for the furries and Goreans, but darn it, I believe in Cooper!

Still, virtual world. Doesn't bode well. If you were hoping for a subtle and mysterious look into a "what is real?" theme, or anything along those lines, then what the fuck are you on and have you not been reading this fucking review? Plus, hard luck, because Cooper's Galen-Sue is saved from all possible forms of curiosity by Daniel Adair, the walking exposition. He just doesn't fucking shut up. Funnily enough, the clock in that second strip denotes that we're skimming over a twenty-minute conversation. I take issue with this for two reasons. Firstly, I doubt that a conversation comprised entirely out of Cooper's wordy bullshit takes a mere twenty minutes to go through. Adair, being nothing but a medium for Cooper to talk through (like all her characters), should keep Galen captive for the better part of twenty weeks. Secondly, I have no idea why she bothered to actually skip the conversation and not just have an extra hundred pages of even more fucking dialogue. Maybe it's because it would have required some pseudoscience shit in there, and Cooper will BURN IN HELL before doing a lick of research. That's a waste of precious time that could be spent churning out more shit like this.

Cooper, I have no idea what the fuck your home life was like, nor do I envy it in the slightest. Not when your idea of a father is someone who either beats the shit out of you for not being an accountant or says shit like "Stay here for a minute whilst I go and get some ice creams."

This webcomic is a fucking plague, and the progenitor of it is a shameless, egocentric bitch with severe issues. I doubt they'll take any of this to heart, especially when kinder words have fallen upon deaf ears, but I just hope that you people will never touch it. Stay away from The Broken Mirror, it is literary poison. The art is fair enough, the colouring decent in places, but neither are worth it unless you can avoid looking at the words. Even if you do, by some miracle of your own ignorance, decide it's great and want to read it, I remind you that it's going to be another FIVE FUCKING YEARS until it ends. If you think you can put up with such a shitty plot, such awful dialogue and such flat characters for half a decade then you must have a tolerance for pain that's simply... epic.

Diary webcomics can be good. There, I said it. You don't have to have much of an interesting life, but you have to be able to make it interesting. Any kind of fiction that's not interesting isn't worth reading. Despite that, I have spent a lot of time reading Jamie Kingston's Kismetropolis. I regret ever having done so and now I'm taking it out on you.

I'm sure some of you remember that back when I reviewed El Goonish Shive, a job I now see I have left only half done, I mentioned one key thing: do not welcome people to your webcomic. Why not? Well, because it's stupid. No decent proportion of your readership will stumble upon your webcomic on day one. However, they will go to the first strip and then have to put up with not getting into the story or jokes right away, but putting up with some fourth-wall-breaking shit from a character they don't know going "LAWL HI YOU GUYZ". You can have a "New Reader?" page, you can have a first page that introduces the key concepts in character, but last I checked no other form of fiction does this. Detective Comics #27 was not entirely Bruce Wayne saying "Hi guys and welcome to Batman! There'll be lots of interesting stuff coming up next issue! I promise!" DC would have bombed within seconds, and that would mean that the comic book fans of today would not be able to read about such wonderful characters as Forerunneru-chan and the C-List Monitor Posse.

That may not be such a bad thing, actually. But you get my point: it's stupid, it's tacky and above all, Kismetropolis does it. Not once, but twice. When I got to the actual first page, it took me a moment to realise it had started. Not only because of the fucking filler where the story should be, but that the thing looks like a piece of fanart from a talentless fan that you stick up on the main page because you're a sap and think that if you don't they'll hate you forever. (They will, but you shouldn't care.) To start with, the font choice is pretty bad. It's one of those fonts which is designed for school posters that are made in Word. You know the ones, they mostly consist of clip art and word art and look nothing like a poster. The font is, basically, not for use in a fucking webcomic. That makes it all the more sad that the font choice is one of the better things about it.

Panels should be drawn, generally, with some kind of straight line involved. These panels look like the page started off pure black and the borders were hacked out with the eraser tool. Let's not forget the "artist" forgoing art to grab images from Google image search, greyscaling them and then making them dark as fuck because fuck working in colour. That rainbow shit is for queer fairy faggots! Or maybe people who aren't incompetent.

