The Keenspot Dome Scandal: Adventures in Mismanagement

Eight years ago, webcomics were still struggling to find their way out of the womb, trying to figure out what to rip off of the print comic industry. Ripping off the jokes and the art was the easy part, but how would webcomics rip off the ability of actual cartoonists to make money? And so, the first webcomic syndicate was formed. Crawling forth from the primordial cyber-ooze, this primitive behemoth clumsily made its way forward in the world, in a spasm of inefficiency and ineffectualness. And while it was criminally worthless, it was still the aspiration of many budding webcomics, for if they could be accepted by this lurching monstrosity, it was proof that they had talent, potential, and something once mistakenly identified as "sticktoitiveness." Thus, Keenspot thrived, despite the law of Natural Selection.

While joining Keenspot became the goal of many up-and-coming webtoonists, it soon became apparent that Keenspot actually had no standards. Many of the comics that joined were incredibly ugly, horribly written, and entirely inconsistent. I don't even think popularity was a requirement, though only Chris Crosby could tell you what arcane criteria were used in selecting new additions to "The Spot." In fact, based on the list of every comic that's ever been on Keenspot, I can safely say that the only comics with any talent at all have either left for greener pastures, or suicided in a pile of their own misery.

Keenspot's greatest tragedy was never its lack of talent, however. After all, this is the Internet. People will read anything, if they can find it. No, Keenspot's worst transgression was not in its lack of talent, but in its inability to capitalize on what it had. Keenspot attempted to publish it's comics and sell them to actual comic book stores. This went over horribly, and the entire idea was all but scrapped, only resurfacing every year on Free Comic Book Day, which, as you can imagine, makes Keenspot's artists very little money.

Other forms of advertising are equally lackluster. Any advertising provided by Keenspot has been ineffective and inefficient. Most ads are placed in places where they are going to garner the least attention, so instead of being focused and powerful like some sort of laser, Keenspot's advertising can best be described as lazy and indirect, like lawn darts. Most ads are placed internally, which turns Keenspot into a whirlpool of self-destruction.

With all the counter-productive behavior Keenspot engages in, you'd think they'd have no desire or need to fire one of their cartoonists. After all, what's the point in kicking someone off a sinking ship? But Crosby has managed to cast logic to the wind once again, and has chosen to remove Kel McDonald (Sorcery 101, As We Were) from his ranks, a scant week before Christmas. Why, you might ask, would Keenspot turn on one of its own? Was Kel too talented, and therefore over-qualified for Keenspot? Although true, this was not the reason given for her termination. In fact, no reason has been given for her removal, at least not publicly. The only speculation is that Kel may have casually mentioned that Keenspot was not the bastion of efficacy and management that so many believed it to be.

Under normal circumstances, badmouthing your employer would be considered "an unwise business decision." However, when your employer does a more than sufficient job of badmouthing itself, expectations go out the window. After all, what can anyone say to make you look bad, when you've already done a splendid job of making yourself look as incompetent as possible already? Apparently that thought never entered Crosby's mind, because faster than you could say "Terrible Management Decision," Kel was out on her ass and Keenspot had not yet realized the hornet's nest it had busted open, like a piñata of misery.

Unlike previous firee, John Troutman, Kel did not enjoy being fired arbitrarily. After airing many grievances with Keenspot, most of which were problems with their immense professionalism and extreme competence. The first response came from Teri Crosby, who essentially agrees with Kel's version of events, but hides behind the argument that Keenspot is a small company that is not well-staffed. Then comes Bobby Crosby, who claims that everything Kel McDonald, and by extension his own mother, has said are bald-faced lies. Son of the year, right there.

Bobby Crosby is the outspoken, antagonistic and often incorrect brother of Chris Crosby, and I'm not even sure he has any ownership of Keenspot, officially. He's responsible for countless numbers of terrible comics, who only end up on Keenspot by virtue of being the owner's brother. He also has an unnatural talent in showing up and arguing absurd points of view. And his arguments are about as well written as his comics are. I have to qualify that statement by saying that both are not well-written at all, because Bobby is the kind of person to misconstrue that statement and believe it was a compliment.

The argument that Keenspot is a "Small Company" is offensive to anyone with any sensibilities. Any company which has made enough money to purchase an abandoned school in South Dakota should surely have enough income to hire an accountant or at least someone with a business degree to actually manage the company with some semblance of consistency. Unfortunately, Keenspot would prefer to squander their resources and efforts on goals that are well above their current means. Instead of investing in people to make the business run more smoothly, and producing products that will grow their brand, Keenspot instead attempts to swing for the fences, trying to land TV shows and Movie deals, which go belly-up as soon as they're conceived. After all, you can't hit a home run when all you can do is bunt.

Upon hearing of Kel's firing, many other Keenspot artists have boldly quit in protest. However since all of them are still being featured on Keenspot and haven't moved anywhere, it is hard to say whether this is a genuine action or just for show, but it has prompted the Crosbys to state that they are no longer accepting any new comics. If you want to join the pool on how long THAT lasts, go ahead and send me an email.

Ultimately this whole event has highlighted just how terrible of a company Keenspot is. While a decent idea, it has been run into the ground by terrible business decisions, awful PR from its higher-profile members, and extreme apathy from anyone who sees the problem. My advice to any webcomickers, new or old, is that if Keenspot comes knocking on your door, it would be best for you if you do not answer it. They will just bog you down and prevent you from growing to your full potential.
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Mag-Isa: Good, Evil, I'm the Guy With the Self-Loathing

Here We See Emmanuel "Crybaby" Cruz About to Achieve Super Wuss Form Level 4

Conflict is an essential part of any story. Well-written conflict is an essential part of a good story. So when something is written that is devoid of conflict, it becomes difficult to determine if you have a story, or a Series of Events That Happened. The former is generally intriguing, attracts an audience on its own merits, and maintains some momentum that the writer can use to coast through some dull but necessary exposition. The latter would be akin to telling everyone that you had a mediocre cup of coffee, and expecting them to care. Today we'll look at what happens to a webcomic when it is deprived of any conflict whatsoever, and how that affects a reader's ability to care. Our subject is a comic known as Mag-Isa and has persisted for two years and 10 "chapters" without any conflict. It has only done so through sheer force of will, and perseverance in the face of boringness.

