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.