Psychedelic Treehouse: Tips on Shoddy Craftsmanship, From the Expert Shoddy Craftsman

How does a webcartoonist improve himself? Practicing alone might seem sufficient to some, but without direction, most will just practice themselves into a hole. Rote learning can make you more efficient, but not necessarily better. There are websites which can guide an artist into developing his skills well, by giving good examples and exercises, and lead to a greater understanding of anatomy, and higher quality art. Likewise, there are aids for the writers out there who want to escape terrible characters, awful pacing issues, and atrocious plots. But aside from the art, what is out there to help you present your webcomic? I have yet to find a good site about webcomic production, but I am knee deep in bad ones.

Psychedelic Treehouse is yet another webcomic site by Ben Gordon, aka scartoonist, in which he attempts to combine information that he feels is useful to webcartoonists who wish to improve the business of their webcomic. The first thing anyone will notice, however, is the terrible page layout of PT. The first textual paragraph is a bunch of metatags, presented as a jumbled mess of phrases, some of which link to subsections of the site, while others do not. The purpose of this section puzzles and confuses me. It is an ugly site feature, and will repel users looking for a more professional site to give them advice. After this massive text chunk, Gordon gives two substanceless taglines, followed by a link to a useless "list" style website. By the time the reader reaches any true substance in the Psychedelic Treehouse, he or she is already fatigued by all the empty content they've had to wade through.

Down in the bowels of the front page, PT turns into a two-column format, with the left column being a left-justified list of various categories and subsections, with no organization or formatting cues. The right column is a centered list of site credits and contact links. The formatting wraps lines in odd places, creating lines with two words, followed by a line break. All the credits in the right column are chaotically arranged, and the reader's eye bounces all over the place, instead of following the list cleanly. The left side is only slightly better, with section titles and descriptions having various assortments of font styles and sizes, with very little consistency among either.

But what kind of substance does The Psychedelic Treehouse actually offer? Perhaps it is a diamond in the rough, an object of immense value with an ugly presentation. And perhaps Jesus himself will swoop down on the back of a giant rooster and smite all the terrible webcomics. The majority of sections found on the PT are simply lists of things. A list of webcomics, a list of webcomic collectives, a list of comic portals, blogs, publishers, award winners, podcasts, books, and commission-taking artists. There are even three whole pages of 'miscellaneous' link lists. The most useless of these 'lists' is a gallery of webcomic logos. What is the purpose of these lists? A collection of information is useless if the average reader still has to digest and analyze it himself. These lists are simply pure streams of data, with no evaluation provided by Gordon, thereby making it about as useful as a list of quantum physics equations to the average kindergartener. Ben Gordon is apparently incapable of giving the necessary commentary on the lists he provides, since he has not done so, but with the quality of his writing, I'm not sure I'd want to see it.

A few sections attempt to be more significant than just a meaningless pile of lists, which is what I'd expect from topics such as Site Design Tools and Networking, topics that Ben Gordon has obviously neglected himself. Of course, they're merely lists of links accompanied with a summary of the link, which I suppose is an improvement, but ultimately, it's not enough. Many subsections again devolve into mere lists. One section on Fonts is prefaced by an amazingly inaccurate assessment and analysis on the use of fonts, making the claim that "If you use an exotic font to letter your comic, many people in your audience will see whatever their search engine thought was the closest match." How is your browser supposed to alter the comic image to change the font used, I'm not sure, but Ben Gordon has asserted that it happens, and presented it as fact. The presence of patently idiotic statements detract from the validity of Psychedelic Treehouse as a webcomic resource. It also doesn't help that the font chosen for the page header is Comic Sans.

The remainder of Psychedelic Treehouse's content consists of extremely short 'essays' about webcomics (as well as interviews and reviews crossposted from his other sites). The problem is that these essays are written to push Gordon's concept of what cartoonists should be doing, whether he has any factual basis for saying so, or not. This checklist is full of minor and inconsequential things that only matters to Gordon, but he has presented it as a definitive checklist for new webcartoonists. The truth is, I'd trust his advice about as far as I could throw him. He puts more emphasis on how to make money from a comic, as well as shameless self-promotion than he does about any kind of substantial improvement in quality.

Ben Gordon provides very little ethos when talking about building a better webcomic site. His own sites are so jumbled, scattered, disoriented and downright terrible. Trying to pass his Psychedelic Treehouse off as an essential resource for webcomickers is laughable. It is essentially a Webcomic Junkyard: Massive piles of junk with a single potential nugget of value contained within. He makes no effort to sort the wheat from the chaff, and as a result his information becomes massive and unwieldy. Anyone looking to improve their webcomic should avoid this site like the plague, since you will waste more time digging for gold without a map than you will spend applying the useful advice to your own product. If Ben Gordon built this Psychedelic Treehouse with his own two hands, then you should think twice about turning it into a clubhouse; the shoddy craftsmanship will fall apart on you at the worst possible moment. Read more→

Girl Genius: Crashing Through the Glass Ceiling Face-First

Webcomics are essentially the scum of the Internet. But it's true that not all of them are abominations. From the subsewers of mediocrity arises a few hypermutants which do not immediately offend the tastes of the rest of the mutants on the E-Zone. How do we determine which ones are good? Who the fuck knows. However, I do know what doesn't work, and that's placing the choice of "best turd" in the hands of other webcartoonists.

The most recent choice for "Most Outstanding Comic" is none other than artistic travesty Girl Genius. For those of you wondering what the hell a comic called Girl Genius could possibly be about, the plot synopsis page is not going to tell you a whole lot, since the author got to what I assume was an insignificant plot point (based on what I know of shitty webcomic authors) before giving up on writing what invariably would have been a lengthy and convoluted description of what every single page had contained.

From what I can glean, though, the story is basically your standard Mary Sue character who is suddenly thrust into a high adventure world based on talents and skills she was unaware of before. She has 2 or 3 companions to round out the skill set, and she has some kind of rival and some kind of nemesis to provide varying levels of conflict and is ultimately possessed by an even more powerful force than herself. Basically the premise of every anime ever. Slap a coat of Steampunk paint on it and it becomes Girl Genius.

Despite the uninspired and hackneyed concept, Girl Genius continues to show that it does not deserve "Most Outstanding" anything with its more than sloppy art. The artist, Phil Foglio, has never seen a human face in his entire life. Eyes are not teardrop shaped, though they ARE generally the same size, and heads are not the size of a softball. And most of all, facial features should exist on the actual face, not on a plane in front of or behind the face. Of course there's rarely any consistency between characters, since faces have a tendency to change their proportions in EACH PANEL. Of course this may be a result from not planning out the art very well; as seen in the last two panels, the features are often resized to accomodate the presence of other features at such an angle.

Ultimately, when one decides who should earn the label of "Most Outstanding Webcomic," one should consider whether the artist can draw a character consistently enough to convey the concept that his characters are not made of Silly Putty. The story should be something which isn't lifted from the annals of japan, and the writing (if it is a long form comic) should be conveyed clearly and concisely to new readers. When the winner of "Most Outstanding Webcomic" is a Girl Genius with an IQ of 60, one has to wonder what the comics who chose it are like. Read more→