You know how there are certain friends who have their inside jokes, and no matter how hard you try, you will never understand the punch lines? I feel like the outsider peering on Guido and Luigi. When I first came across this comic, I was excited to see what it had to offer. The cartoonish art style, the simple punch lines; I was expecting comedy gold.

What I received instead was lame joke after crippled joke centered on body building. Seriously? You’re going to dedicate an entire strip to two wimpy dudes going to a gym? Now I shouldn’t be too harsh, since this comic is brand new off the presses, as of March. It also began in a Norwegian weight lifting forum, which isn’t the typical web comic community that most artists are familiar with.

Having that said, this comic is not worth the effort. The art is simple, dull, and has no unique style whatsoever. The writing is flat, as are the characters. The set up for the jokes are obvious, and the punch lines made me grimace in disappointment. I honestly gave it the old college try when it came to finding this web comic funny, but I just ended up feeling defeated, and just a little empty inside.

So an invitation to check out a strip came through recently, leading me to check out Thingpart by Joe Sayers. There’s some fairly smart references hiding behind those stick figures, which leads to the question: is writing enough? Can the art be as, um, child-like and innocent as humanly possible, and still be offset by the words?

If you think “no”, then don’t bother with those links; you won’t like ’em. But then you probably don’t like The Perry Bible Fellowship or Boy on a Stick and Slither, either. They’re pretty much the Platonic Ideals of simple art used with great effectiveness. If you think “yes”, how do we explain the fact that Nicholas Gurewitch and Steven Cloud can be seen to use simplistic art merely for its effect (affect, even), and often mix in beautiful, complex artwork and or backgrounds that hint at subtle depths? To get by with simple art (or nearly without art entirely), do you have to obsess over language to a Northian degree? Shall we to this marriage of Art and Language admit impediments?

So … discuss. And after we’ve solved this dilemma to everybody’s satisfaction, we can get to work on the whole Bird Flu thing.

Nazi Polka and sandwich-fueled murder is what I love about Muffin Time. Brian Chojnowski’s brain has spawned a web comic full of fun, bright, and slightly-offensive humor portrayed in the usual three delicious panels. I’ve always had a penchant for weird, disturbing humor with beautiful artwork and quirky characters.

That’s why I’ve decided to give Muffin Time the mention I think it deserves. The humor can be hit-and-miss at times, which is common for web-comics still developing its niche in the web-o-sphere. But when you take in account that the strip has recently been revamped with a new art style, it is truly impressive how much it has grown since its beginnings.

Going through the archives, I’ve found numerous scrumptious strips featuring tasty dialogue on Andre 3000, apricots, and the ever-lasting gobstopper that is Jesus. Muffin Time offers its own book, bountiful downloads, and forums where one can chat about zombie communists and whatnot. Just watch out for those katamari, they can be hard on the digestive system.

One of the worst revelations about reviewing anything, restaurants, bands or comics, is in deciding when to shake your head and tell people something really stinks, despite the presence of talent. Not everyone can have the most awesome, fantastic, oh-my-god-you-must-read comic and for Monster Machine, boy is it true.

Pulling off a four panel comic strip that is poignant, funny and doesn’t use cheap tricks for a few chuckles is hard. Pulling off a four panel strip that uses only two or three characters and hardly any backgrounds or body changes is even harder. Her! Manages the feat with startling entertainment and runs on the same principle that Monster Machine does. The difference is one has good dialogue and motion within the strip and the other remains motionless and uninspiring. There is no real personality or history to the characters. They are flat and offer no genuine or unique funny.

Two of the biggest sink-holes new (and occasionally, old) online comic creators get sucked into is in thinking that they can pull off Breaking the Fourth Wall and ego maniacally referring to the comic creator in the comic, in this case Daniel Davis. It nearly never works out and readers flinch with mistrust. Once you start self-referencing yourself, it’s hard to gain back the respect of readers. More often than not readers want to be sucked into the world and the characters you create, even if they are set-ups for one liners and shattering that illusion is a mood killer. Even without these two troubled approaches to the comic, Davis’ writing is just bad.

To be fair though, the comic is new. As in, it’s been around for two months. To Davis’ credit, he updates almost every day and has maintained this schedule from the beginning. This is encouraging and hints that perhaps in a year the characters and writing will flush themselves out and if he keeps up his updating schedule, he’s sure to find his voice. There is truth in understanding that comics don’t hit their stride until at least a year out, and for Davis, I hope he keeps going that long and I’ll tell you why. Davis has something that even long standing comics don’t have; amazing and unique artwork.