Mag-Isa stars a young, troubled self-insert by the name of Emmanuel Cruz. He is an Filipino immigrant to Canada, who often laments his lack of friends and family. A normal person might consider that there might be some way to improve himself so that he would better fit in and make friends. But no, apparently it's just a cultural difference and there is nothing that can be done to bridge that gap. His family is not much better, allegedly. Both parents are portrayed as incredibly abusive, when they inconsistently beat Eman, complaining about his violent tendencies after he writes a troubling journal entry about raping drugged-out prostitutes with AK-47s. Eman sees no issue with his writing of course, and doesn't comprehend why anyone else would. After all, it's just a creative writing class, so it's not like the words are anything more than an expression of his inner desires.

Considering that Emmanuel is a blatant self-insert, the reader can only assume that these incidents reflect actual events in the author's life. Exaggerated, most likely, but since hyperbole is just a matter of scale, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume that the author has the same kind of twisted worldview where it's normal to write about killing your colleagues and self, and that no one should express any concern over that kind of content.

This is not the only troubling behavior exhibited by Eman. There is also an event where he spends all his time helping his female friend work on a book report. After it's finished, Eman decides to ask her out, but she rejects him. Could it be the fact that she values his friendship more than his value as a potential mate? Or perhaps it's just the really creepy way he asked her out? No, she's just an ungrateful, selfish cocktease who wishes to torment Eman for no other reason than he's fun to torment. Then she shoots him.

When I Told Her to Swallow a Bullet, This Wasn't What I Meant

Through all of this, there has not been any significant building conflict. Chris has propped his "story" up against a generic Good vs. Evil plot, but has not done much to actually develop or explore this conflict, or even show how Eman fits into it. Meanwhile, Eman has had several opportunities to engage in conflicts of his own, between his peers or his self, but instead of confronting any of them he instead chooses to ignore it and go somewhere else. When his favorite priest is accused of pedophilia, Eman just cries for a bit and then moves on. When his friend and roommate gets shot in front of him, Eman just yells for a bit, launches an effortless revenge attempt, and gets shot up a lot, then moves on.

Ultimately, Eman joins an anti-government terrorist cell because some girl has sex with him. He then spends the next period of time training to fight against some generic, faceless enemy. His colleagues are other degenerates who have lashed out violently against their peers, and feel that there is nothing wrong with their behavior. The unusual bit about this, is that Eman had spent a while doing "Martial Arts" training with his priest (before he had been framed for pedophilia) and almost immediately becomes out of shape when he joins the anti-something terrorism squad.

In eleven chapters, the only thing remotely approaching conflict would be two poorly choreographed fight scenes, one between a priest and the object of his desire, and the other between some heretofore uncharacterized agent of "Good" fighting some bizarre plantchild. Neither of these fights has any sort of building action, no motivation beyond "I don't want to die right now" and serves no literary purpose beyond breaking up the boring exposition. This does not qualify as true conflict, though, since it doesn't really add to the story in any way whatsoever. Instead, this is a way to distract the reader from the fact that there is nothing driving the plot by creating the illusion of strife. Unfortunately for Chris, it's hard to forget that the protagonist is a worthless, self-hating twerp who has no potential for an enticing story.

When This Guy Flips Out, His Skeleton Gets All Wonky

So if there is no conflict driving this story, just what exactly is? Something must be compelling the author to tell this story; there must be something driving him to put us through this drivel. My guess is that it's some sort of cathartic release, retelling these "tragic" events of his life so that the pain will stop. But I'll tell you something, Chris, the pain never stops. as long as this webcomic exists, someone will have to live through the pain it causes. And if you have a conscience, the guilt will eat away at you until you destroy yourself. I hope.

From what we've seen in Mag-Isa, I think it's safe to say that Chris harbors some kind of persecution complex, feels that the reason his life is so terrible is that someone out there is trying to make it so. This is the theme presented in Mag-Isa, large corporations and media outlets being corrupted by the generic forces of "Evil" to trick people into believing dumb ideas and performing horrible actions. The responsibility is removed from the people and the blame is placed squarely on the Elite.

It has always been firmly established that a good story requires conflict. Conflict drives the plot, giving your characters a reason to grow. It is the lifeblood of any plot. But until Mag-Isa, no one really knew what would happen if the story lacked any conflict whatsoever. Now we know that it becomes a whiny piece of livejournalistic moping and depression. Thanks for the experiment Chris Lim, you can end it now. Please? Read more→

1977: Like a TV Show, Except You Read It

Here We See the Cast of That 70's Comic. From Left to Right: Jackie, Eric, FES, Kelso and Donna. They're All High on Illegal Drugs

What's worse than ripping off a popular television series? Ripping off a popular television series, and then putting it in a webcomic format. Fortunately, I can safely say that today's topic does not violate one's sense of decency in all the basic, lackluster ways, but manages to do so in new, exciting ways. Actually I'm sure it hits on all the basics, I've just become insensitive to those kinds of transgressions, what with subjecting myself to them regularly. But I digress. Today's case study is a comic which goes by the less than descriptive name 1977, and as you may have surmised, takes place in the year 1977.

1977 follows the story of 4 twenty-somethings who smoke illegal marijuana and attempt to play in a band. Of course, I have to take their word that they're in a band, seeing as how they're never portrayed as actually playing in a band. The closest they get is performing activities that bands do, such as driving out to shows, try to find someone else to do the hard work for them, and sell illicit drugs. However no pages have actually shown the characters during or immediately after one of their alleged "shows." Effectively, when a story arc begins involving the musical aspect of the strip, suddenly the plot ends and we cut to a character shooting up LSD.

This would be forgivable if the generic plots were halfway decent. But if that were the case, then I wouldn't be writing this review. 1977 managed to last a whole three months before introducing a gimmick where the male lead suddenly genderswaps. I was hoping that when the plot resolved, this gimmick would be shelved eternally, but you and I are not so lucky. The spontaneous sex changes have been used repeatedly in lieu of jokes, when the cartoonist needs a way to introduce a plot point. The first clue should have been how the ridiculous story was ended with a tenuous reference to The Incredible Hulk. In fact, it seems that the majority of 1977's plot is fueled by nothing more than pop culture references. Don't get me wrong, the occasional reference is fine for the sake of making a gag, but for actually driving a story, it's like building a skyscraper on quicksand.

