The Webcomic Overlook

“Adventure games” nowadays are a generally defunct genre. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, these games were embraced by the sort of insecure gamer who were driven to tears because they lacked the twitchy reflexes needed to avoid frags in First-Person Shooters. These were also the sort of gamers that were easily thrilled by interactive cartoons where the most visceral thrill occurred when you clicked on a colorful background item and— for time in a long, long while — your character doesn’t mumble some variation of “I can’t pick that up.” They were, for the most part, heavily story-based and tediously linear. Naturally, I was a huge fan. What can I say? I’m a sucker for good storytelling and lush visuals. (And… I totally suck at FPS.) At its best, adventure games churn out magically imaginative worlds like The Land of the Dead from Grim Fandango. The best most FPS games can scrounge up is yet another rip-off of the Alien series.

1993 was located at the center of adventure gaming’s Golden Era. It was the year Myst was released, which went on to become the best-selling video game in history until I Finally Have An Excuse To Play With Dollhouses Again (a.k.a. The Sims). Sierra,still cranking out its Quest games, was just starting up the highly acclaimed Gabriel Knight series.

In the same year, LucasArts — with its noble goal of writing games that could be used in film — released two of the most beloved games of all time. The previous year had seen the releases of highly anticipated games like Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Yet this year would also see the release of two instant classics. The first was the absurd Day of the Tentacle, where a gang of slacker kids must change events at different points in history to stop a sentient tentacle from taking over the world.

The second was based on a little known comic book by Steve Purcell featuring the adventures of a dog detective and his buddy, a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing.” With Sam & Max Hit the Road, the modern day animated descendant of Martin & Lewis finally hit the big time. The game is funny … legit funny, not the kind of torpid video-game funny. The jokes were disarmingly clever, too. Play your cards right, and you got a musical sequence, sung by stuffed and mounted animals, devoted to preservationist John Muir while “Edutainment” flashed in the background. Hit the Road was such a phenomenal sucess that the game has eclipsed he original comics as Sam & Max’s baseline medium. (This is not unlike how discussions on James Bond gravitate toward the movies, while the original Ian Fleming novels are mostly forgotten.)

It’s no surprise, then, that a video game website hosts the latest issue of the Sam & Max comic. Telltale Games produces both the “Sam & Max Season One” game and the illustrated heir to the original comic book series, Steve Purcell’s Sam & Max digital comic.

The biggest pleasures of Sam & Max are the character designs …or rather, that of one particular character. Make no mistake, Sam’s got his charms. He’s got a droppy lower lip and blank pupils that suggest either an innocent sense of humor or total obliviousness. Sam’s design, though, is nothing you haven’t seen before … at least when it comes to canines, detectives, or canine detectives. And finally, homeboy just knows how to dress.

The star attraction of the series, though — and probably the numero uno reason the LucasArts programmers were so enamored by the comic — is Max. Forgive the hyperbole, but Max is the best designed cartoon rabbit I have ever seen. Take that, Jim Benton’s Happy Bunny! Those simple balloon-like ears, rounded for child safety. The sensible belly button. And, of course, the wide, psychotic smile that can snap open to become a huge, gaping maw. Max’s design is a thing of power and simplicity. Hell, back when I drew a print comic, I based one of my characters on Max’s template, big toothy grin and all. It’s a good thing I never published it outside my college paper; Steve Purcell would’ve sued my ass off.

So, by all rights, I should be a fan of the comic book, right? Back in the mid 1990′s, I flipped through a an issue of “Sam & Max: Freelance police” the comic book store. I desperately wanted to love the comic. I wanted to enjoy the adventures of the gumshoe dog detective and his lagomorph pal. I was raised on the Disney Afternoon. Funny animals were my tea and coffee. And yet, “Sam & Max” in print form failed to reel me in. Despite being a comedy book, I don’t remember laughing at all. I do remember putting that book back on the shelf, feeling a little disappointed, and spending my disposable income on something that could make me smile … probably Spider-Man 2099.

Sad to say, this feeling carries over to the webcomic. The current and only chapter — suggesting that there will eventually more down the road — is entitled “Chapter One: The Big Sleep.” In the strip’s climax, Sam finds that the doctor who has been treating him is really a villain with a hook for a leg. But no worries … an action hero earwig is here to save the day! It’s all “zany.” And by that, I mean that I wish WordPress would let me fool around with the size of the quotation marks, because I’m totally make them 72-point fonts. Here’s my reaction to those two “reveals”: eyeroll, smirk.

How can a video game and a comic both use the same twisted humor, yet the former is a stellar example of everything that’s good in the world while the latter is a mushpot of apathy? One simple answer: the medium. The video game was repelete in wackiness: the dynamic duo went from a Cone-O-Tragedy amusement park ride to the World-O-Fish to a Celebrity Vegetable Museum. The pacing, though, slows down. The adventure game format — with it’s long stretches of nothingness where the user tries to figure out the next item to pick up — spaces out the wackiness so that each new gag is fresh and suprising.

