Shitty Webcomics

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/9422-Previously-On-Critical-Miss

yea they actually explain the backstory in this comic, on page 146 out of 150~.  just from reading that one page, you would think that this was the most unoriginal pile of shit gamer webcomic ever made.  GET THIS, it’s a comic about a nerdy gamer girl who plays video games!  and it’s written by two guys.  fuck.  and then she gets into a car accident and when she wakes up suddenly she sees video game characters everywhere, o boy get ready for HIJINX.

but actually it’s probably one of the best of this type of subject.  there’s no fanservice, there’s no extended story lines to mine the drama of the situation, and the jokes are about 500x funnier than penny arcade’s typical shitstream.

but fuck, couldn’t they come up with a more original idea?  whatever I don’t EVEN care why am I posting about webcomics I don’t hate on a blog about shitty webcomics?

After we played a short game of “guess the third panel” with a couple of webcomics, we jumped into playing “make a new punchline” for a handful of comics.  Our goal was to make a punchline that was funnier than the original comic, without being a non sequitur, and was related to the previous two panels.

We started off with Three Panel Soul, a comic I used to like but has been taking a pretty strong nosedive lately.  http://threepanelsoul.com/2011/11/23/on-market-segments/

I phoned mine in really (and broke like all three rules).

Here is an improvement!

This guy really really phoned it in but we did have a good laff.

This one was decided to be the winner.  We probably should’ve ended here because this one is still my favorite (even though it’s not done by me sadly).

Next is a comic apparently called Hatefarm, which I had never seen before.  We actually did these ones without knowing the punchline.  After our drawings, we saw the original comic’s punchline, and it was pretty unanimous that we all made better comics than the original.  You can see the shitty original here though:  http://hatefarm.com/comic/a-many-splendored-thing/

The above one is clearly the winner in my NOT so humble opinion (woaoaoaoaoa).

She’s just going insane.  I think because she’s a woman (oshit).

She is living a life of regret… even though he has A MILLION DOLLARS?  Right above his Nobel Prize and Olympic Gold.  I TOLD YOU DIS BITCH CRAZY

This actually seemed like the natural final panel.  The original final panel does not at all compare.

I was going to sleep, so the other guys wrapped up with this comic I’ve never heard of, but according to the top there it’s called Incoherent Jargon.  I dunno, look it up I guess.  Or don’t, because the original comic wasn’t nearly as good.

http://www.viruscomix.com/page562.html

I won’t even embed the image because they’re only getting more and more obnoxiously massive these days.

The part that made me laugh unintentionally was how she opens the card and it’s YET ANOTHER gigantic wall of text.  It’s like the author of this webcomic is starting a meltdown like Robert Crumb’s shut in brother who was drawing more and more gigantic text balloons until he eventually was filling entire notebooks with little seagull Ms.

http://twokinds.keenspot.com/

A furry fetish comic that buries the fetish part under thick globs of generic anime shit storytelling.

The fetish in this case is gender swapping, which you can get a heavy dose of at the artist’s deviantart, where he constantly draws fanart for himself of his own characters of them in multiple gender swapped scenes.

The story itself is kinda typical, mostly unoffensive mediocre fantasy tripe about a guy (probably some sort of author self insert) who is a powerful magician that toodly doos around a forest and finds a sexy catgirl, they sorta fall in love (just by being together) and they adventure with a few other animal people.

One of the most confusing of these animal people is a dog lady warrior/assassin, who is actually a guy who was cursed by a wizard (so yeah, a wizard did it) to be trapped inside a woman’s body.  I won’t even get into the kind of unintentional Freudian nightmare that should ensue from this.  Instead, it’s played for mild animu humor (which is to say, really lame boring filler).

