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.