Pothead Musician Rule #6: Distract Your Audience From Your Terrible Playing by Wearing a Revealing Outfit

The perpetual regendering raises another issue with the comic, namely the fact that every character has the same hairstyle, and therefore, every character looks the same. Effectively, not only do all the girls in this comic look the same, but now you have the added confusion of a male character who also looks like all the females. Clearly the cartoonist hasn't considered the psychological implications of what would happen if the two male roommates, after a night of taking illegal drugs, woke up to find they had engaged in sex rituals with each other. I don't think anyone could look at their roommate the same way after that kind of traumatizing experience.

Artistic anomalies are not limited to the fact that everyone has the same hair; the eyes also lead to a disturbing conclusion. While female characters are given decently expressive eyes, male characters are given soulless, pupil-free eyes. This kind of disconnect between his depictions of the two genders indicates some degree of sexism inherent in the mind of the cartoonist. This is further evidenced by the fact that his sexswapping character exhibits the same differences between his male and female counterparts, which, aside from making it difficult to mentally connect both versions, seem to further indicate that the cartoonist sees a fundamental difference between the two genders.

Drug Use Has Been Shown to Decrease Comic Making Skills and Increase Levels of Smugness

Putting the cartoonist's latent sexism aside, we must now take issue with the uninspired setting of this comic. The 1970s were probably a great time if you were a shiftless layabout who did nothing but ingest illicit drugs and pretend that you could play guitar. But for anyone with half a brain, the 70s were just a time when life was annoying, inflation was out of control, and people had no taste. During the 70s, music was at its most banal, lacking style and substance, ignoring tradition and innovation, and our cartoonist feels it necessary to title each comic as a reference to some 70s song. It was cute at first, but as time wears on the relation between the chosen lyrics and the content of the comic becomes tenuous at best.

This extends to all the other pop culture references found in 1977. All sources of entertainment were incredibly vacuous, and it takes an extremely vapid, drug-addled mind to remember any of them fondly. To be honest, that is true of everything today and will be true for all of eternity, but that's another matter entirely. The point we're making today is that the 70s were an uninspired era, and any fond remembrance of them is clearly the work of illicit substances.

Nostalgia has never been a great premise for a comic strip. It's usually just a mask for poor writing, and often uses references in place of actual plot progression. This transgression is further amplified by choosing an absolutely absurd era to be nostalgic about, a time when the people driving culture were so focused on themselves, chasing that next high, rather than improving society in any meaningful way. So remember, when you're coming up with the idea for your next webcomic, avoid basing it on your own nostalgia, no matter how appealing television might make it seem. And remember to pass on the grass!
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Rooster Teeth (aka College Dorm: The Webcomic)

"I Call It 'Bad Webcomic'"

You might have noticed, for the last few months, I have had an email link asking for reader submissions of comics to review. I did not have to wait long until I received a suggestion: Rooster Teeth comics, from the same people who brought you Red vs Blue. A cursory glance told me that the comic was terrible, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what was primarily wrong about it. So I decided to go through the archive and make a list of everything that was missing, in order to discern what the cartoonist did wrong.

• 40% of the American Flag - While inserting someone else's artwork into a comic is generally reprehensible, as it looks incredibly awkward and wrong, there is an exception when it comes to national flags. When it is flat against a wall, a flag made in Photoshop is going to be indistinguishable from a flag grabbed off Wikipedia, as long as it's accurate. A US flag with only 25 stars and 11 stripes is close enough to fool the reader at first, but becomes more and more suspicious the longer its looked at, and is rather disconcerting in a 'humor' comic.



• A Clear Concept of How People Converse - In most RT conversations, the characters are performing an unnatural action known as 'palming.' Artists often feel a need to do something with the characters' hands, but usually have no idea what they should be doing. Consequently, characters are drawn palming, because doing nothing is an undesirable option. Additionally, the characters must ALWAYS be facing the camera, because otherwise we wouldn't know who they were. Even if it looks like their heads are on backwards, they must always look toward the reader!



• A Tenuous Grasp on Human Anatomy - I'll start with this: necks do not end in the center of the head. They go in the back of the head. They're also not a foot long. Some of these characters have massive noggins perched atop narrow stalks for necks. The clavicle does not attach to your back, and torsos don't look like that when they twist. The humerus is not attached to the ribcage, and pectoral muscles don't just disappear. I can see why these guys are grossed out.




"No, I'm Not Interested in Buying Eyelids in Bulk at a Discount"

• Upper Eyelids - Most emotion in RT comics are expressed by squinting the character's lower eye lids. In fact, the majority of panels feature a closed lower lid. It would be nice if this was some sort of satire of the common half-lidded expression found in most webcomics, but I really doubt that the artist is clever enough to come up with that. Instead, I think he's just trying to avoid falling into that quagmire, and managed to fall into it from the other direction.



• Jokes - I'm not sure I understand the point of this one. Blu-ray players exist outside of PS3s so why is this guy spazzing out? No one knows. Why is a man yelling at trees? Who cares? There are a lot of comics that don't have jokes included. I know we're in a recession, but this is ridiculous.



• Consistent Comic Resolution - Some of these comics are really really small, and some are really really big. It's really kind of annoying having to strain my eyes to read one, then having to scroll all over the place to read the next one. Please keep them a consistent size, so the pages aren't annoying to read.



• Positive Space - Yes, I know you don't want to crowd the panel with characters and dialog, but this amount of negative space is just ridiculous. The guy looks silly at that size, and just doesn't engage the reader like he would if he were filling up a bit more of the panel, especially in those two panels where nothing is happening. The same could be said of these two, as they would look better if they were filling up the panel, as they'd look closer together and give the impression that they are actually interacting. This is probably caused by the artist drawing the characters before even thinking about the word balloons, so he draws a lot of space for the balloons to go, just in case. In the future, I would reccommend sketching the whole thing out, text and all, so it doesn't feel like the comic has a bunch of visual gaps in it that divert the reader and eat his soul.




