Comics et al

It’s difficult to categorize Wapsi Square. Some days it’s very funny, and others it’s downright creepy.

Taylor’s drawing style is very loose, but well structured. His characters have moments of looking like a hybrid of Manga and Hanna-Barbera. And the impossibly busty Monica is a strange sight to behold. However, Taylor insists that she is physically based on someone that he knows. An odd side effect of Monica’s shape is that Taylor, and some of his readers, have made numerous posts to the Wapsi Square Forum and Taylor’s LiveJournal concerning the proper fitting and purchase of bras for heavily endowed women.

With just a cursory look at Wapsi it’s difficult to imagine it being much of anything but funny. And that’s where Taylor will kick you. Yeah, the strip is about some girls that live in Minnesota, but it’s also about ancient Gods, both of Alcohol and Destruction. Monica isn’t exactly what she appears to be, either. Though what she is, exactly, is something that Taylor has hinted at, but not yet told us.

A pattern has emerged, and Taylor has confirmed he does this on purpose, where the storyline will take a rather dark and serious tone, but turn into absolute silliness in the next strip. And the opposite holds true as well. Whenever the strip gets a little silly you can be certain some grim revelation will pop up soon and send the cast spiraling into doom.

This shift from grim danger to happy silliness is often cause for discussion in the Wapsi forums, but it is pure genius if your goal is to get people to come back to your site on a daily basis. Taylor clearly works in the tradition of the old cliffhanger serial. Even to the point where the strangest revelations will happen on a Friday, and everyone will have to suffer through the weekend wondering just what is going to happen (the comic updates Monday-Friday only). While I have been personally very frustrated by this, I’m back on his site first thing Monday morning. And I know he’s going to do it again.

If you want well written characters, some humor, and exceedingly weird storylines, you can’t do much better than Wapsi Square (which is why it’s also listed in the links section). Give it a try, and if nothing else, remember, it’s free.

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The first impression you get of Brian Defferding’s School is from the format itself. It doesn’t look like a standard comic. Instead of the familiar six by nine format you are presented with a square. It looks for all of the world like a very dark children’s book. Like a Little Golden Book gone horribly astray.

I’m impressed by the line quality on the cover. All of the figures look like they were drawn with a technical pen or something else with a fixed width, but the art on the cover and inside is incredibly dark containing huge patches of black. I can just imaging Defferding sitting at a drawing table scribbling away at a background trying to cover a vast area with a sharpy without burrowing a hole through the page.

I only bought the first of the three issues of School that are available. But I’m certain I’m going to pick up the rest. I admit, I was a little apprehensive about Defferding’s drawing style; dark backgrounds and children with too big heads and too small arms. However, the strange nature of their appearance compliments the story that Defferding is presenting. I’m not sure if he’s setting this up as a murder mystery or supernatural horror or something else entirely. At the end of the first issue it can go either way, which is something I find compelling.

Defferding presents a number of questions in the first installment that I hope will be answered when I read the rest of the story. The obvious one being, why is Lindsay trapped in the school. But why are all of the student’s eyes sewn shut? And what about Scott Myers, why can we see his eyes? And what’s up with the guys in the smiley masks that can see and interact with Lindsay?

I was quite apprehensive of this comic, to be sure, and there are still a few things about the art and writing that bother me a little. Such as, sometimes Defferding’s illustrations can be a little confusing, he plays with perspective a little too much on occasion. And sometimes he’s a little more wordy than is really necessary, or his phrasing comes across as awkward. I’d try to play that off as the narrator is a dead third grader, but then he drops in some profanity and speech patterns that seem a little strange for an eight year old girl. But all of that is fairly minimal. The story is compelling and I actually am curious about what is going to happen next. Go check out Defferding’s site for a free preview of the first issues, and see for yourself. It’s not for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a look.

Technorati Tags: Brian Defferding’s, comic, reviews

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On its surface Paul Sizer’s Moped Army is about the current Moped Army based out of Kalamazoo set roughly three centuries into the future. However, it is also a look at a dystopian society set on top of a utopian society, or, possibly, the other way around.

The setting is a city divided in half. At ground level is the workers that make a city go, the power plants and refineries and such. On top is the society of the gentry. Sizer has quite obviously displayed the class structure that exists in no uncertain terms. If you live up top you are above everyone below you, both literally and figuratively. But in the upper city of Bolt Harbor corruption and the plagues of today still exist. Simone is dating the wealthy, jock asshole, and her parents want her to stick with him no matter how bad he treats her, in order to cement her place in high society. In fact, Sizer’s representation of the relationship between Simone, her boyfriend, and her parents is almost a cartoon of an abusive relationship and those that enable it.

Down below in “Rust City” society is grim. Again, Sizer presents an almost cartoon of a society made to suffer and work for their “betters”. The setup is very much so like H.G. Wells Time Machine with the Morlocks and the Eloi. The most radical, and important, departure is that the residents of Rust City are not the ones that occasionally visit their counterparts to wreak havoc on their lives.

The writing is an exaggeration of everyday life. Sizer’s characters are clean black and white examples of good and bad. Simone’s boyfriend, Chester, has no real redeeming qualities. And the rest of her friends are the very essence of social climbers that will do anything to move forward with their own agendas. And in Rust City, what appears to be a gang of thugs are actually a community of individuals that look out for each other and value the hard work of the individual above all else.

What contrasts with that idea is the artwork. There Sizer made everything gray. His use of gray scale is much more pronounced than in his earlier Little White Mouse. I’m not certain if that is symbolic of anything, or if he just felt that the page needed a little less white space this time around.

Sizer’s use of perspective in relation to human anatomy was also something I had to get used to. The characters have quite a Manga feel to them. In fact, they remind me of the early work from Matt Wagner’s Grendel, you know, that thing he refuses to reprint. But while a cartoon Grendel perhaps reinforces a cartoon quality that Wagner didn’t want, here the simplified, cartoon nature of the character’s appearance works. These characters are cartoons. They are the boiled down essence of their function. The guy that looks like a geek, is a geek. The thug is a thug, and so on.

The story is very accessible and cleanly laid out. No fancy splash pages where you wonder where to start. Nothing is entirely unexpected, okay, one thing struck me as strange, but it was a good kind of strange.

So, go pick it up and give it a read. And watch Simone move from the destructive Eloi into the world of the Morlocks, taking her first steps away from a society that she sees as being fatally flawed.

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