The first panel is possibly supposed to have stars, but it looks a little more like snow. Wait, no, I think it's supposed to be dots drawn with the spraypaint tool because Jamie Kingston hasn't a fucking clue what stars look like. Maybe this is some crazy alternate universe where the millions of stars in the galaxy have been replaced with a dozen big glowing gas clouds. That would explain why the next panel has an utterly black sky, we're seeing one of the gaps between clouds. Fuck, I'm so sick of looking at this strip that I'm not even going to bother pointing out the flaws in the other two panels. Do it yourself for once.

Strip two made me say "GOD, YES!" out loud, but not in the good way. Practice makes perfect, but drawing yourself out of "completely imperfect" would be a pretty rad start. Also, what's the deal with the lack of colour? It seems less like actual black-and-white art and more like these used to be in colour but got turned to greyscale for God knows what reason. It makes the thing look even more dull than it would be using good black-and-white stuff. Oh, wait, "good" - I forgot that Kingston is apparently somewhat terrible.

Strips three, four and five show us more bad font choice and haphazard art that's so black it went on the Million Man March. Five is especially telling of Kingston's laziness - fuck drawing such complicated things as "desks", I'll just silhouette my way to Easy Street! This kind of shit brings to mind terrible sprite webcomics on Geocities, it doesn't deserve its own domain name. The one saving grace is that it doesn't have the walls of text associated with such endeavours.

Still, remember what I said about having to make your life seem interesting? Kingston has decided to go the "Magic is REAL!" route that will somehow turn her humdrum life into a fascinating read! Only it doesn't work, because we get fucking chat logs. I'm not even sure what it says, because I just hit "next" the moment I saw it. As a reviewer I should try and read everything, and I usually do, but Goddamn if it isn't telling that someone just skips a whole page of your webcomic because it looks like shit. Because of the fucking glacial pace and lack of anything interesting happening, it didn't affect my understanding of the story, which is apparently NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS.

Kingston, and you other fuckers who do this, you are not Brian Michael Bendis. You don't have the talent for even mediocre decompressed narrative shit. What you end up with is just a long and boring webcomic where nothing happens and I feel like giving up and just posting "It's shit" in lieu of actually reading it every fucking time I click "next".

I still can't get over how utterly amateur this thing looks. I mean, I thought that Hookie Dookie Panic! was bad, but even that Godawful heap is a damn sight better. Look in the first panel here, at that fucking speech bubble. What the fuck happened there, Kingston? Did you type out the text first and then keep missing it with the ellipse tool like a blind cowboy throwing a lasso? That mess is unreadable and looks like something my dog might throw up after a heavy night hitting the dog bars. Still, if you won't listen to me, listen to the utterly fantastic Your Webcomic Can Still Be Saved: "Don't treat your balloons as if they were shrink-wrap for the text. Don't carve your balloon into a jigsaw around the text, either." Failure on both counts.

There is a reason that people see webcomics as terrible amateur works done by idiots without any talent, and that's Kismetropolis. Not just Kismetropolis, of course, but fuck it: this shit is so Goddamn unprofessional in every respect that it's the patron saint of them all. So many fucking flaws, but the one I despise the most is the fact it's so fucking dark. It's like a goth in blackface in an underground coal cellar at midnight when even the very concept of light has ceased to be. What the fuck is happening in half the panels here? It's ridiculous that the only time there's any colour is during the fucking abysmal filler art, and then it's either dull as fuck or dark as fuck. It may be that the entire webcomic is black as some kind of tribute, but I suspect it's because Kingston has a broken monitor since holy fuck. Even when it's not super-dark, it's still fucking incomprehensible.

Although judging later strips, I think I preferred the incomprehensible shit. Thankfully it diverts into colour, although I don't know why. Maybe it discovered the magic of sex, like in Pleasantville. Judging by the amount of love-related whining (which is never fucking entertaining ever) in the webcomic, that's doubtful. Colour still doesn't save it from the shitty layout, however. Protip: if you need big red arrows to tell people where to look next, you've failed. Although the same could be applied to this webcomic's entire storyline - if there even is one, I may be faulty in assuming this is anything but random images and text as a kind of freestyle performance art. Kingston, try jamming in some big red arrows and footnotes so we can follow this shit. I know that's tacky and shouldn't be done in a webcomic, but you don't, so go for it.

Actually, she does do it. This strip has a note saying "Mysterious chick, first seen here." Except, if you remember, we couldn't see a fucking thing in that strip. Also way to play up the fact that we've had two strips about "mysterious chick" and have yet to find out what her name is, why she's turning up in a webcomic that's mostly about your shitty experiences doing tech support, and why the fuck am I still reading your fucking awful webcomic.

