BetaPwned: Hey Look! I'm a GIRRRRRLLLLLL (2 of 4)

I've always felt that, in order to improve one's skills, an artist must surround himself with works greater than his own. If you're the best, however, all you can really do is keep on dragging on, or quit while you're ahead. When I decided to write about BetaPwned, I first saw this page and thought "Another fan of awful webcomics decided to make one of her own," but after reading through the archives I realized that she WAS surrounding herself with better webcomics, because BetaPwned is atrocious. That other part is still true, though.

BetaPwned is a journal comic, which is inherently terrible because no one's day-to-day life is so interesting that it is entertaining to outsiders. Exaggerating these events can sometimes work, but a bad writer will exaggerate the wrong things in the wrong direction and the result is just weird. But the biggest problem is that the author rarely feels the need to give the characters any depth. Since they're based on real people, they automatically have the depth they need and there's no need to explore the characters further. The end result is a main character whose only character trait is "girl." The only reason for such a simple character is to draw in male readers who don't even know what a girl is, and the author character shares "interests" designed to attract these nerdular readers, such as webcomics and video games, though these are not stated in anything more than passing reference.

The art is terrible, but that's true of almost every terrible webcomic. Frankly, I'm getting tired of saying it. All the heads are lumpy sacks of bowling balls, with facial features spread over it like jam on rye bread. The characters look like cardboard cutouts, which could easily be remedied by varying the line thickness used in inking (this is true for a lot of comics, if you're reading and this is your problem, give this solution a try! But leave a comment with a url of your comic before you do so I can make fun of how terrible it is now). The flatness gives a weird contorted look to many of the poses, since there's no way to judge depth. There are more problems with the art but I honestly don't feel like doing that right now.

The worst offense committed by BetaPwned is the existence of "Dear Diary" comics, which is just musings of the author placed on a notebook. These things have no business being passed off as "comics" and I consider it offensive to the readers that this happens. If you want to write your terrible musings and have people read them, get a twitter account. Most of the non-diary comics have more words than the diary ones, which is strange because I expect more words to be in a book than a comic page.

Most webcomics are created by amateurs who are only doing it as a hobby. They see webcomics they like and decide to follow suit. By emulating better comics, a hobbyist can find ways to improve his own skills. However, emulating terrible webcomics just leads to a shitty hobby comic. Surrounding yourself with sewage doesn't make you King of the Sewers, it just makes you smell terrible. BetaPwned could become decent, but first it's going to have to crawl out of the sewers.