This time, my art-thirsty friends, we’re looking at a webcomic featuring video game jokes.

“But there are so many video game webcomics out there!” some may cry. “Why would I be interested in checking out this one?”

Because it’s damn funny, that’s why! You silly kids and yer questions….

Katie Tiedrich’s site, AwkwardZombie.com, features a weekly webcomic that mostly focuses on Nintendo games, along with some World of Warcraft, Phoenix Wright, Borderlands, and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, among others. You’ll also get healthy doses of Tiedrich’s slice-of-(fantasy)-life pie.

Pie? Dang, I must be hungry.

AwkwardZombie.com does a fine job of pointing out those little fallacies and game-holes we all like to lovingly poke fun at, augmented by its caricature art style. (Usin’ big thinky-words done maked me look SMART, y’awll!) The most recent comic–as of this posting, at least–is having a laugh at The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks. It especially sang to me since I’m playing through the game right now and have similar occasional frustrations. Click each picture here for fullsize goodness, as Spwug’s cramped formatting makes for some squashy-lookin’ pics.

This comic speaks truth! WHY can’t you control Zelda normally when playing her? WHY do you have to draw a shaky pre-set path for her to follow? WHY does the path always need to be altered to avoid new dangers as soon as she starts walking it? WHY IS A CHILD LIKE LINK ALLOWED TO DRIVE TRAINS ALONE ALL OVER NEW HYRULE??

I complain because I love. I do mean that. Spirit Tracks has been my crack for months now. It’s just got a few things that could be improved upon, like every other game in existence. Moving along…!

A big chunk of the comic’s earlier content came from Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Lots of people picked to live in a house! Insert further “Real World” spoofing here! But yes, comedy and mayhem do ensue when your roommates consist of Roy, Marth, and Link….

…As well as Mewtwo, and cameos by the rest of the gang, including Snake, Otacon, and Pikachu. Poor Otacon. No one ever really cares, huh? Well, except Naomi, and we all know how that went, don’t we?

What you’ve already seen is what you get with these comics, and that’s just dandy by me. There’s no ongoing story to try to catch up on, no deeper meaning to discern (unless it’s “do something dumb in your video game, and it will get mocked on the Internet”). It’s just fun, cracky comics, starring the big and small guns of video gaming! Simple and entertaining. After a hard day in the real world, who doesn’t want to come home to see that on their computer monitors? What are ya, emo or somethin’?

Warning to the anti-emo: the journals below the comics are sadly sometimes prone to the self-deprecating “Waah, waah, I can’t draw, I suck, yet I keep making comics that I want you to keep reading even though THEY SUCK” comments that irritate me so much. But I’m happy to add that those are mostly found in earlier comics. The journals have largely become less negative and more neutral or positive in more recent times. Of course, there are rare moments where self-deprecation actually = comic humour!

I’ll leave you with a The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess comic that made me grin. I love Tiedrich’s snarky Midna in her Twilight Princess comics! Then we’ll chase that with a few more, mostly Zelda-related, comics. The artist really seems to love her Zelda jokes, and it shows!

And if you’ve ever raised an eyebrow at all of attorney Phoenix Wright’s underage “assistants”, you’ll give a chuckle and a knowing nod to this comic.

Another “PREACH it, sistah!” moment from Twilight Princess (and also Ocarina of Time). I remember shooting an arrow at a Big Poe in Ocarina of Time just as the sun came up, only to see my missile rip right through the spot where the Poe had been floating one second earlier. ARRRGH!!

And one final comic from Ocarina of Time. Yes, Navi, I’m pretty sure that counts as “cruel and unusual punishment” under Hyrulean law.

That’s all for now. Till next time, hop on over to AwkwardZombie.com and catch up on its offerings!

With only one page left to post, two weeks from this past Monday, it’s time for you to leap on reading Dreamless (reviewed here) if you haven’t already! No one really knows how it’ll end–well, except the creators–but we all want to find out. I’ll be on hand to post my afterthoughts once it’s finally completed. With less than one hundred pages in its archives, this makes for a fairly quick read, and artist Sarah Ellerton’s visual candy is worth the clicks on its own.

Enjoy!