Ironically, It Doesn't Filter Out Red Vs Blue

• Fresh Ideas - If you've read 10 of these comics, you've pretty much exhausted the depth of Rooster Teeth's pool of ideas. For the most part, these comics are about 30-year-old men who act like they're still living in the college dorm. Cracking gay jokes and video game sex jokes like they're still as funny as they were then, but unfortunately they aren't. When a 20 year old cracks an immature joke, it's funny because you expect him to be immature. When an old man makes the same joke, however, it's just creepy, because the only people that age who make immature jokes are most likely sex offenders. The writers are aware of how stale the material is, because they've acknowledged that the main comic is not funny enough, and decide to include some zany background character doing something wacky, in order to ensure laughs.



• Shins - Apparently someone blew this guys shins off in the war with a machine gun, and they had to glue his feet to his knees. But I think that idea's already been done.

This list has made one thing about Rooster Teeth comics apparent: It's missing something. What that something is can only be determined by looking at this list and analyzing each missing piece. And I have finally discovered what is wrong with these comics. They lack one crucial element, the one thing that is necessary for any webcomic. Hopefully the cartoonists at Rooster Teeth can work on attaining this thing that they are lacking, because until they do their comics will be the most brainless abominations to ever exist, appealing only to idiotic squids. What is this solitary thing that they lack? That thing is talent. Read more→

Bengo's Choice: Investigative Journalism or Libel?

My faithful reader might be wondering why I stopped updating for the past month. Simple answer: I decided to take a vacation from this blog for a month, starting about 2 weeks before I made the decision. I had begun to run low on vitriol and needed to spend some time drilling some from the nearby gulf. The comics I have in my queue were either too young to work with, had spontaneously stopped updating, or were otherwise outside my capacity to review. So I decided to relax for a while and see if a month would give these guys enough time to mature into viable targets. Unfortunately, something far more inane occurred. Ben Gordon finally decided to leap from his bell tower of insanity to the the warm blue waters of the Crazy Sea. If I might be serious for one week, I'd like to point out how utterly ridiculous Gordon has become.

Gordon's magnificent swan dive into madness began almost six month ago, when he decided to take issue with a business model presented in How to Make Webcomics by those Halfpixel guys, namely an assertion that a firmly established webcomic might expect 5-10% of its readers to purchase any items from its online store. Gordon seems to think that this means that buyers will only purchase a single item whose profit is $5, failing to account for repeat customers. Gordon also seems to take a flawed mathematical approach, using monthly traffic numbers to approximate annual income. The use of "Traffic" as a term is also incredibly vague. Is he talking hits, unique visitors, or what? I wouldn't consider every unique visitor to qualify as a "reader" for the purposes of Halfpixel's sell-through rate. Gordon also seems to claim that several of his "case studies" give conflicting data but fails to deliver enough data regarding his case studies. While he seems to want them to remain anonymous, he is trying to imply that the expected income from the Halfpixel model doesn't match up with their actual incomes, but this figure is never given. Information like the age of the comic he's studying, selection in the comic's online store, or anything which would lead anyone to follow his conclusion from the data he's given. In summary, Gordon's rebuttal to the model presented in How to Make Webcomics lacks sufficient evidence to convince anyone but the most gullible.

This led to an intense mistrust of anything Halfpixel did, such as purchasing the webcomics.com domain and tries to find anything remotely suspicious about Halfpixel that he can muster up. Unfortunately, there's not a lot out there so he has to make a lot of it up.

At the same time, Gordon began developing a grievance against Dumbrella, namely for their sponsorship of webcomics blog Fleen. Now I don't know about you, but if McDonald's is producing a blog, I'd expect it to focus on Big Macs and McRibs, not the overall state of the fast food industry as a whole. They have access to information and sources that normal people don't have. But Gordon would have you believe that it would be best for all blogs to cover the same industry with the exact same scope, i.e. all webcomics blogs should cover the entire breadth of the webcomics realm evenly and fairly. Of course, since Gordon fancies himself a real life journalist, this is nothing more than a Journalistic wet dream he has. Wanting amateur webcomics bloggers to be held to some journalistic ideal seen only in films and comic strips. Whether Gordon is justified or not in disliking Fleen, this began an unhealthy obsession with Dumbrella, to supplant his already obsessive dislike of Halfpixel.

Gordon's desires soon turned to uncovering some kind of major corruption scandal in the world of webcomics. He began by developing some kind of "Corruption Metric" for webcomics, but of course he only states what he is measuring, not HOW he is measuring it. But until he found a big conspiracy, there was nothing to test his self-created metric against. Gordon was so intent on finding a big conspiracy that he managed to convince himself that one existed.

Until this past month, his obsessions were fairly harmless. But beginning in February, Gordon moved from harmless stalking to destructive libel. Inspired, perhaps, by the emerging popularity of Twitter among webcartoonists, Gordon began his quixotic crusade by attacking the advice given by Scott Kurtz in How to Make Webcomics, "Fake it 'til you make it," as inciting a plethora of webcomickers to fake their popularity until they actually become popular. In actuality, this is common advice for nervous people, telling them to act like they're highly skilled until they gain their confidence and self-worth. Gordon seems to have forgotten that he has manufactured this intention by Kurtz, and has taken further steps to sabotage his career. This blog post by Bengo was the first shot in a war against scientific integrity.

The next day, he posted a lengthy assault against a small collection of his enemies, accusing them of being a Twitter "faking gang," or a gang of people who created fake Twitter followers for each other. His premise is that a large quantity or Twitter followers is a significant status symbol among webcartoonists, and by inflating this number by dishonest means, one can attract gullible idiots who just want to read whatever's popular. He also tries to connect Twitter cheating to other statistical cheating, but applies circular logic later to convict his opponents to both. They are guilty of Twitter cheating because it's known that they cheat on their other stats, and they are guilty of cheating on their other stats because they are known Twitter cheaters.