The answer to the last one is "because then I can point out all the flaws in it" by the way. Because damn if this isn't just a fucking terrible webcomic. It's not entertaining, it's not informative, it's not even fucking educational. It doesn't seem like you're improving your art or your writing by doing it, since both are still uniformly terrible. You've been at it since 2005, so for two years you haven't even learned how to put together something that's not terrible? Way to go! I'm sure someone's proud of you for not accomplishing a damn thing in two fucking years.

But all is illuminated. "I think Sluggy Freelance was the first webcomic I ever read," she says. "I thought: I can do that!"

Depressingly, no, you can't. Your webcomic is not even anywhere close to being on the same level as Sluggy fuckin' Freelance, which is pathetic on a level I can't begin to comprehend. Also you refer to "learning word balloons" as if now you know how - you don't. Even your idol, Pete Abrams, can make a semi-decent one, even if it is full of eight billion fucking words. Nice little addendum with "manners are not optional" though. I can practically taste your hopeless idealism, and oh it is ripe for the crushing. Let's look at it another way: my various impolite remarks are the logical response to the massive insult you have subjected me to by putting your shitty webcomic where I can read it. Kismetropolis is a massive "UP YOURS, YOU FUCKERS" from Jamie Kingston to the world at large, and as part of the world at large, I say "YEAH WELL FUCK YOU TOO, PAL" in my best Bronx accent.

If you still cling to the hopeless delusion that everything I said is somehow moot because I'm being a big meanie, then have this separate sentence in the blandest, most inoffensive terms: your webcomic is boring, confusing and uninteresting. Does that spell it out for you? Because Goddamn, it's true. Watching paint dry is not only vastly more entertaining than Kismetropolis, it's also more colourful and less full of stupid Internet clichés and your attempts to make your sad life roleplaying on some shitty MUD seem like anything but a pathetic stream of depressing misery. Since even I was wishing you'd go out and get a fucking life already, you've failed at that. You can start doing something with your pointless existence that would make your webcomic worth reading, or stop making it entirely. Either one of those would be nice, but if you try for the former then for God's sake learn how to fucking draw and learn how to fucking write.

Transgenderism, also known as gender identity disorder, is a real psychological condition with its very own code in the DSM-IV. You would not know this if you read webcomics, because to you 'transgender' would be a word like 'furry' or 'gaming'. That is, just another category of terrible webcomics. Now how this came to be I have no fucking idea. I mean, I know a lot of people like video games, but I never imagined that a lot of people would be getting excited over the concept of a guy magically turning into a girl. It's not even an obscure category, either, as names like Misfile and El Goonish Shive are at least moderately well-known in webcomics.

But still, I wouldn't be surprised if you were fortunate enough to not know about this particular section of the webcomics world. It is pretty insular, tending to link to and only be linked by others of their kind. Well allow me to end your run of good luck by reviewing the only transgender fetish webcomic you need to know about to pass judgment on the entire genre. No gender-changing magical supervillians or gender-changing alien space rays or gender-changing thousand-year-old genies to get in the way. Just the base elements, so that it becomes the purest of terrible gender-changing webcomics. Like rainwater distilled through a ten thousand year-old glacier. Yes, there is such a beast to study, and its name is Abstract Gender.

As you can see, even the name screams purity. Abstract Gender. It's like if I started an ore extraction firm and called it 'Mining Inc.' It makes no bones about it and puts it right up front for all to see and proclaims: This is a comic about dudes who get changed into girls, and that's it! That's all! We can expect great things from this work, and by great things I mean terrible things, but terrible in a way that we can study this phenomenon known as gender-switching webcomics. I'm going to go through the entire archives from page 1 to page 276, commenting all along. No, really. This will also make this review rather longer than the average one, as I will not just be commenting on this comic, but speculating on the trends and the motivations of this alien world of transgender fetish webcomics as well.

So let's go to the first page. Here we can see the two main characters of the strip: Ryan and Brian, whose character designs are so inspired that you can only tell them apart by the color of shirt they wear. You see, just as the typical terrible gaming webcomic will feature two guys with contrasting one-word personalities sitting on a couch playing video games as its main characters, the typical terrible gender-changing webcomic also has two guys with contrasting one-word personalities, only instead of delivering scathing reviews of the PS3 they turn into girls. Or maybe only one of them turns into a girl. Or maybe both of them turn into girls but can turn back into guys at their leisure. As you can see, the possibilities are endless!