It pays to follow what your favourite webcomics creators are doing outside of their webcomics. You learn interesting facts, like in this recent announcement on LiveJournal from Kaja Foglio, of Studio Foglio, where the comics Girl Genius, MYTH Adventures, What’s New, and Buck Godot are hosted.

To sum up, the Foglios will be creating a comic and other odds and bodkins to go with PlayStation Home’s upcoming steampunk area. Often regarded as bloatware where users go to harass other users (or get harassed by other users), this may be the one thing for many PS3 owners that makes them actually want to blow the dust off their Home accounts and log in. At least, I know that’s how it’s working for me.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this development. You know, so you don’t have to. (Because who really follows Home news, anyways?)

Now, back to harassing other Home users–I mean, enjoying an enriched and healthy and social PlayStation Home experience.

Hey, Spwuggin’ Nation! Hope you US Spwuggies had a Memorial Day weekend full of barbecued dead things and days off work. You’re probably still reeling from all the weekend’s food, sun, and a sudden onslaught of work back at the office today.

But don’t doze off just yet! The recently-ended 8-Bit Theater has finally posted an epilogue page, stepping away from sprite art to say goodbye in a more traditional, drawn-art style.

Yep, it’s really over. Nothing left but to either remove the site from your active bookmarks or browse the other comics on offer at the Nuklear Power website.

Enjoy your epilogue, folks! And congrats again to 8-Bit Theater for carrying the story through nine years of updates!

Strap in, Spwuggies–what we’ve got here is a negative comic review.

I really thought I’d like Ryan Sohmer’s and Lar deSouza’s Least I Could Do. Being a longtime fan of their fantasy gamer strip Looking for Group, it just seemed to make sense that I’d be a fan of their other work. Sadly, this was so very much not the case.

Least I Could Do is an episodic and shallow comic, focusing on the life of a real jerk of a self-insert and Gary Stu character, Rayne Summers (Ryan? Rayne? Sohmer? Summers? Get it?) The entire focus of the comic is how the arrogant, selfish, childish, misogynistic, and sex-obsessed Rayne can screw over anyone he wants (or just screw, if it’s a “hot lady”, but overweight or otherwise unattractive women are just talking farm animals to him), usually suffering no consequences whatsoever.

Because the comic is about All Eyes On Rayne, the other characters tend to be bland in every way. With the exception of Issa, who pretty much only stood out for being the one female in the main group, I never really could remember the names of the other characters, not even after reading through seven years’ worth of archives (2003-2010). I mean, it’s not as if they act like real people or anything of the sort. Their entire role is to serve as punching bags for Rayne’s abuse, to pay Rayne’s way even though he makes far more money than any of his friends (early on, he scored a $100K+ corporate job he was completely unqualified for, during a quest to seduce the CEO), and to serve Rayne’s every whim no matter how much they want to refuse; for no reason other than He Is Rayne, his henchmen–I mean friends–seem to be terrified of him.

Really, I think the main problem I have with the strip is that it’s all about rewarding bad behaviour. Dude, I don’t like to see good things happen to bad people in real life. Why in the infinite hells would I want to see it almost every single day in a webcomic? The laughable part is that attempts are made to show Rayne as a kind and generous soul from time to time. When a character is berating Rayne for his selfish behaviour, Rayne counters by pointing out that he took in an orphan child and has given the boy things he couldn’t get otherwise. This shuts up the other person (and frequently, characters who are not Rayne will be shut up by his weak arguments, just because He Is Rayne). But there’s a serious problem with Rayne’s counterpoint. The characters and audience are supposed to conveniently ignore that the reason why Rayne took on the boy is because he wanted a slave to serve his every whim (I could argue the boy is “another” slave, to go with Rayne’s cowed friends). And that really is the boy’s role in the comic, by the way. Rayne’s slave. I don’t think anyone’s ever even bothered to give the kid a name. Not that I’d remember it if he has one.

This review is just depressing and infuriating me now, so how about we move onto the visual examples of why this webcomic is pretty awful? In a rare redeeming quality, the art is actually pretty good, by the way. Nothing amazing in the world of comics, but much better than the norm. But since I’d rather not waste Spwug’s server space on images of Rayne Behaving Badly, I’ll just be linking to the relevant strips here.