His only stated method for identifying fake Twitter accounts is that they have a limited number of people they follow, with few posts of their own. Gordon has made claims that there are more conclusive techniques to identify fakes, but has yet to divulge them: "Various techniques allow us to identify fakes; too many to list today." At this point Gordon attempts to prove the fakers by showing their visitor numbers. These attacks are levelled largely at Scott Kurtz, but Meredith Gran of Octopus Pie also suffers a grand assault. Gordon's main argument is that OP went through large jumps in readership twice over the last year, therefore it must be doing something shady to generate those readership increases. The truth of the matter is simply that Octopus Pie was barely a year old, and at an age where large jumps in popularity are both drastic and common. Consequently, the graphs provided for PvP show nothing more than a single month of poor performance in November, followed by a large increase in December of 2008. The most likely reason is a glitch in the data provided (by a third party, no less), as well as a month where people have a lot of free time. However, presented by Gordon, this is a suspicious increase in traffic by the mastermind of a vast conspiracy.

After this less than damning evidence against Gran and Kurtz is presented, Gordon begins the most troubling part of his "report." He begins listing names of people he believes are fake Twitter accounts, with nothing more than the names of the people he thinks created them. Failure to grasp the behavior of Twitter in the hands of webcomics fans will be Gordon's undoing; these people are merely fans who wanted to follow their favorite creators. They signed up for Twitter just to follow these people, because otherwise they'd have no reason to have a Twitter account. People really are capable of realizing that their lives aren't interesting enough for other people to read about, and therefore feel no need to use this service for themselves. This behavior, continued in later blog posts by Gordon, is reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy naming suspected Communists, with no evidence whatsoever.

In the comments of this post, Gordon dismisses alternative sources of data as unreliable (for no discernable reason, no less) and asserts that his accusations of Twitter faking are, indeed, factual. Gordon fails to realize that in order for something to be factual, evidence is first required to verify. His speculation on Twitter cheating is not fact simply because he says it is, and using these false facts as evidence against these cartoonists for faking their other statistics is a terrible logical fallacy.

Several of Gordon's blog posts in February take snipes at his accused Twitter Fakers, turned an innocent party into some kind of exclusive nightclub circle jerk, and otherwise masturbated his own journalistic ego into a Grand Mal seizure of self-congratulation, before attempting to seriously sabatoge Scott Kurtz's career. Kurtz had been asked to host the Harvey awards this year at Baltimore Comic-con, because of a positive response to his presentation in previous years. Due to a manufactured grudge against Kurtz, after imagining a conspiricy, Gordon decided that Kurtz wasn't "good enough" to host these awards, and has started a letter writing campaign to have Kurtz uninvited. This is, of course, a ridiculous course of action to take when your only motivation is something you yourself have manufactured.

Gordon's most recent post on the subject gives more detail to his proposed motivation behind Twitter faking. In essence, the Webcomics Industry is largely run on the character of its creators. By faking popularity, Gordon asserts that popularity can be generated. Communities spring up around popular comics, and these communities will generate traffic in return. But it's a double-edged sword. Levelling audacious claims against webcartoonists with absolutely no evidence to support them, even things as seemingly innocuous as forging Twitter followers, can damage someone's reputation to the point where they begin to lose readers because of it. And that, my friends, is known as libel. Gordon, if he has no actual evidence to support his claims of Twitter forging other than wild speculation and circumstantial evidence, has committed libel, and should begin apologizing immediately.

Ultimately, Gordon is just a fringe blogger who desperately wants to be an investigative journalist with a lot of importance in the field of webcomics. Unfortunately, he has yet to realize that the way to get there is not by publishing audacious claims, inciting career sabotage, and committing grand acts of libel, but by dedicating himself to writing an honest, if boring, blog. Cover the dull stories, and use them to improve your writing skills, Bengo, and when something big actually does come along, then you can use those skills to really make it big. This route is self-destructive and dangerous, and part of me hopes you make the right choice.

PS: Joe McCarthy is a terrible role model Read more→

The Gigcast: Cramming a Megacast of Information into a Gigacast

Bill Gates and His Hobo Friend Are Here To Talk To You About Webcomics.

There are a lot of podcasts out there. There are even more podcasts about webcomics. That doesn't make mathematical sense, and yet, it's still true. Everywhere I turn, I trip over another webcomic-related podcast. And they're all terrible. Honestly, I'm not sure there exists an amateur podcast that is done well, and I'm not really willing to review every terrible webcomic podcast, if they're all the same kind of terrible. However, I have tripped over a webcomics podcast that is a NEW kind of terrible, and that is what I'm going to discuss today. After all, if I keep reiterating the same points over and over, no one is going to learn anything new, and the perpetrators are unlikely to pay attention anyways. Hopefully this isn't the case with The Gigcast, because it's terrible enough to rival even Nickelback as the most terrible thing to penetrate my ears.

I first noticed The Gigcast by watching my referral links like a hawk. I generally do this to find humorous search terms that find me, because I do get some weird stuff (the most popular search term is some variation on "betty and veronica porn," and I'm starting to regret reviewing Menage a Three now). The Gigcast had shot me a pair of links comparing me unfavorably to the now-extinct "Your Webcomic is Bad and You Should Feel Bad" blog, which was my first indication that this podcast is the product of two oblivious idiots who couldn't discern an apple from a federal bailout.

The two hosts, JT (A 40 year old man who plays a ukelele and as far as I can tell, does nothing else) and Scott (who does a vapid webcomic with dull art and poor writing) run the show as though it were a weekly lecture on the importance of bread in a post-modern society, which results in a podcast that is unnaturally extended to fill a whole hour. Both hosts give the impression that they are just watching the clock until the show is complete, filling the space with awkward conversations and off-topic murmurings. Unlike other podcasts I've punished myself by listening to, the guys on The Gigcast actually go in with a bulleted list of topics to bring up, which puts them a leg up on the rest of the competition. Unfortunately, this is still inadequate since after the first few sentences, the discussion meanders away into something unrelated to the initial topic, and more than likely, regards some self-centered bit of information, such as what the hosts are doing at some upcoming convention.