By the way, the first artist for this comic lasts all but six updates, and we see a new one by the seventh.

If you are reading along with me, you might notice that there haven't even been any mentions of gender-changing, and the comic so far has just been a shitty, boring story about two guys and their female friend, Katie, at a mall. But don't worry, what's been going on so far has been character-building, except it really hasn't been character-building because fifteen comics in and I still can't tell the two main characters apart. But God bless 'em, they're trying. And before you know it, the mechanism for the gender change so juicily promised in the title of the comic is revealed, and surprise surprise, it's unbelievably stupid! Apparently a flatly characterized nemesis of the one in the black shirt offhandedly mentions a treasure in a mysterious mansion, and so for no reason at all our two protagonists decide to explore in search of it! Of course there's still time to make wacky penguin jokes and solidify their one-word characterizations. And it turns out that the long-awaited transformation comes by our two protagonists being knocked out and operated on in a basement lab by MYSTERIOUS SCIENTISTS. Which is, as promised, fucking stupid. Though honestly I couldn't think of a plausible way for two young boys to be instantaneously transformed into two young girls with no side effects in a normal, modern-day setting if I tried, and I'm not going to think very hard about it either as it's not like I'm going to start my own gender-bending comic. And it is for this reason that most of these gender-changing comics rely on magic or science fiction to make the guilt-free change.

And is it a coincidence that the revelation of our two protagonists in their new female form is lovingly rendered in a detailed close-up unlike anything seen in the comic so far? Of course, such a noticable transition does not happen in many gender-changing webcomics for one of two possible reasons: the first being that for many any attempted close-ups will result in what looks like a sloppy rasterbation, because that is what it is, because the art in the comic is not so much 'art' but 'shit that would be failed from a third grade art class'; and the second being that many of these webcomics start with the change right off, or very close to, the bat, so the artist will have from page one a cornucopia of female curves to illustrate with his left hand. In Abstract Gender, instead we get to read through three months of boring, terribly written shit before the comic is distinguished from being just a regular ol' boring, terribly written, shit slice-of-life webcomic by becoming a boring, terribly written, shit gender-changing-fetish webcomic. And knowing the depths of the precipice this comic is about to fall into, to be honest I would have preferred to read the Mall Adventures of Ryan and Brian for just a little while longer.

But we can't always get what we want, and the trainwreck continues with a second art change. You don't have to be a terrible webcomic connoisseur to detect the changes in this one. Though it has tried to copy the previous art style to the best of its ability it ends up looking stiffer than the erections of the comic's intended audience as they read it. That is, the art has gotten worse, and it doesn't help that the comic is hitting another station in the train ride through the land of Plato's Ideal Transgender Fetish Webcomic. After all, isn't it normal for, you know, if you're a perfectly normal normal guy and all, and you just, oh I don't know, happen to wake up one day and you just happen to inexplicably be in the body of a woman, wouldn't it be, you know, normal to start, oh you know, touching yourself in places? No. No it's not. The normal response would be to freak the fuck out because to a normal person suddenly waking up the opposite gender is NOT the culmination of one's adolescent fantasies. And speaking of adolescent fantasies, you can see that from the myriad of choices for the configuration of the two protagonists I outlined four paragraphs ago, the writer has chosen to gone with one being stuck as a girl, and one being able to change back and forth at will. Which is, really, the best of both worlds for the audience because you can get stupid drama from the stuck one and guilt-free whacking it to the carefree one, whose tits are bigger anyway!

And of course the reaction of the main girl character upon discovery of this chromosome-swapping affair (after checking that they're real, of course!) is not to take the two of them to some medical professionals, but rather to take them shopping! I assume that later she also teaches them how to bake pies and fold laundry and submit to their husbands, for the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church. Though seriously, in your average genderswapping comic you're pretty likely to come across a shopping scene, because logically your men-newly-turned-women will not happen to have women's clothes simply lying around and will have to obtain them somehow. This is almost a bone thrown by the writers. A bone of consequences-for-actions that is all too rare in terrible webcomics. Because it makes sense, right? Guys turn into girls, they have no girl-clothes. So of course they go shopping for some because their first reaction is to figure out how to fit into everyday society in their new female bodies and not to figure out what happened to them and if it is possible to reverse it or anything. Wait, damn! I was proven wrong again by myself! How does this keep happening?

