The Webcomic Overlook #111: Las Lindas
March 4, 2010 at 4:53 pm | Posted in 1 Star, The Webcomic Overlook, WCO Big Review, adult webcomic, comedy webcomic, furry webcomic, romance webcomic, webcomics | 27 CommentsTags: Las Lindas
There are two sure signs of getting older. The first is that your parents’ lame jokes are suddenly funny. The second is that when you start watching movies of teenage rebellion, you start identifying with the stuffy old deans.
Like the time when you realize that the free-wheeling Ferris Bueller is really just tiresome, selfish, and destructive. In a stunning reversal,we root for the principal, who wants nothing more than to take that preening snot down a peg. The kid from Where the Wild Things Are is an annoying little brat. The New Radicals don’t quite sound so radical. Evanescence is less a paean of teenage rebellion than it is music that is, like, so totally embarrassing. Even Luke Skywalker starts to sound a little whiny.
The sense of being powerless probably leads us to idolize rebellion. On the flipside, gaining power means that we’re more careful to practice it since we know what happens when that power is abused irresponsibly. Or, to put it more succinctly, we’re growing up, and that means identifying just the teensiest bit with the oppressor.
This is one of the many reasons why the main character of Gonzalo Reyes’ Las Lindas made my skin crawl. So disgusted, in fact, that it almost made me lose sight of the two things this webcomic is really about.
Now, most of the links in this review are relatively safe for work. There’s some nudity, but not too much. STILL, I highly advise you to click on these links from the comfort of home. With no kids around. In fact, this review should come with the following notification: “WARNING — LINKS MAY CONTAIN WELL-ENDOWED COWS.”
Gonzalo Reyes goes by the pen name “Chalo.” He and two co-writers have been working on Las Lindas since at least 2004. The furry comic started out as a noble attempt to be the next Omaha The Cat Dancer, but, probably because it wasn’t working out, eventually morphed into something completely different.
Here’s a few key points about Las Lindas that I’d like to get off my chest. The comic set on a farm … but not just any farm! This one features the
firmest of cabbages, the roundest of melons, and the juiciest of mangoes. Las Lindas is about total strangers who squeeze together during hardships to become the best bosom buddies. The comic is also about the pains and hardships of cultivating a budding romance. Who takes the first step? Is it inappropriate to reciprocate love before you know it’s true? To crib a phrase from the Pointer Sisters, “He’s so shy, and he’s much too good to let me get bye.”
At the risk of milking a metaphor dry, lets get down to thick, meaty raison d’etre: boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, boobs, and boobs. Also, sometimes crotch. But mostly boobs. When a comic includes the line, “I’ve just had more conversations about breasts at this job than over my whole teenage years with five brothers,” then your inner milkshake-detector should be going off the charts. In the spirit of equal opportunity, Chalo sometimes draws beefcake too. Male characters, though, are a relative rarity in Las Lindas. Once introducing them, Chalo frantically hurries them off the page so he quickly return to drawing his favorite Dynamic Duo.
Now, in Chalo’s defense: he does hail from El Salvador. Based on some South American children’s programming I’ve seen and that one Simpsons episode set in Brazil, I’ve been led to believe that taking in a view of the Andes Mountains are a wholesome national pasttime of Latin America. (And God bless them.) He and I have different standards when it comes to good taste, and that’s fine. However, judging by the page stats, 60% of readers are from the USA, and 12% are from Canada. I think it’s pretty safe to say that Las Lindas was tailor-made for the North American part of the world. Hence, I feel absolutely justified when I say that all this attention to oversized butterballs comes off as a tad trashy.
And yet it wouldn’t be so sleazy if Las Lindas had anything to offer beyond its religious devotion to the female fun bags. Charlie’s Angels was all about ogling the fine female form, but you also got action, decent actresses, and the sonorous voice of Charlie. Las Lindas can get away with cheesecake if it had, say, any semblance of a likable character we can root for, for example. Unfortunately, by and large all our “heroes” are one-dimensional nitwits with traits awkwardly hi-jacked from every single bad anime you can name. You know, I’ll go even further: each and every one of the characters are actively repellent.
