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→