The first ten minutes are generally occupied by a segment known as "Shallow Thoughts" which is basically just co-opted from another podcast to fill time. It has little to no relevance to "the industry" and therefore has no purpose in this podcast. In addition, it's just a cheap knockoff of the old "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey" segments from Saturday Night Live, but with less humor. Next is generally a segment where the hosts spotlight comics submitted by someone named Brian Anderson. These spotlights are generally just brief descriptions of a comic's about page, which really isn't much to go on. If the same amount of time was devoted to a single comic, the results would be a bit more detailed giving the listener a greater impression about what is being shilled. That is, assuming The Gigcast's writers could craft a decent evaluation.

By now we've been able to eat up a good ten minutes. Solid! But now we've got another 50 to kill. The next step is to start talking about the parent company Nightgig Studios and shilling its other products. This is actually expected, since this is the whole purpose of a "collective" but it could be done so much less blatantly. Unfortunately, I think this would require that JT and Scott knew what the definition of 'subtle' was. I don't think they do, which is why they cover all their bases quickly and fully, instead of working them into other topics that they bring up later (which they also do, just to be sure).

As JT runs down his bullet-list of news items, Scott will often chime in with some irrelevant comment that steers the conversation onto a meaningless track until they run out of gas. Then with the next list item, the cycle repeats itself. The overall effect is like listening to two cut-ups in the back of a classroom, taking cues from the instructor, then moving their own discussion onto a tangent of a tangent of a tangent, until the instructor raises his voice to speak over them, resetting their attention to the topic at hand.

The Gigcast will also feature a guest sometimes, which, if I understand the formula correctly, is whoever is buying the most ad time via Project Wonderful. The guest does very little for the show, since he's neither the centerpiece of discussion, nor a fresh voice for the show. Instead, they generally tend to be in the same vein as Scott and JT, i.e. meandering and self-serving. Either give them more weight to the course of the show, or shorten their appearance time, don't drag them through the entire hour if they're not going to affect the outcome.

As the show draws to a close, our intrepid hosts have a tendency to note how close to the end of the show we are, and how many more minutes we have to fill. Here's a tip, don't draw the audience's attention to how much or little time they have actually spent because it detracts from the enjoyment experienced. Not that there's much of that involved in The Gigcast. Try to fit as much significant content into the hour, instead of dragging things out to fill the whole thing. If you can't fill an hour with substantive content, then you shouldn't try to go for a whole hour.

The strange thing is that there is often a blog post that coincides with each podcast, full of bullet items which could easily be used to fill the space on air. It's already in the same format as the bulleted list used for the items they talk about already. Of course, without more structure for the ones they DO use, this would just extend the show by hours into conversations about how JT and Scott each spent Christmas in 1995.

Ultimately, my biggest problem with The Gigcast is the inability to focus on the topic for the entire duration. A lot of chaff in a podcast is a recipe for disinteresting the listeners. If you find yourself looking at the clock to find out if your job is done, then you might want to rethink your format. Putting more preparation into the news items being covered will result in more structure and a greater adherence to the topics being discussed. The hour will be filled more substantively and the result is appropriately sized content for an appropriately sized show. As it stands now, though, The Gigcast is just too small for its britches. Read more→

Peter is the Wolf: The Most CONTROVERSIAL Review Yet!

In the Light of a Full Moon, Sarah Hazen Transforms into an Atrocious Webcomic.

There is nothing more reprehensible than a smutty porn comic that tries to pass itself off as something for all ages. Comics often attempt to pull this off by taking their pornographic material, and covering up small naughty bits or just removing completely graphic scenes. Unfortunately this usually results in a second-rate product for general audiences, since all of the creator's effort is being poured into the purely erotic bits. I'm not convinced that a comic can exist where two equal versions exist, where one is for scum-sucking sleazebags and the other is for the more decent population. The odds are very slim. Peter is the Wolf, (from White Lightning Productions) is the prime example of just how unlikely a concept this is. And since furries are being thrown into the mix, the odds are ever-narrowing. NOTE: I will only be discussing and linking the general version of this comic, because the porn pages are so mind-shreddingly vile that I would be charged with war crimes if I inflicted them upon you. You can switch to the adult version (at your own peril) by replacing 'general' in the URL with 'adult'.

Peter is the Wolf (written by Kris Overstreet and drawn by Benjamin "BAR-1" Rodriguez) is, at its core, a tale about werewolfs. Werewolfs, it turns out, are simply the furry equivalent of vampires, which we all know is simply a ploy to seem more mysterious. Furries have an amazingly difficult time separating their professional life from their sex life, so it goes without saying that anything I link, despite being from the general audiences version, is probably not safe to view at work, lest you get fired from your job as an actuary/test pilot/terrible webcomic reviewer. Peter is the Wolf chronicles the adventures of a werewolf, not surprisingly named Peter, who unsuspectingly turns his girlfriend into a werewolf via unprotected sex. Invariably, she turns into a 12-foot-tall werewolfess, and since this is first and foremost a porn comic, her breasts are larger than seven of her heads. Peter, an abnormally small werewolf, has the only crotch in the world capable of calming her and reverting her to her mousy human form.

Yes, that's right, the most common way to turn a ten-ton titan back to a meek, minuscule maiden is through sexual intercourse. Granted, this is a furry porn comic, so I can't say I'm that surprised, but there IS a difference between writing a porn comic for your readers, and writing one for yourself. And if anyone is the intended audience for Peter is the Wolf, it's Overstreet and Rodriguez.

This Guy Knows Something You Don't

Since werewolfs (or lycanthropes, as the most anal of nerds would insist) are indicative of a transformation fetish, this comic is laden with instances of characters switching from their "wolf form" and "human form" frequently, and require the reader to make a mental note of what both forms look like for a character, and realize that they are, for the most part, interchangeable. Seriously, there are pages where a character can switch back and forth about ten times. Since there's no discernable reason for this, such behavior can come off as confusing and befuddling to the reader. Some pages are also peppered with a dramatic shot of someone spying on our pair of protagonists, but this doesn't really bear any fruit, since we have no idea who these antagonistic spies are, what their motives are, or why we should care that our dynamic duo is even being watched to begin with.