Our cast is anchored by a ridiculously top-heavy gal named Mora, who should more appropriately be named “Mary Sue.” She is a cow-person, the most well-endowed of all furry archetypes … at least according to Las Lindas. She’s also not a very good farmer, and when the webcomic starts she’s in danger of losing the titular farm. (Wait. Did I just type…? Moving right along….) In a main plot that seems to have been written after countless hours playing Harvest Moon, Mora needs to recruit farmhands to work the fields and till the land. So what does she do? She sluts it up.
Step one: seduce a barfly named Miles into working on her farm. He falls for it, of course, and finds to his chagrin that he’s doomed to do hard labor. (Why he just doesn’t leave because work sucks so much is one of the comic’s huge plotholes.) This is played for laughs, but the only thing running through my mind was that these two are the stupidest, shallowest characters ever. Miles, by the way, gets even more shallow as the story gets on. Initially set up as a sort of breezy cad with a heart of gold, he turns into an unpleasant horndog who sabotages a stable relationship in the pursuit of getting laid.
Around the same time, Mora spots a big, beefy bull named Minos. He’s the sort of anime douchebag who stands around in a heroic pose as wind blows through his hair while the end credits close. I’m being totally serious when I say that this is the only personality characteristic that Minos has. To get Minos to pay attention, Mora tries to get raped so her hero has a chance to come to the rescue. (Ugh.) Mora basically hires him just so she can sleep with him. Minos is pretty standoffish. Good for him! He doesn’t cave in, until, several pages later, HE DOES. It’s laughably abrupt. I had to smack my head at the sheer ludicrousness of this “romance.” My face suffers the first one of many face palms.
As the story progresses, more and more are absorbed into the farm system that is Las Lindas. A girl at the bar named Taffy, while making a pretty good salary, gets roped into doing laundry work. Sigh. The hell, can’t Mora dry her own clothes? Or, better yet, given the fact that this is a technologically advanced society… run a dryer? Two vagrants stumble onto the farm and are given room and board… just because. The dark cat one is overprotective of the young one, whose blossoming womanhood becomes part of one of Las Lindas‘ longest running plots when she turns 18. (Which, is, frankly, a pretty flimsy excuse to have the kid dress and act slutty.) Two characters that were romantically linked with Mora (one of them possibly gay) show up out of nowhere and are also brought into the fold. Also, some annoying child-like deity named Digit joins in, as well as two equally annoying and far more superfluous demon sprites.
Good Lord, how bad is the economy in the Las-Lindas-verse if Mora’s the only person in her circle of friends who owns a house? How pathetic does life have to be if being conscripted into forced labor to an incompetent airhead considered an improvement? Does anyone have an actual life before they even came to the farm? Apparently not. Characters have nothing better to do than show off their enormous jobbers and to love and support our cow-like Mary Sue. The only reason for existing is to orbit the black hole of intelligence named Mora, bathing in her life-affirming Mary-Sue-ness and rescinding any shred of individuality.
But hey, who wouldn’t want to give that to live in the amazing rustic paradise of Las Lindas? I mean, it’s a magical utopia where every anime cliche comes to life in the most tiresome ways possible. And, oh, the jokes! Where else can you find humor that is both forced and headache-inducing? Las Lindas wants so badly to be a wacky sex comedy, but completely fails at being wacky, sexy, or even a comedy.
Except when it’s a tragedy … and then Las Lindas just gets phenomenally goofy. In a recent story arc, Chalo seems to acknowledge that his characters are flatter than dishwater by trying, God bless him, to introduce some its hand at drama and conflict into his comic. Yet, the years of damage have already done its toll. You root for no one in the ensuing fight, and you feel no emotion — other than supreme embarrassment over having actually read this tripe — when one of the twenty-or-so main characters bites it. But hey, it’s all good: in accordance with the over-arching theme of Las Lindas, all this calamity was just an excuse to give little Digit, the only non-endowed female at this point, some knockers. Because ogling the dozens of sweater puppies currently on display was clearly NOT ENOUGH!