Rayne has a bird violently flung into a closed window from a catapult, then shows off his godlike healing abilities on it, then ropes two of his guy friends into crossdressing as nuns to make up stories about how kind and generous Rayne is. All this to get in the pants of the blonde woman (unsuccessfully that time, I’m happy to say). There is something wrong with an audience that sees no problem with any of this. And here’s how Rayne repays his nun-garbed friends after humiliating and insulting them.

Of course, because Rayne is a Gary Stu, there are many, many, MANY examples of how he never really pays for his bad behaviours. Such as when he gets his friend and himself arrested by mouthing off to a cop. (Rayne Summers: Worst Friend EVER.) We get one panel of Rayne in jail, quite pleased with himself….

….And by the next day, it’s already been left behind and never mentioned again in the comic, as Rayne continues to do exactly as he pleases.

Another example of Rayne being the Worst Friend Ever: humiliating your friend, then shoving him out of an airplane. And he’s not arrested for this…WHY, exactly?

“If you’re ugly, please don’t procreate.” Still trying to figure out why Rayne is considered the protagonist of this comic….

Oh, and here’s a real gem: Rayne’s friends finally grow a collective pair and try to get him back for all his abuse. Awesome!! At first, it looks like this ploy will be successful. But then, because Rayne Is Rayne and everyone cowers before him, he twists the prank to his advantage and turns his friends into obedient little lapdogs with nothing more than an angry look. And what happens with the lovely German lady, who should’ve stormed off the moment she saw Rayne in Nazi gear? Yeeeeaaaaahh….I really have nothing to say here. The disgust for this comic and its Gary Stu character has just gotten too strong by this point.

But I’ll end on a high note! There is ONE time when Rayne really gets his due. I just wish the lesson had stuck. This is easily my favourite strip in the entire collection.

I spent several weeks suffering my way through the comic’s archive to write this review. There WERE a few redeeming moments for the comic. I’m just tossing that out there to be fair. I’m hard-pressed to remember what those good moments were right now (aside from Rayne getting the crap beaten out of him in the last link), but they did exist. If the primary focus hadn’t been Rayne Summers and his dickish ways, I could’ve even gotten into this strip. But for the most part, I really can’t recommend Least I Could Do. If you’re an ass, I guess you’ll like reading about your own kind. If you can overlook Rayne and his ego, you might enjoy the other humour this strip has to offer. But as for me, I’ll stick with Looking for Group. It has its Gary Stus and its D-bag moments, but at least that one doesn’t make me want to throw something at the monitor on nearly every page.

Hallo again, you Spwuggy kids, you!

The three of you who read this column probably noticed the lack of updates last week. The short version is, when the temperature in the computer room is over 85°F, I don’t risk overheating the system by turning it on. Luckily, the responsible central air unit has been fixed, and we’re now back in business!

Let’s get right down to it with a newish feature I’d been wanting to implement since I first started writing for Spwug: MORE PURTY PICKCHURS. If my focus here is supposedly on webcomics, shouldn’t this column be more visual too? I kept putting it off because I had no working tablet or scanner. Finally, I had enough of waiting and started drawing in Photoshop.

After an hour of very painful hand-crabbing from gripping an ancient, unresponsive mouse, I remembered why I had put off drawing on the computer. But it was too late to stop, and you can now reap the dubious rewards of my agonizing labour! Everyone loves MS Paint-style pictures, right? So, let’s get started.

There’s a little television show called Stargate Universe. I doubt anyone here has heard of it. It’s not like geeks ever come to Spwug or anything. But if you have heard of this TV series that I understand is “science fiction”, you probably know that it’s not doing too well compared to its predecessors in the Stargate franchise. Fan and critic complaints range from too much drama, to not enough action, to “Syfy Channel sucks” (a very valid complaint), to excessive shaky-cam, to “Where the heck are all the aliens?!”

I agree with all of the above plus some. If my housemate didn’t keep recording this show on the DVR box, I wouldn’t have watched it past the first few episodes. But instead of just griping, I’ve decided to offer up some suggestions to make the show better. Get your pencils out and take notes, SGU writers. There’ll be a test on this later!