If you check out everything he has done over at his site Steam Crow Press you’ll find yourself entrenched in quirky and delightful monsters of all shapes and sizes. His print work reminds me of Meghan Stratman over at Bunny Pirates. I was honestly shocked to discover that this comic that seemed so terrible was created by someone with the choppy, sweet and well crafted talent I’d been impressed with for so long over at Bunny Pirates. Davis has a cool mind for art.

So did I change my mind about Monster Machine? No, it’s still a terrible comic. But Davis has given me hope for an evolution into funnier and better writing. I’ll cross my fingers.

So “school” is a pretty popular location for entertainments of various types. It lets you attract kids (and their hefty allowances) as a primary audience, because it relates to their everyday experience. If you set said entertainment into the “high school” setting, it lets you attract creepy borderline pedophiles (an undertapped economic cohort) as a secondary audience, because it lets you put (possibly underage, or meant to be) oversexualized fantasy objects into key roles. It even lets you recontextualize traditional adult entertainments making them “fresh” and “hip”, leading to mystery, melodrama, horror, soap opera and the rest. And they’re almost always from the perspective of the kids. ‘Cause teachers are boring, man.

Or, at least just like the rest of us. Work is absurd sometimes. Lessons come from unlikely places. And sometimes, there’s little triumphs to be found in the misfortune of others. Thus, actual teacher Robert Anke’s new webcomic, Running In The Halls. It’s a bit awkward to navigate (being based in WordPress), but the archive is small so it’s not too bad for now. The art is a bit primitive, but already showing more detail in later strips than earlier ones; give it a year, and it’ll probably look as good as Unshelved. The humor follows the classic setup-setup-pause-punchline of the newspaper comic strip, but still manages to keep an absurdist edge. 

Presumably drawing from classroom experience, Anke is sharing with us a taste of being a teacher; one gets the feeling that much of what we’re seeing is taken from the best you won’t believe what happened to me at work stories that we all share with our friends over sophisticated adult beverages. And that right there is the universal message of Running In The Halls: teaching’s a job (just like yours), kids are kids (no matter how many antennae), and the right words can put you in a good mood all day long. Keep an eye on this one; it’s clearly just finding its legs, but in a year, it could really be something.

Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Dylan Meconis who was much loved by all, for she could draw pictures and tell stories that made people forget their cares. She spun a story called Bite Me as a dwarf spins gold from wool, and all who read this story were enchanted. But one day, the story ended and the people were sore disheartened. But goodly-hearted Dylan heard their cries, and began a new story called Family Man. All who read the story were glad once again, and waited eagerly for midweek to come so that Dylan might tell them more. And they lived happily ever after.

Ah, fairy tales; you may not realize what those words actually mean. It’s been a couple of centuries since we really had fairy tales, you see; Jacob and Wilhelm were documenting language and culture when they compiled their famous collection of folk-tales, and they cleaned them up considerably to make them worthy of the right sort of people. More than 40 tales were omitted from their compilations for being unsuitable for respectable society. By the time Hans Christian Andersen came along, the Victorians had thoroughly sanitized the very idea of the fairy tale (Andersen’s originals are only now starting to be restored to their original grandeur). Then came Disney, and fairy tales became more than harmless — they became cute.

So here we are in a new century, with a thoroughly safe set of stories for children where the good guys always win and the bad guys always get punished safely off-screen, and some brave storytellers are writing fairy tales as they used to be. That’s what Meconis has crafted here: a story full of mood, from a time when the dark outside the house contained who knows what, and there are worse things in the woods than a wolf that needs to be put down on a frosty night.

Take a look at that page again — it’s the first one of Family Man, and it sets a high bar of expectation. Everything about the landscape screams “deep of winter”, in a time before climate control, insulation, or performance fleece, when the short days of the year didn’t mean winter wonderland, they meant maybe we won’t die of starvation and cold before spring comes. Look at the wolf’s face, with the narrow, malevolent eyes and a cruel sneer over vicious teeth; it was an undeserved reputation, but for millenia this was the most feared and loathed of the forest’s creatures, surely the very spawn of the Devil. That is how you start a fairy tale, with an attention to detail and mood that drags you along, will-you or no.