(Smack your forehead with your palm … now.)
The dialogue is several levels worth of face palms, too. Here’s an actual line from Las Lindas:
“Don’t you think it’s funny that I’ve been blessed with a far better form, yet have not degraded myself to your level, and have succeeded far more than you could have ever dreamed?”
Rolls off the tongue, don’t it.
Those words, by the way, come from Mora’s rival, Alejandra. She’s one of the few women in the Las-Lindas-verse who has bigger hooters than our glorious Mary Sue. (Trust me, Chalo provides actual PROOF of this.) Alejandra accuses that Mora of being an incompetent idiot who has no business running a failing farm. She also sneers that Mora only ever uses her farm as a brothel. Hey, she only hired people with the promise of sex. That’s totes different from a brothel! Otherwise, it’s really hard to disagree with Alejandra here, and that makes it very difficult to accept her as a villain.
It’s revealed that Alejandra is ticked off at Mora because A.) Mora used to be prettier than her and B.) because when she was a kid Mora stole her boyfriend. GOOD. LORD. Let me get this straight. The only self-made woman in the Las-Lindas-verse only rose to become a titan in business just because she wanted to get back at her rival over a petty childhood grudge? Over a boy? Let’s hear it for the women’s rights movement! And apparently, the end result of Alejandra’s vengeance is …by robbing Mora of her pride? What, that’s it? C’mon girl… take off the kid gloves! Destroy this half-witted heifer! Gore! GORRRRRRREEEE!!!
But then, before our Mary Sue can experience anything that could be mistaken for hardship (and thus freeing her mind-controlled boarders to pursue their non-agrarian destinies), we get a visit from our friendly neighborhood deus ex machina, who arives in a ship stolen from The Phantom Menace. She turns out to be a High Muckymuck in the Las-Lindas-verse’s absurdly overcomplicated mythology. (Las Lindas, by the way, implies that Neo Earth is regular Earth with furry immigrants from space. So how come we see only one or two humans in the entire comic? My theory: genocide. By furries.) In a capitalist’s worst nightmare come true, our ethereal monarch with the big gazongas arrives to bail the worthless Mora out, because … what, how many times do I have to prattle on about how Mora is a Mary Sue and the entire world revolves around her, her, her? Cripes, maybe if the godlike beings of the Las-Lindas-verse wouldn’t waste their money on propping up clearly inadequate patrons, then maybe Neo Earth wouldn’t have such a huge number of homeless furries that are so hard up they’re willing to do manual labor on a failing farm.
And you know what? This really pissed me off. Everything in the story indicates that Mora is an unpleasant witch, a lousy boss and an even lousier business person… and somehow we’re supposed to take her side against Alejandra? Las Lindas insults the readers further by having Mora pull off a tie against her rival. Afterwards, Mora … our pure, beatific Mary Sue-chan… does the “better man” speech, where she wishes that she and Alejandra were friends again and this competition means nothing.
Alejandra, consumed by hatred, storms away, upset (but not until after Chalo has her gratuitously flash her massive milk jugs the crowd). Can you blame her? I was right there with her. Who the hell wouldn’t when the judges were fixing the contest because they were taking sides with your competitor the entire time? Even going so far as to bestow your hated rival some magic tools to ensure that you couldn’t beat her? And then she rubs it in with a stupid, “Let’s all be friends” speech?
Kiss my fat cow boobies, Mora.
If, for some ungodly reason, you’re still tempted to check out Las Lindas, I’d like to offer you a suggestion. Chalos did, at some point, put together a handy summary. Everything important about Las Lindas can be summed up in this four-part handy-to-use bust chart. Sure, it’s still tasteless, but it’s gets to the point a lot faster. Best of all, you get to skip the awkward dialogue, the awful characters, and a plot so hackneyed that even a two-bit manga publisher would reject it. It’s a deeply flawed and terribly unfocused comic, one that never, ever makes you give a crap about what happens next. To read Las Lindas is to be driven … um … udderly mad.