And really, the obligatory female love interest for the former male and the unwitting guy interested in the newly-minted woman feels like the comic is just going through the fucking motions. Of course that vibe could just be coming from the utterly lifeless and terrible art, and the equally utterly lifeless and terrible writing, so there's no way to know. The writer and the artist could have been creaming their pants as they wrote/drew those pages, and not barely managing to keep themselves awake like I'm imagining. Of course, in the very hypothetical competently-written (pfft) gender-changing webcomic these subplots might also come into play, except that they wouldn't be written so fucking ham-handedly.

After all, there's nothing inherently terrible about a story where a man turns into a woman. The concept has been with us since the story of Tiresias in Greek mythology. It's just that these writers, well, are generally terrible and lazy at writing, and elevate this gender-changing concept onto some sort of strange pedestal to the point where it's almost a fetish, if it isn't one already to them. This, combined with the lazy writing, leads to patterns like when those closest to the character discover the change, they're always perfectly fine with it to an unbelievable degree. And the general public can never know of the change, so there must be a way to handle the effective disappearing of a man and replacement of the same with a woman who looks and acts a lot like him. But instead of sitting down and thinking up a good way to resolve that, instead many of these bad writers use a Deus Ex Machina (the number one tool in the bad writer's toolbox), or a dumbfuck convoluted explanation that no sane person would believe. But since Abstract Gender's dumbfuck convoluted explanation hinges on a very coincidental earthquake, which is a D.E.M. by itself, it seems that the comic once more tops its own genre and goes for both.

And so at long last, we arrive at this point. The two-dimensional characters are established. The cause of the change which should have been the overarching plot, the MYSTERIOUS HAPPENINGS in the MYSTERIOUS MANSION, can safely be ignored for now. Everything is ready to get on with what the show is really intended to be about: Ryan adjusting to his new life as Rachel, a person of the female gender! And would you be surprised that the writer is not good at writing this either? I mean first of all, he is starting his new life as a woman by going back to school on the very next day, and his mother, who ostensibly cares for his mental well-being, is the one insisting on this! And the very first thing he does on his very first day is to join the volleyball team, an event that is celebrated by showing just how stiff the terrible art can get. And when someone says 'this chapter of my comic is about a school day' I expect it to hit just the salient points of the day's experience and not actually go
through every class. Not that such a thing couldn't work, as going through a full day of someone's life would be an excellent way to build some subtle characterization. Things like this, however, is not very good subtle characterization. And while it could be that the stilted art is coloring my judgment, the writer does not seem to be very good at pacing and flow either, especially when he feels he needs to detail the minutae of the formation of a girls' volleyball team.

The next seventy pages consist of such shining examples of character development, and the plot moving forward once more with Ryan finally going back to that MYSTERIOUS MANSION in search of clues. But what drives this is not the whole stuck-as-a-girl thing, but instead Brian-sometimes-Brittany getting a part-time job as a model, and starting to date Katie. Really. This is fucking stupid. The door to the mansion is unlocked, and he runs around until he literally steps on a piece of evidence, a manila folder with his name on it. This is really fucking stupid. And upon opening the file, it turns out that the change was apparently authorized by one Brian Parker, a seventeen-year-old who has been characterized so far as being dumber than a bag of rocks and having the foresight of the same. This is absolutely fucking stupid. I doubt even Alan Moore could pull off a good resolution given something this fucking stupid, so I have little faith in the writer of this comic.

And now we get to the third artist change. The latest one's impairment, a terrible anime-copying 'style' and the resultant poor grasp of anatomy, is apparent from her introduction. Which just shows how this comic continues to be the perfect representation of its genre, as pretty much every one of those comics are either drawn in that terrible MSPaint fashion or in that terrible shortcut abusing, every-character-the-same faux-manga fashion, and this comic has managed to have both! The coloring's terrible as well initially, but later another fellow anime-copier signs on as the colorist, making a total of five artists that this terrible comic has gone through. That has to be some kind of record, though at least I can't say that any talent has been wasted.