Very slowly, Meconis is doling out bits of the story. We have met Luther Levy, ink-stained scholar in the Saxon lands near Göttingen, and his merchant brother Johann, home for a visit. Their younger sister Liesl (sniffed out by Johann with his “Levy nose” … hmmm), their stern, religious mother, and their clockmaker father have been given to us in the smallest of doses, forcing us to learn about them in an organic, deliberate fashion. Right now, all is well and ordinary, but we know how fairy tales start — it’s just matter of time before the menace that lurks outside the hearth decides to step from the shadows.

From a starting point of modernity (for what could be more modern than the clock, bending the natural rhythms of time to the mechanical rule of man?), we’re about to fall back into a sense of magic and wonder. And when the ancient and modern bump up against each other, can danger and divine punishment be far behind? This story is to Cinderella as an angel (a real angel, a messenger of fearsome visage and great import) is to those treacly little cupids running around the greeting-card store at the mall. It’s worth your time; you deserve a little bit of real fairy tale in your life.

And since I’m thinking of it: I want a cherub to top my Christmas tree this year. A real cherub, straight from the King James Version or the Book of Ratings; there’s creative people that read this, so if any of you are good at soft sculpture or dollmaking, drop me a line. In a world where I can buy a plush Shoggoth or Summer Fun Chtulhu, there must be somebody willing to make me a four-faced, four-winged tree topper.

So there was beer at the Peculier last night with the usual crowd, plus Chris Hastings (newly of DFP) and by one of those odd coincidences that proves just how incestuous webcomics really are, the best friend of Liz Greenfield (also newly of DFP). “Oh,” she said, “you’re the Fleen guy.” That makes her at least the fourth person that’s referred to me that way … I’m thinking I need some business cards printed up. Anyway, Norna (sorry for not catching your last name) wanted to know why we haven’t written up Stuff Sucks yet; I told her I had intended to hold off a bit yet, wait for the story to hit a break point, but screw that. It’s damn good work and it’s time we acknowledged it. So here’s everything you need to know about Stuff Sucks:

Liz Greenfield is actually John Cusack.

Stay with me here. Check out the parallels in the cast: Daniel is a man-child, not always successful in being what his girlfriend wants him to be. Tony has a record store just to have a place to keep his collection. Aaron & Mike have the same conversation/argument over and over and over again; oh, sure, it’s different words, but it’s really the same conversation. Nicole is (was?) Daniel’s wealthy girlfriend who’s never been satisfied with the way he is. And there’s schemers in the form of Leo and Zemi, with grand plans (some of which target Daniel directly for special mind-games and life-ruining). I’m still trying to figure out where the fish fits in this model, but he does. Oh yes, he does.

And how do explain this? Faced with Nicole dumping Daniel (side effect of a cruel prank by Zemi), Tony heads to Nicole’s house for a little musical warfare á la Lloyd Dobler to try to get her to take Daniel back. But Greenfield knows that in the real world, there’s no boombox-induced awww, that’s sooooo romantic reaction. In the real world after a stunt like this there’s retaliation, escalation, and incarceration.

The loopy and appealling characters are wrapped in an open, clean-line art style that puts me in mind of a combination of Vera Brosgol, Raina Telgemeier, and Tyler Page. The writing is a prime example of show, don’t tell; even with first two dozen strips being reworked and currently unavailable, the reader has no problems dropping into the story at strip #25. Like walking into a well-written movie after the first reel, it only takes a moment to get the gist of the story because the characters are so well-developed. We might chafe at being forced to wait a week to see what happens next, but for the characters it’s all happening too fast as they try to adjust to this sometimes-sucky thing called life.

Circumstances have prevented Tuesday Crimson from posting This Week! In Webcomics Boning; she will return as time permits. But because we at Fleen know you gotta have your boning on Thursday, consider following.

You may have seen that Clay has wrapped up Sexy Losers (gateway page that’s probably SFW, but click further at your own risk), which is a shame as now we won’t see the end of the Shiunji and the Suicide Girl story arc. They’ll be forever trapped between life and death, Yuuko unable to find vengeance and rest, and Shiunji never finding out if being dead yourself is all it’s cracked up to be.

Moving on from storyline particulars before they cost me a job someday. Instead, props to Clay — like all solid comedians, he understood the value of a good running gag, and it’s to his credit that he always considered The Funny in equal proportion to The Sexy. Given that he chose to work in a motif of explicit sexuality, one might expect adult aspects to dominate the work, but a surprising number of his strips provided only innuendo. Nudity, sexual situations, adult language, and everything else that moralizers go on about only showed in Sexy Losers to the extent that they made the gag better; if it didn’t need full-frontal, the strip didn’t have it.