On the other hand, both print and digital comics are so awash in the “zany” that it’s a lot like “Perfect Hair Forever” on Adult Swim. When “anything goes” is the default state, humor — which partially relies on screwing with your expectations — loses a lot of its crispness. And here’s a weird thing: the follows a weird, unsatisfying middleground where it’s neither brashfully overt nor slyly subtle. When the big reveal about the doctor’s legs showed up, I breezed through the panel. I didn’t miss it, but I didn’t find it remarkable or noteworthy, either. It wasn’t until several panels later where it finally dawned on me: “Wait a minute … the hook-for-a-leg guy is supposed to be ‘zany’.”

It also hurts that the layout is damn confusing. Purcell wants his comic to contain both visual slapstick and copious amounts of silly conversations. Fine. The intentionally tortured dialogue is enjoyable to read. It’s very similar, in both tone and content, to the kind you hear in those Peanuts holiday cartoons. Thanks to the LucasArts games, Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson are in my brain providing the proper vocal cadence.

Sometimes, however, monologues that are pleasant to the ear should not be written down on the printed page … especially one that is partially illustrated. The word balloons are like an impenetrable brick wall in the middle of the action, and the kinetic artwork distracts the reader from the written word. Sam & Max does include an interactive feature that hides the word balloons unless the reader mouses over the panel. It’s pretty innovative, I admit, but it’s also distracting. I had it turned off the entire time I was reading the comic.

In addition, the illustrations often failed to clearly convey the actions in the strip. The washed-out coloring is great for fantasy epics. This is a comedy strip, though, where visual ambiguity is not your friend. There were also times when the layouts were a total mess. Some panels felt claustrophic and crammed together. I had to look at the car wreck sequence several times to figure out what in the world was going on.

But, whatever. Sam & Max has its flaws, but it isn’t terrible. It’s got decent retro-60′s artwork. Some gags that will make you smile once or twice. It’s got Max spouting the darndest things. And it’s short; you can sit down to it and finish reading in the pan of 10 minutes. In fact, why did I even bother reviewing a webcomic with a short run that hasn’t been updated since April 2007?

Because Sam & Max is the winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic.

Now, I’m about to go into a Nerd Rage. For those of you who can’t stand seeing a grown man cry (or whine, at least), I advise you to go down to the end of this review where I have a string of cute stars from the Super Mario games. Not only are you rewarded with a shorter review, but you may somehow escape this site regarding me with more than a shred of respect.

Still here? OK, then.

Are the Eisner Award voters senile old bats, or what?

Not that the Eisner Awards are relevant in the first place. Ask a typical comic fan (even some hardcore ones) to name just one winner, any year, for the Best Continuing Series. The response you’ll most likely get will be, “They have award ceremonies for comic books now?” So maybe my bitterness is misplaced.

But I just can’t fathom how this comic — which, from a marketing standpoint, is not far removed to those free comics bundled with your Batman action figures; took 2 years to publish a paltry 12 “issues” (in the sense that each issue lasts the equivalent of 1 comic book page); and, while competently done, is generally unimpressive — walks away with any award whatsoever. Did the judges even bother reading any other webcomic out there? Did voters fall in love with the gimmicky interactive feature? Hell, did they even bother reading the Sam & Max webcomic? Were the votes a result of residual good feelings from the LucasArts (and possibly Telltale Games) adventures?

Or — and this is what I suspect — were the voters, all comic-book professionals, all either friends or acquaintances of Steve Purcell? Perhaps, they were itching to give the guy some award … any award. His latest project just happened to be a webcomic, and the award was really to honor the creator of a timeless video game franchise. Maybe this is no different than Scorcese’s Oscar win for “The Departed.”

Yet this still doesn’t placate my white hot Nerd Rage. As I mentioned before, the Eisner Awards aren’t high profile … but they’re still better known than anything handed out for webcomics. Scary Go Round, Lackadaisy, Butterfly … these are all better webcomics than Sam & Max. An Eisner win would do wonders for their readerships. Shouldn’t awards go toward things that are actually good?

I guess that old saying is true: it’s not what you do, it’s who you know.

As a side note, the Eisner has a twin brother, the Harvey Awards. Their 2007 award for Best Online Comics Work went to Nicholas Gurewich for The Perry Bible Fellowship (which, incidentally The Webcomic Overlook gave 5 stars). Now, I’ve always seen the Harveys as the one more easily swayed by what’s cool at the moment rather than whether or not a comic can stand on its artistic merit (best single issue went to Marvel’s Civil War #1, for example), but in this case, the Harveys got it right.

At the very least, I can guess that the Harvey voters aren’t suckin’ down on prune juice.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Bonus Rating — 2007 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic: 1 star (out of 5)