As usual, there is nothing great to say about the art. Characters are wildly inconsistent, and that's just when they try to stay on model. When BAR-1 attempts a tense, wide-eyed shot, it only serves to creep readers right out. The intended expression of shock is submerged in a sea of distorted faces and strange viewing angles. The artist takes most of his artistic cues from popular anime characters, but it's obvious that he is more comfortable drawing wolf-men than humans, judging from how skewed his people end up looking. Again, I should not act surprised. The inconsistency of human characters could also be explained by the artist's excessive cribbing of 'manga' and anime sources, since comic characters will often change proportions, but only between different artists. If this artist is trying to emulate this effect, then he is decidedly worse than the ones who draw their comic right-to-left with tall skinny speech balloons, despite the native language being English. If this is not his intent, then a study of anatomy would be the standard prescription.

Yes, It's Very, Very Wrong

There a few other oddities involved with PitW's composition. On several occasions, the creators have felt it necessary to write, in large letters, "SPIELBERG" behind a surprised character. I would hazard a guess that they are trying to indicate a "spielberg moment," but I guess no one told them that a spielberg moment only occurs in film, and not comics. If you can't indicate surprise without referencing an occurrence in another medium, you really have no business making comics. Additionally, there are times when, instead of drawing backgrounds, Rodriguez has decided to simply use photographic backgrounds. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the epitome of laziness in webcomics. Using photographs for backgrounds is like using actual cardboard as the crust of a pizza. No one is gonna like that pizza.

The porn is blatantly obvious when you run into it, even in the "all-ages" version. Because the artist is lazy, he takes a shortcut--scaling the original image so that the "naughty bits" are out of frame, would work if not for one issue. Changes in resolution within an image are painfully obvious, and this kind of scaling creates a massive neon sign that says "THIS IS NOT RIGHT. SOMETHING IS WEIRD HERE." If the creators are committed to providing two versions of the comic, then they should be willing to redraw panels when necessary, instead of moving things around in Microsoft Picture Editor. While the writer could easily pull apart the important stuff and separate it from the smut, it really falls on both creators to treat both versions of their comic with the dignity it deserves. Why bother putting this stuff out there on the web if you're not going to put your best effort into it?

Personally I promised myself I would never review a porn comic, since its goals are generally not in line with my own. But when a webcomic makes an attempt to be both porn and not-porn, it has committed a violation so egregious that deserves ten times as much ridicule as it will ever receive. The use of furries is merely a giant fluorescent target painted on the webcomic, garnering even more ridicule, as it highlights the creators' flaws and shortcomings. Peter is the Wolf is the most condemnable and wretched implementation of a webcomic I have ever been witness to. Sergei Prokofiev is rolling in his grave. Read more→

Point Guardian: Nothing Super About This Hero

I Don't Like It Either, Buddy, But I've Got a Job to Do

Superhero comics are a lot of work. First you need to come up with a compelling character with unique talents, skills or equipment. Next you need an interesting setting for your hero to work in. Add in a supporting cast to balance him out, and give him a well thought villain to go up against. It's easy for a comic creator to come up with the ultimate superhero, one who is infallible in every way, and is undefeatable, but in order to keep this interesting, exponential power growth usually occurs. If the hero defeats all the challengers in his city, then he expands to the nation, and if he conquers them, then he expands to the entire world. This process keeps going and pretty soon he's punching God right in the jaw. Think Goku from Dragonball. By giving the hero character flaws and weaknesses, it's easier to keep his adversaries from becoming absurdly powerful. Yes, a superhero comic requires a lot of work before pencil ever meets paper, and there is no better proof of this than a webcomic known as Point Guardian.

Point Guardian is a comic done solely by Ben Carver, and it features the exploits of a superhero named Ultra whose powers include the ability to "at will, empower his body, giving him strength and abilities far beyond those of mortal men." With generic powers like that, it's no wonder that Ultra is the most popular superhero in the known universe. The comic 'covers' also give me the impression that he has the ability to transform from an Asian man into an albino. Point Guardian claims that it is "One of the first and few non-parody superhero webcomics on the 'Net!" Thankfully, this is true.

You WILL See a Lot of White Space in This Comic

One of his other unmentioned superpowers is the ability to smirk incessantly to the point of annoyance. It seems impossible that the artist can draw any expressive faces that aren't plastered with a smug little smirk. The ones that aren't smirking, are merely blank slates; devoid of any emotion whatsoever, they litter the page like tiny tombstones in this cemetery of a webcomic. The most important part of drawing an interesting character is giving them a full gamut of emotions, especially ones that can't be expressed with a smirk. In the short span of comics I read through for this review, I counted 181 smirks. Since that covers about 1 3/4 years, we're looking at a rate of over 100 smirks/year. Look at the cast page, even. Every character is smirking here. That's just silly. While a well placed smirk can give a villain a chilling demeanor, when the artist plasters them all over the place, they lose their effectiveness. My suggestion to the artist here is to practice drawing faces at various angles, exhibiting a slew of various emotions, until he's good enough that a third party can reasonably pick out what emotion is being conveyed.

Other than the excessive quantity of smirks, there's not much else for me to pick on, artistically. Of course, I mean that literally. There is really nothing to this art besides characters floating on a white void. Backgrounds only seem to be drawn when establishing the setting, and ignored during the bulk of the action. This kind of behavior removes the context from the action and places the characters in an action scene with no reason, other than to be actiontastic. In fact there was one instance where Carver decided to place the action inside a featureless white room, for no other reason than he'd not even have to establish the setting in the first place. In fact, even his establishing panels are utterly devoid of visual description. Carver chooses to draw the area from an angle where he can get away with drawing as few lines as possible. And the comic covers, a picture one would expect to be filled with some action-packed scene and filled with detail, are generally just dull shots of 1-3 characters in some vapid pose, on top of a cheap gradient fill, if even that. People want soul-crippling detail, and filling your panels with empty white space is a surefire way to bore them to death.