1: More alien action, please! In two seasons so far, we’ve had, what? Labrador Retriever-sized spiders in two episodes. A sandstorm that may or may not have actually been sentient. Neither one showed any sign of anything resembling intelligence compatible with that of the human characters (despite the fact that human intelligence also seems to be a lacking quality in the show, so you’d think they’d understand one another). Though I have this theory that the spiders weren’t REALLY bloodthirsty monsters trying to eat the faces of the stranded humans. They were just lonely and wanted new friends.

Then there was T-Rex’s doughier cousin for about fifteen seconds. I still don’t get why Scott wasted ammo and time shooting at the thing when he could’ve just escaped through the Stargate. Maybe the dino reminded him of his shameful Weight Watchers days.

The only intelligent aliens of note so far have been the anorexic “blues” that keep trying to steal the ship Destiny away from its human crew (who, it could be argued, stole the ship from the ascended Ancients who made it). They really haven’t done anything else of interest so far, unless you count competitive non-eating.

2: The military and civilians aboard Destiny should be allowed to decorate the ship, or at least their respective quarters. Seriously, now. Every single scene aboard the ship takes place in a setting of drab greys and the occasional blue-grey light. No wonder all anyone does is fight and/or cry. I’m surprised half the crew hasn’t committed suicide already. A little colour goes a long way, folks. Maybe some throw rugs and dried flowers. A splash of paint, a few family photos lining the halls, and you go from stranded victims to homeowners of the biggest and most fashionable estate known to mankind!

3: Dr. Nicholas Rush needs to decide which team he supports. I mean, come on, Nicky-baby! This sympathetic-villain-in-one-episode, antihero-in-the-next stuff was old last season. At least he and Colonel Young are no longer at each other’s throats every five minutes. (Kudos for the next pic go out to housemate Thoradin, whose idea of a D&D setting for Young and Rush was far more amusing than my original pic of Rush shouting about how he was going to hijack the ship’s systems to obey only him and then give everyone onboard the puppies he and his dead wife never got to have.) For some reason, this scene works best in my head in stick-figure format.

4: The final suggestion doesn’t need pictorial accompaniment. To save the Stargate franchise, Syfy should go back in time, NOT cancel Stargate SG-1, NOT cut its budget, and watch the money come rolling in. But we all know Syfy can’t do anything sensible, time travel or no. This is why The Lost Room still has never moved beyond a pilot miniseries.

Did you pay attention, Stargate Universe writers? I may have just saved your show there.

That’s it for this week. Tune in next time, when we may or may not have more hand/mouse-drawn pictures. It really depends upon how masochistic I’m feeling. You’ll just have to come see to find out!

Here I say my farewells to the webcomic 8-Bit Theater, which recently ended its nine-year run in a manner most anticlimactic. That’s right–the sprite comic that even people who don’t like sprite comics read is done. It’s all over but the shouting, folks. And the epilogue that creator Brian Clevinger has promised is forthcoming.

But Nuklear Power, Clevinger’s site with its host of other webcomics, still chugs along. There’s the Eisner-nominated Atomic Robo, Warbot in Accounting, and How I killed Your Master, all written in whole or part by Clevinger and visually rendered by various skilled artists. I’m not actually going to go into detail about each comic hosted on Nuklear Power, mainly because I was never a huge fan of any of them aside from 8-Bit Theater. And even 8-Bit gave the impression over the past few years that Clevinger was bored of it, just putting out new pages to finish what he started. Which, don’t get me wrong, was pretty darn commendable of him to still finish the story even if he’d lost interest! Too many artists will just wander away from a comic, leaving it hanging when they get bored/busy/distracted instead of giving the audience a proper ending (remember last week’s article?)

Nuklear Power is one of the oddities in the webcomic world, one of the few sites where someone’s success as a webcomic artist actually helped launch a career outside the boundaries of that webcomic. Aside from Atomic Robo’s success in the physical and digital realms, Clevinger has been living The Dream for comic book fans everywhere, writing material for mainstream comics. As he stated in a blog post from April 25th: “Interesting note: I’m the first webcomic-er to do a full mini-series for the Big Two, and now the first to get a gig that takes place in mainstream continuity.” This was posted in relation to the news that Clevinger is a writer for the soon-to-be-released Marvel comics The Infinity Gauntlet (a revamping of that series) and World War Hulks: Wolverine vs. Captain America.