Regardless of what you think of adult humor and situations, Clay provided a consistently funny strip over a period of years, his art constantly improved, and he honed his gags into what perfectly fit his (and his audience’s) expectations. Here’s hoping that he finds the impetus to pick up drawing tools again in the future.

There’s a million reasons to be reading Dr McNinja, ranging from the Strong Badian Cease and Desisted! to the GI Joe-like morals at the end of each adventure. You got your cameo by T-Rex, punching snakes in the face (almost as cool as tasering them), shades of Evil Overmom, high-fiving turkeys (Can you high-five a turkey? Sure, monkeys got five fingers, but turkeys don’t … anyway, nice Eraserhead moment there.), and a shout-out to Cartilage Head. The strip fairly hums with crackling dialogue, occasional scenes of pure domestic horror, and clean art, courtesy of Chris Hastings (story and pencils) and Kent Archer (inks; actual deep, black, wondrous inks! A tracer!).

But more than anything else, you should be reading Dr McNinja because it’s possibly the first, the very first to explain why pirates and ninjas have such a storied rivalry. Everybody on the internet just knows that pirates and ninjas hate each other, but even the Wayback Machine can’t find a historical reason why.

Plus: giant monkeys! I have a friend who’s getting a PhD in monkeys, and she likes these parts a lot. And yes, she knows that gorillas aren’t monkeys, but are you gonna argue with a primatologist? Didn’t think so. There’s only one Monkey Doctor in this conversation, and her name’s Katherine.

The Problem With Reproduction, 193c Gallery
Greenpoint, Brooklyn

“I got the idea for the name first, then the pictures followed. I was falling asleep one night and there it was.”

The “it” that Andy Bell got while falling asleep was The Problem With Reproduction, his new one-man show; what might not be apparent from the adverts you may have seen is how small a scale he took when looking at reproduction. Not the paintings, they’re all 12 x 24 or 12 x 16 inches; the scale of reproduction. Each of the 22 images in the series takes its shape from one of the (in-scale, proportionately-accurate) chromosomes in the human genome.

In each painting, a black background was masked with a black film featuring little chromosomes, leaving bare wood for the shape of the main image. These windows Bell to filled with his creature-iffic, humorous, occasionally disturbing images. To wit: please enjoy chromosomes 20 and 21 (Sudden Starvation and Defective Delivery, with the un-level photo being entirely my fault).

You can actually see those background chromosomal images somewhat better in photos (where they catch the flash) than with the naked eye. It’s worth looking closely at them, because Bell has them doing things appropriate to the main image. For example, in Inevetible End Bringers (on the left, next to Superfluous Cepalopod), there are little skulls in the mix and the chromosomes form crossbones underneath them. The main images themselves range from playfully anthropomorphized (as in 12, Vindictive Viruses, with the Sam Brownesque eyes and smiles on the bacteriophage) to highly abstracted (as in 22, Fertility Figures).

Being a gender-neutral show, the Y-chromosome was absent. “Plus, you need a second chromosome to match with each of these for there to be reproduction,” says Bell. “What I have on the walls is less than half of a human being.” So will there be a second show, featuring white-backgrounded matching chromosomes? The artist considered his hands, bloody from the effort of completing his work. “No.” He seemed quite cheerful about it.

Rounding out the show were several of Bell’s Zliks figures (look to the lower left corner), eggs filled with skulls, a bird, and a squid, and several of his famed Creature drawings (photo at the start of this post, to the right, behind the grumpy looking Mr Jon Rosenberg). With a healthy crowd filling the exhibit space, Bell’s first gallery show of 2006 was a rousing success, even as he continues to straddle the line between cartoonist and artist. So is he a cartoonist that arty types find acceptable, or an artist that works with cartoony subjects?

“I guess I’m more of an artist than a cartoonist, since I don’t seem to be able to form any kind of narrative with my cartoons. Do artists make more money than cartoonists? I’ll be an artist, then, but not the starving kind.”

Worthy goals. Check out The Creatures In My Head over the coming weeks, when photographs of all the works (and perhaps even the elusive Y-chromosome) will be available. And if you’re in Brooklyn before April 11th, be sure to consider The Problem With Reproduction.