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→