My favorite of these animal people is the basitin.  Because, you see, they never get sick.  How do we know this?

http://twokinds.keenspot.com/archive.php?p=327

I can’t describe what a perfect webcomic page this is.  This is also the ultimate page of Twokinds, the only one anyone should ever need to read.  It’s like if you distilled every shitty webcomic into its purest form.  First, the art is passable, but typical animu/furry mixture, combined with really moronic style choices, such as the final panel where the girl (who is a guy ON THE INSIDE) is blushing so hard that it’s going off their face breaking all the laws of physics and reality.  Second, basitin never get sick.  HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD WORD OF THE BASITIN?  THEY’RE INCREDIBLE.  Third, oh no, this dog girl/guy is in heat… and a male is knocking on their door!  They tried casting a spell on the lock of their door to prevent people from coming in, instead of, you know, saying “I DON’T PERMIT YOU TO COME IN HERE” or at least some equivalent of that.  That’s basically what he/she/it says in fact, but this asshole ignores that on the basis of an illness.  And finally, this is pretty much every “joke” in anime.  Oh no someone’s naked or they need their asshole mouth and cunt filled with dick.  I hope no one enters the room OH NO SOMEONE’S ENTERING THE ROOM.  Could someone try LESS to come up with a joke?  No.  No they could not.  This is everything you need to know about Twokinds, in this one singular page.

http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2126

For years, the boredom of making this comic has been crushing the soul of Jeph Jacques.  Today, he tries desperately to take a risk, but pulls his punch at the last minute, destroying it.  This is proven by the blurb he posts underneath his comic, which says:

I was really tempted to have panel four just say “THE END” and do a week of Yelling Bird strips.

You know, Jackx, it’s your comic, you could do anything you want.  Anything.  You’re limited by absolutely nothing but yourself.  And instead you do this.  I’ve considered feeling pity for you.  I know what making this comic is doing to you.  But when I try to feel that pity, nothing happens.  I know that if Shiva came down from heaven and gave you freedom from your gilded cage, you would reject it, and therefore not deserve it.

Just start drinking again, Jeph.  There’s nothing worse that could possibly happen to you at this point.

On the bad webcomics spectrum, Penny Arcade is a mixed bag.  The art started off as serviceable years ago and has always progressed.  The jokes are, at least, actual jokes (with the obvious exception of the following comic).  A few strips I’ve liked.

As for general criticisms of the comic overall, that’ll have to be for another time.  For now, there’s this.

http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/02/13

Brutal Legend, you mean the awesome heavy metal album cover of a game with sandbox cruising to a great mix of metal, combined with good hack and slash combat, and occasionally a light spicing of RTS?  Yeah that’s just universally regarded as a bad game, that makes their case here.

If they can work off assumptions like that, so can I.  It’s likely that originally they slammed Brutal Legend because they didn’t get a free copy.  Penny Arcade has been caught doing that before, not only promoting games (and, even more whorish, unrelated products and designer novelty beverages), but then refusing positive comments on games that didn’t give their little webcomic world preferential treatment.  It’s been long known in the games industry that if you want Penny Arcade to talk up your game to their massive fanbase, you had best START with a free pre-release copy of their game, and throw in some merch while you’re at it.

Valve knows from experience, however, that even if you let the PA guys walk in your front door and play a beta of an unreleased game, they still might not give you a glowing review.  Maybe there’s not enough My Little Ponies or Little Mermaid pandering in your game for the PA guys.

I saw this linked on a blog, and I actually can’t say much about the webcomic itself, all I know is that this one page I found so fucking annoying that I don’t think I could force myself to read any more strips of this.

http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1329/

Oh those stupid heterosexuals and their silly prudishness!  If only everyone was a bull dyke, then maybe the world would be an enlightened, less naive place.  Meanwhile if you made a comic strip about how a silly homosexual didn’t understand that sometimes men and women like to have sex with each other, you’d be banned from the internet faster than you could say “hate crime sob sob boo hoo.”

PS: So many of these awful dyke comics are so full of themselves that they try to throw in your face that they know about dental dams, as if that’s some deep inside lesbian knowledge.  As Patrice O’Neal said better than anyone else could, a dental dam is a piece of a garbage bag that you put over a woman’s vagina… in case it’s poison.  (PPS go buy Elephant in the Room, it has more insight into human nature than any “lesbian mocks silly breeder’s naivete” webcomic you’ll ever see.)

EDIT:  A guy I know summed this comic up pretty well with this:  “hey it’s QC, without all that coarse manliness.”

ALSO EDIT:  When showing this to friends, one thing that stuck out to most was the smug lesbian putting condoms on her dildo.  I guess we’re such dumb square heterosexuals that we don’t know why she would do that.  She goes through all the trouble to mock her (emasculated?) female friend about not understanding that she has a dildo (because heterosexual women don’t have dildos, ever), but then doesn’t bother to explain why you would put a condom on a dildo at all.  Is it so she doesn’t have to wash it?  I wouldn’t know, I don’t have a dildo because I don’t need one.