Going from creator of a parodic sprite webcomic to a writer of Marvel comics. Whether you like Clevinger’s work or not, you still have to admit that’s an amazing leap!

I doubt I’ll be sticking around to see where his other works go. They’re not bad comics; they’re just not my personal cup of cocoa. You may well visit the site and fall in love where I just shrugged and moved on (Atomic Robo is a good example of my “shrugging” at something nearly everyone else seems to love, so check it out!) In my case, once the 8-Bit Theater epilogue is concluded and the story is shelved for good, Nuklear Power will probably end up shoved into my rarely-opened bookmark folder of sites for webcomics that have ended. I’m sure I’ll drop by once or twice a year to see if anything that catches my eye has popped up, but for now, I’m saying my goodbyes. Thanks for the memories, 8-Bit Theater! It was a great ride while it lasted.

Don’t you hate it when something you love just…stops with no resolution? Webcomic fans know this pain all too well. Your favourite webcomic is chugging along, picking up fans right and left, in the middle of an epically epic storyline, when suddenly…a month goes by with no updates. Then two months. Then six. The artist puts up a brief blog post that says, “Being swamped by work/school/family, but we’ll be back soon!”

A year later, the site is inhabited only by crickets. It sits there, unchanging, for many more years, or until the server deletes the page. The webcomic is only ever again mentioned in forum discussions where people ask, “Whatever happened to such-and-such comic?”

In the spring, a young geek’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of loss. Let’s look at a few of the fallen, and sometimes missing, friends that I would have loved to see get a proper ending. We’ll be doing this again later, by the way. I have a pretty long list of comics I used to read that stopped without ending, and they make for great nostalgia columns, eh? Plus, there are other unfortunate webcomics being abandoned all the time….

5ideways by K. Sandra Fuhr – This supernatural apocalyptic thriller started off with a strong story and intriguing characters in 2005, only to taper off with updates as Real Life continued to eat away at the artist’s free time. By 2008, the comic was officially on hiatus, and the site sat largely untouched until November 18, 2008, when a “5ideways will return soon” graphic was tossed up on the front page. “Soon” was a bit of a stretch, sadly, as there have been no updates since then. However, the extremely talented creator didn’t just up and abandon webcomics completely. If her name sounds familiar, that’s because you may already have read/be reading her other works: Boy Meets Boy (completed), Friendly Hostility (completed, and reviewed here), and Other People’s Business (ongoing, and blurbed about at the bottom of this page).

Absurd Notions/Why the Long Face, both by Kevin Pease – The first, running from 1999 to 2007, focused on the work and play misadventures of a group of young-adult friends with varied hobbies (though they all seemed to enjoy tabletop gaming) and the occasional bout of mad science. You know, what has since become a staple of webcomics. The second ran from 2003 to 2007 and focused on the creator’s musings about life in general. Both trickled to a halt around the same time (with Absurd Notions in the middle of a story). Sometime in 2008 or 2009, I asked Pease about further updates. He mentioned that he didn’t intend to drop his comics completely, but it looks like if that’s still true, we’ll be waiting a while longer for updates. A certain Spwug webcomic writer can keep hoping!

Chrono Trigger Rip-Off (at least they’re honest!) by Mark and Tom (and possibly someone else; it’s not too clear) – Sprite comics are reviled by art elitists for not using original art, but I LIKE sprite strips. LOVE them, even. I love sprite art and everything you can do with it. I love sprites being used for tributes and parodies of the games they come from. This webcomic did all that. Sprite comics are all over now, and the whole “Video game sprites cause mayhem while behaving in naughty ways that are totally out of character with how they behave in their canon” thing is done and overdone, and often done wrong. Chrono Trigger Rip-Off isn’t exactly a unique entity now, but back when I found it (likely pre-2001, but the archives only go back to January of that year), sprite comics were a fairly shiny new concept for me. I got a lot of good laughs out of this comic and enjoyed the fact that it even had a plot. And while there’s nothing unique about the strip by today’s standards, I still regret that it died out in 2004 with its story unfinished.