I Don't Know Who He Is, But I Bet You Five Bucks He's Smirking

As far as characters go, Point Guardian's Point City is populated with the most ho-hum of heroes, as well as the most vacuous of villains. A quick look at Captain Smirk and his Smirk Squad tells us all we need to know about how much effort Carver puts into his characters. Powers include the ability to alter matter and time at will, the ability to make someone feel good or bad just by touching them, and the ability to be a dragon. But that's not even the start of it! Each hero has a kid sidekick whose ability is exactly the same as his mentor's, just reduced in scale. So now we have Kid Smirk and the Junior Smirkateers to assist the Smirk Squad in their Smirkly duties. Villains are even less inspired. While some are as creative as "The Protagonist's Evil Twin" others are decidedly less so. An energy vampire who can absorb anyone's abilities simply gives the writer a crutch to lean on whenever he needs to give the villain a leg up. Other villains have abilities such as "really strong" or "gadgeteer" which are vague enough to give the writer leeway when conducting a match-up. The final antagonist is the ruler of an evil space empire, which as we all know, is where writers pull villains from when they've hit a barrier on how powerful a person could reasonably be on earth. Pulling villains from space is the first sign of a desperate writer, since it simply means he can't write a convincing human villain.

Developing the relationships between characters is another aspect of comic making that Carver has failed at. Two characters are abruptly revealed to be mother and child, only so that it will seem more dramatic when, a scant three pages later, the mother attempts to kill her own child. Carver has no idea how to write two characters such that their relationship to each other genuinely increases the dramatic tension between them. Instead he relies on tropes and cliches without properly developing them so that they're actually effective. Most are applied at the last minute, as though the author simply had them as afterthoughts, thinking "oh, this meaningless fact would make the upcoming scene more dramatic!" The truth is, most readers see through this easily, which results in a cheapened event, rather than heightened drama. This, more than anything, makes me question how much of Point Guardian is planned out in advance.

Superhero Comics are rarely, if ever, strictly about a person with superpowers fighting some threat to humanity. There is often an internal struggle between his heroic life and his personal life. He may make poor life decisions, or be distracted into slipping up at a crucial moment. The point is, there is often a lot of detail peppered into one of these comics, illustrating as much about the character as possible. Point Guardian, on the other hand, gives its best effort to create as little detail as possible. Even potentially action-filled events are cut short because it would require more detail. By putting more effort into properly developing the world his characters live in, as well as the characters themselves, Ben Carver could have made Point Guardian into an interesting comic. Unfortunately what he gave us was nothing more than an amateurish attempt to come up with the best superhero: One who has infinite power potential, a broad scope of abilities, and an incorruptible spirit. This is the most boring superhero. If he was the one slated to rescue me, I think I'd opt to remain in mortal peril. Read more→

Out There: Doonesbury for Beauty School Bimbos

Complacent With Mediocrity, R.C. Monroe Grants Us a Look At His Life

R. C. Monroe's Out There walks into a bar, and says to the bartender "I'd like a terrible webcomic." The bartender says "here you are" and hands him a mirror. Yeah, I know it's not a very good joke, but it was designed as an example rather than something to make you laugh. You see, it's the kind of writing I've come to expect from a comic like Out There, a comic so bland that it makes Blondie look like The Watchmen.

Out There is basically what happens when the valedictorian as the local beauty school decides to make a webcomic, based solely on the fact that they read Doonesbury in the newspaper, liked how it looked but the jokes went over their head. In fact, Out There LOOKS like a crappy knockoff of Doonesbury, and it's formatted like a crappy knockoff of Doonesbury, it just lacks the political satire that made Doonesbury tolerable. Instead, Out There focuses on things the author knows well, like "being an alcoholic" and "being a tramp." Unfortunately, the drunken sex exploits of a twenty-something get old pretty fast, especially since nothing is ever shown. The protagonist's raging alcoholism is never seriously addressed, beyond a friend saying "haha oh you drink too much," and nothing ever happens beyond that. I know I'M glad that this comic isn't trying to force some anti-alcoholism agenda down my throat; if I want to get drunk and beat the hell out of my kids, that's my prerogative.

I Wish My Legs Were Detachable...

I know I've said it before, but Out There is a visual knock-off of Gary Trudeau's work in Doonesbury, but without a clear grasp on anatomy or a clear plan on differentiating characters. The key feature used to distinguish one person from another is the hair, since all body types are generally the same, and clothing is generic and featureless. In fact, this indicates an excessive amount of inspiration taken from Dominic Deegan, though the problem isn't as drastic as that. If you were to remove all hair from every character's face, it would be nigh-impossible to pick out specific people. Characters have few expressions that aren't half-lidded eyes paired with an open mouth. When Monroe does decide to use a wide-eyed expression, the result is generally bizarre and freakish, and ultimately unsettling. The black & white coloring does nothing to generate interest, and the comic would benefit a lot by being in color, or at least grayscale, in order to give the user something interesting to look at in this miserable webcomic.

There's Always One Ironic Panel in Every Webcomic

The writing is also an awful Doonesbury knock-off, in the sense that each strip and plot is structured just like Trudeau would write the 'bury. Unfortunately, Monroe has failed to realize that Doonesbury is done this way because it's a political satire comic, which Out There is decidedly not. In the case of OT, there is no satire, which means each strip should at least offer something interesting to hook new readers. As it is, Out There reads like a long-winded novel with small illustrations under each line of dialogue. Every strip fails to contain anything resembling a joke, and each page instead ends with something that attempts to convey finality but falls short in some significant way. When two characters engage in an intimate situation, nothing is really explored in their characters beyond the shallow characterization that Monroe has already given them. Instead of wallowing in what we already know about these characters, how about delving into their personalities once in a while? You can't attempt to have a comic with one continuous plot, without any meaningful plot development. Even Garfield had a few story arcs that looked deeper into Garfield's character once in a while (before it got homogenized into oblivion). Monroe treats his story like a nature hike where he is pointing out all the interesting things on the trail, but not letting you actually see them for yourself.

Out There is really one of the worst webcomics I've read in a long while. It's even bad at being bad, instead being that insufferable kind of dull that makes it difficult to even form a coherent opinion about. You can easily see the effort put into the comic, and its half-hearted. Monroe has given us a comic developed by simply applying ethereal silly putty to Doonesbury, and rubbing out all the politics before pressing it on to paper. Its characters are as shallow as they come, incapable of submerging the smallest of minds. In the end we are given the most drab, boring and droll webcomic in existence, R. C. Monroe's Out There. I only wish it was out there, and not in here where I am. Read more→