But back to the terrible story, in which the parents of Brian, the one who can switch between genders at will, discover their son's newfound ability, and not only accept it but also do not question it or do anything that would indicate that such a thing is not an everyday occurrence. Strike another one for team 'completely fine with it la dee dah'! Of course in these webcomics not everyone needs to be kept in the dark or fine with it. As long as they're an antagonist and completely incompetent. That way you get to have a one-dimensional foil you can trot out every once in a while for comic relief, as well as to show that not everyone has been buying that nonsensical story, which according to the comic has been going on for months! Yes, Ryan has apparently been a girl for months, a state that he does not desire to be in, and in that time he has gone searching for answers only once, and upon getting a strong lead has not done anything about it, because to do so would be to talk to his friend which he does not want to do because his friend is somehow reaping benefits from this whole affair? That's fucking stupid. That's really fucking stupid. A normal explanation for this would be that maybe the writer has written himself into a corner with that 'plot twist', but considering the genre it is more likely that the writer thinks his resolution of that twist is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is only delaying it so that we could have more of the Everyday Adventures of the Amazing Man-in-a-Woman's-Body.

And it's no surprise why he would want that as we hit another mile marker. Lesbians! Even if you are fortunate enough to have never heard of this entire category of webcomics before reading this review you should have seen this coming from a fucking mile away. It's like mathematics. The appearance of lesbians can be derived from the very axioms of transgender fetish comics, and I bet if I cared enough I could write a fucking formula for the page that lesbianism will first appear on given certain parameters. And I would bet that a sizeable percentage of both the readership and the authorship of this fine category of webcomics stick around mainly for the lesbian angle. The draw for the readers is obvious, and goes without saying, as most of them are undoubtedly males of the high school age. The draw for the writers, mostly males in their twenties, is obvious too, but I conjecture that they choose to write their story in this genre because they realize that they cannot write actual lesbians as they do not know any actual lesbians in real life or perhaps not even any females in general. But perhaps they reason that what they can write is a man stuck in a woman's body. Well as we've seen they really can't write that either, but they think they can. And of course nothing comes of it, as the whole thing is just a hint! A tease! To keep the readers reading and to keep from I don't know having to write an actual lesbian relationship or something. Of course going either way would have resulted in terribleness because at this point I think it's established that the writing here and in all this sort of comics is terrible.

Oh and of course thanks to the new art style the girls look twelve now, but I'm pretty sure zippers are being undone in basements across the nation all the same. And the estranged father of Ryan, who left his wife because apparently having two children is enough to be considered an unrestrainable baby factory, looks fourteen. He is, of course, the left in the dark variety of family member. And of course between that angle, a possible reconciliation, and the unwitting guy attracted to the new girl, we're slowly building up enough drama to whip up a drama soufflé! Or at least a drama burnt omelette. Though there's enough time between all that to have some more pandering, both to the furry crowd by that thing again and to the rest of the readership by taking the girls' volleyball team to a spa. But no drama burnt omelette is complete without the green onion that is death! Is it using dramatic events as a crutch for storytelling? Why, yes it is! And that's the comic so far but I can already tell you that this terribly-written drama omelette will make up the entirety of the remainder of its existence. Not that I'd find out, as this is hopefully the last I will ever see of it. Of course, it might be amusing to see just what the whole happenings in the MYSTERIOUS MANSION was supposed to be, as by now it has to be something ridiculously complicated and hilariously bad, but seeing as how the very goal of this author and transgender fetish comic authors everywhere is to delay the resolution of that plot as long as possible, I doubt it will ever be revealed.

And as a bonus, the comic is heavily tied with a transgender fetish comic that is actually a thousand times worse than this one: The Wotch. Not just in the sense of having guest comics from it and its much less terrible spinoff, Cheer!, and not just its boards being hosted on their community, but also the cameos of the main characters of The Wotch, two of its secondary characters as the opposing volleyball team, its cheerleaders (rendered in a way that is making me nauseous, continuing that trend), and this guy, who also wrestled a girl on The Wotch, but lost that one. As I said the world of transgender fetish comics is pretty insular, though with the most recent artist change Abstract Gender is branching out to attract DeviantArt animus as well.

So there you are. If you are wondering if there is any worth to this whole gender-bending webcomic genre, just read Abstract Gender and that will be all you need to know, as every quality common to the genre, both bad and bad, appears in that webcomic. If you still are wondering after that, then you are an idiot.