RPG World by Ian Jones-Quartey – You just can’t talk about unfinished business in webcomics without invoking the granddaddy of them all. RPG World went from a superstar of webcomics to a lesson in how NOT to end a story during its final battle. (The lesson is: DON’T STOP UPDATING DURING THE FINAL BATTLE.) Remember that? This webcomic started off strong in 2000. It updated regularly, the story kept getting better and better, Cherry’s butt kept getting bigger and bigger, the audience grew steadily–even friends who otherwise never read webcomics read RPG World. Every breath was bated as the story blazed into its climax. Beloved characters were killed. World-altering secrets were revealed. The final boss was confronted. The heroes geared up for the greatest fight in history. And then…nothing. In 2005, the comic ground to a halt. It tried to defibrillate itself with fillers and side stories on very sporadic occasions until June 2007. Finally, the artist admitted what the audience already knew; he had no intention of completing the story. He was too busy, he’d lost interest, didn’t like seeing his old art, etc., etc….

Recently, he put out the word that he felt bad for leaving the audience in the lurch and wanted to find a new artist to take his scripts and finish the story. I’d dearly love to see that, but since then, there’s been no word on finding a new artist. The site has been dead for so long that I don’t know if anyone who could help even saw his request for a new artist. But if you’re interested, please contact him at his site. I selfishly want to see RPG World finally completed! And if you want to know what eventually helped take Ian’s time away from the comic, watch this show called The Venture Bros. that he’s worked on for a few years. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. I think it’s about siblings who become business entrepreneurs. Also, something about butterflies. Maybe they fund a living butterfly museum together or something. I don’t know. (And if you think I’m being serious here, let’s talk bridges.)

Well, that’s enough out of me for now. I still hope to someday see these old loves of mine completed, before being shoved back in the shoeboxes of the Internet. If there’s a webcomic you enjoyed that ended prematurely, let me know. I’m seeking more stalled comics for future installments!

Annnnnnnnd, with a recently-restored working computer, we’re back!

Recently, Something Positive and Girls With Slingshots celebrated the dubious “miracles” of marriage and birth via two crossovers. Webcomics readers know the drill: you usually, though not always, have to visit both sites to get the full story. Which can present something of a challenge if you’re late to the game, and the sites crossing over don’t properly link to each other’s relevant pages in their archives. You’ll notice that little archiving faux pas in the two crossovers I just linked, sadly.

Some people think crossovers are great, especially if they already read both (or more) comics participating in one. Of course, you also have the people who think crossovers are stupid, and puppies should be stomped.

I love the crossover. Not just in webcomics, but any kind. Penny Arcade meets Elf Only Inn (page one of three). Spider-Man on the starship Enterprise (sorry, no links–I’d just really like to see that). The titular character from Nodwick in the fan-parody movie The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.

Crossovers aren’t done just so the artists can fulfill their dreams of seeing their own characters appear in their favourite webcomics, though. They’re also a not-so-sneaky way to get more page views and possibly expand a comic’s audience. Meaning, potentially more fans to make donations and buy merchandise. Since the crossover benefits everyone who participates, it’s actually a pretty slick deal for all sides. Just another reason I love ‘em.

At the same time, I can’t say I’ve ever started reading any webcomic as a result of a crossover. When one takes place on a webcomic I like, I’ll check out the other sites participating. But once the crossover ends, I normally never return to those other webpages. I find new comics to add to my bookmarks from banner ads on another site, from a glowing blurb on another artist’s blog, from links people leave in the feedback section of other webcomics. But never from crossovers.

I think it’s because crossovers generally feature already-established characters. Their motivations and nature aren’t explained; if you’re not already familiar with a character, you’re not going to become so during a crossover. And let’s face it, it’s difficult to really get behind a character or setting you don’t know anything about. I enjoy a crossover while it lasts, but in the end, I’m not at all invested in the elements from “outside” the comic I already like, so they’re lost and forgotten.

What about you, Spwug Nation (someday, we’ll be as cool as the Colbert Nation)? Has any kind of crossover ever led you to discover a new fandom?