Another immediately irritating aspect of this is that you can tell it’s written by a gay girl, so the only perspective the comic can have is from a gay girl.  “What, writing characters from other orientations and backgrounds as non-morons?  What do I look like, a rocket surgeon?”  You know what they should’ve named this comic?  TURNABOUT IS FAIR PLAAAAAAAY!  Or how about Sardonic Cunts Weekly.

There are a handful of what get called “hate blogs” or are really criticism or complain blogs about webcomics.  There’s the Bad Webcomics Wiki which was previously mentioned, which is a small wiki of reviews of webcomics.

There’s the xkcdsucks blog, which covers xkcd on a running basis.  http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/

The good old “Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad” blog which was also an excellent blog of some real cutting reviews of webcomics, and a great deal of sacred cows, such as Questionable Content and Dresden Codak (which we’ll be getting into soon).

There’s this defunct tumblr about explaining the (lame) jokes in xkcd, before they gave up, and I can’t blame them: http://xkcdexplained.com/

http://qcisterrible.blogspot.com/ This went defunct only after a few posts, which is a shame, because questionable content is one of the most consistently terrible webcomics in history.

The purpose of our tumblr, though, will be to mix our general overall take on these webcomics, along with continuing coverage of individual pages of bad webcomics, or occasionally visiting previous story arcs of bad webcomics (I already previously wrote up a bunch of shit elsehwere about the “raping you to save your life” arc in dominic deegan, the king of bad webcomics, and maybe soon I’ll try to post that here).

I’m going to use this time to get a little more in depth about the problem I have with My Life With Fel.

http://mylifewithfel.smackjeeves.com/comics/1419086/nice-to-meet-you/

First, the art is mostly excellent, not only in cosistent style, but composition, and coloring.  When it comes to webcomics, good art isn’t really expected, because of course there’s no accountability, which is the simultaneously greatest strength AND the greatest weakness of webcomics.

So it’s easy to skim through just about every page of this comic and just enjoy how easy it is on the eyes.

Unfortunately, a comic has to be read, and that’s where things start to get painful, because there’s no jokes in any page of this comic.  Either just references, or whatever the fuck this is.  It looks like a new character being introduced, but to introduce a character, you have to learn something about them.  All you learn about this kid character is that it’s a kid character.  Personality, opinions, quirks, pretty much absent so far in this page and the following page (as seen in the previous My Life With Fel post).

That’s not even addressing the main collapse of this comic, which is its original premise, but that can be gone into later.  Actually, a pretty decent sum up of the comic is already done on the Bad Webcomics Wiki:  http://badwebcomics.wikidot.com/my-life-with-fel

This tumblr exists more for topical updates on comics, page by page, and what they fuck up on a daily basis.

JUST…. penny arcade

a lot of people seem to really love PA and think it’s not one of those terrible webcomics, but they are retarded if they really think this.  between the red noses on everyone, and obsessing about jocks to the point where you actually start to sympathize with jocks (hey, that’s not good) to the many many punchlines they rip off from everything they see on the internet, I don’t need to explain why penny arcade sucks.

This is one of the more aggressively mediocre, and occasionally overtly repellant webcomics in existence, so instead of starting on what’s wrong with it, I’m just going to get into the latest “arc” that reeks of desperation, the same as any godawful sitcom resorting to adding an orphaned kid or some kind of alien in its 7th season nosedive.

http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2125

As it has been a crippling failure of the comic for the past several years, Jeff “Jeph Jacques “Off” can’t seem to go more than two pages without having a castrated embarrassment of a “male” character apologize for something completely insignificant.  Chalk it up to whatever “this country is going down da tyewwwwwwbs” reason of your choice, political correctness run amok, the continued pussification of the American male (as Carlin put it).  This one either shoots for par, or sinks to a new low (it’s hard to tell with QC) by having a fucking computer AI hologram do it.

The subject of the castrated non-men characters in “Apologizing Content,” as it’s grown to become known, is a topic for another post.  It’s already been covered fairly well else where anyway, such as here.