I’ve got somewhere around seventy currently-updating comics in my regular reading repertoire right* now, and over a dozen more that are inactive but still checked every now and then. Recently I’ve been asked if I ever get sick of reading any of them. Do I ever just…stop reading?

*(Alliteration, WHOO!)

Well, I’m a pretty tenacious little buggeridoo. Once I’ve been established as a fan of any comic, at any point, I tend to hold on until the sweet or bitter end, even when I’m just kinda wishing the thing would hurry up and put itself out of my misery. I mean, if I ever loved it before, chances are I’ll love it again, right? I WANT to love again! Why don’t you ever return my calls or stop telling me you hate me? I–

–Got a bit off track there. *Ahem*

That said, there’s a few webcomics on my reading list that I’ve fallen out of love with, or am in the process of losing that spark for reading. I was reading the old archives of one such story and feeling nostalgic for the glee I used to have over each new update. So, I think I’ll wax a little unpoetic about ‘er. It’s already been reviewed here and was, in fact, my first Spwug review. So, you could say, we’re revisiting it to see how it’s changed since last year, for good or ill.

Misfile: (Reviewed here and here.) Over the past year, it’s become quite a bit of an emofest in apparent reflection of the creator’s life woes. Oh, and don’t forget the sexism. Ash is grumpier than ever and still a know-it-all who in this story’s world knows more about women than women do, despite really being a boy with no actual prior female experience. (The “women just use Halloween as an excuse to dress like sluts” misogynism in those last two links makes me want to stab both Ash and creator Chris Hazelton in very sensitive places.) The apparent solution to any problem in the comic now is to have a car race. Someone makes a racist (and race-ist) remark? Race her to show (and shut) her up! Guys being jerks to racers? Race the jerks!

The overarching plot with the angels and fixing errors made in Heaven is all but forgotten lately in the face of all the emo and racing. Plus, even though they obviously hate each other and have even both dated other people, Ash is STILL holding Rumisiel to the fake relationship farce they’ve been putting on since the beginning. Even when there was an opportunity to end it, Ash forced Rumisiel to keep up the act. Need I point out again that they hate each other, and this so-called “plot point” was stupid and unnecessary from the beginning? I found this forum suggestion to include Misfile on the Bad Webcomics Wiki. While it’s hardly a scholarly source since the site exists to be specifically negative, I can’t say I really disagree with much of the discussion on that link.

But let’s not dwell overmuch on the bad times, m’kay? Let’s remember it fondly and with the hope that, unlike the South, it will someday rise again. Before Misfile started making checking the website feel like a chore, it was one of my favourite comics. It was, like I said above somewhere, the very first webcomic review I did for Spwug. It was a two-parter review, even! With all the genderswitching webcomics out there, Misfile actually managed to do something different. Ash didn’t magically become girly just because he sprouted boobies overnight; he remained Ash in personality, for better or worse. The material didn’t fall prey to most of the comedy pitfalls that genderswitch comics like to bury themselves in. Ash didn’t use his new girliness as an excuse to watch girls shower in gym or “accidentally” fall into their bosoms. His very world was altered by the cosmos to reflect how his life would have been had he been a girl from birth, so there weren’t numerous awkward jokes centering around him trying to hide his new femaleness from family and friends.

Even though Ash is a racer and Hazelton has a nerd-on for cars, the comic didn’t (at first) lay on the racing storylines too thickly; the content was entirely accessible even to those who don’t even know how to pop their car’s hood and who find street racing dull. Really, the comic did pretty much everything right to begin with (see my previous Misfile review links for more), and I’m very much hoping that’ll happen again soon. I could very easily see it happening too; it just seems like perhaps the creator isn’t doing the best job of separating the suckiness of real life from his story at the moment.

Would I still recommend this comic? Sure, at least browse the archives from the beginning. Just be braced for plot wandering and excessive emo over the past year or so. I’ll be sticking with this one, hoping that things cheer up, and soon.

Expect other mini-reviews and updates as time goes on; if my opinion of a story ever changes, you’ll be the first (and probably only ones) to know! Now, back to browsing comic archives for me. Did you know that back in the olden days, Misfile was actually funny? I love history!