Hey, c’mon, it’s late people!
Rating: 1 star (out of 5)
27 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
WCO Central
-
Recent Comments
Featured Products
Amazon.com links
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (Widescreen): MST3K: The Movie is back ... and on DVD! If you haven't seen it yet, you must check it out. If you've seen it 15 times ... well, that Rando joke never gets old.
The Perry Bible Fellowship: The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories: One of the most highly acclaimed webcomics in print form! Great art and dark yet surprisingly subtle humor.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art: Scott McCloud's influential guide on what makes comics tick!
Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation: Tom Siddell's amazing comic of magic, whimsy, and steampunk robots.
Achewood: The Great Outdoor Fight: The legendary Achewood story arc.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
Dear Santo, before you get flooded with the vicious hate of the furry crowd, I just want to congratulate you for another great review. Few mortals dare trudge through the “Furry SoftCore Porn” genre, let alone writing a witty, intelligent review that never once succumbs to the “Furries-are-gross” card. You are more a man than I will ever be.
Respek Knux
Comment by Russ W. — March 4, 2010 #
Thanks. Honestly, I’ve been a little hard on furries in previous reviews, but it was mainly tongue-in-cheek. Besides, I think this is one of those comics that even furries would find embarrassing.
And “witty, intelligent review”? Thanks! I mean, this doesn’t count my insane attempt to as many “boob” euphemisms as possible in a single review, does it?
Comment by El Santo — March 4, 2010 #
Now where did I put the popcorn?
Comment by William George — March 5, 2010 #
Egads, what a worthless garbage bag of a comic. I mean, the art is decent, but J-H-C, whatta unlikeable cast/protagonist! I….well, you already touched upon what makes this comic so horrible, so it wouldn’t really do much for me to state what’s already been stated. But still, DAMN.
By the way, just so you know, I’m DMXI from Twitter (dungeonmaster11 was already a taken username, as was DM11–and I didn’t even realize it sounds like the username of a fan of the rapper DMX until I had already made my account. About that comic I mentioned with the busty nurse: I was referring to Marilith. I just thought you may’ve been reading over it since the supporting nurse character in Marilith has an enormous bust–though, she doesn’t appear all too often, so I was probably quite mistaken for assuming one overly-busty character (though the other women are well-endowed) would warrant extensive research on boob eupehmisms. But this review was quite an entertaining read anyway, so hey. I just hope it didn’t scar you too deeply with its obnoxiousness.
P.S. Don’t worry about ‘getting old’; I’m not even twenty yet, and I can find myself leaning towards supporting the adults in movies/books here and there as well.
Comment by dungeonmaster11 — March 4, 2010 #
Ah! Now it makes sense! The twitter I mean. Thanks for the suggestion, world famous rap artist DMX.
Comment by El Santo — March 4, 2010 #
I have heard terrible rumors of this comic. They appear to be true.
I wouldn’t say that the art is all that good. They have the “I learned to draw by tracing pictures of anime girls and know nothing of real human anatomy, or real human girls for that matter,” feel.
I am surprised (and at the same time, not) that you found little of anything positive to say about the comic in this review. This is the first all bad review I think I’ve read by you, maybe I’m just ignoring the bad ones. I mean, you found something positive to say to the character of Jack at least, is there really nothing positive you can say here?
While the art only serves the purpose of displaying the “two main characters” of the comic It still shows some level of skill in the ways of drawing and coloring. That’s all I can say for it. It really is one of those comics made by someone who draws from anime and not from life.
Comment by Grey — March 4, 2010 #
Well, the art was alright. That’s about the only good thing I can say about it. And, you know, as needlessly bizarre as the cosmic backstory was, I did wish that Chalo spent more time writing about that. I think there was some potential there.
Comment by El Santo — March 4, 2010 #
What a sorry excuse for a comic… And of course it perpetuates the whole ‘furries are sex maniacs’ thing. (To be fair I’ve only seen three furry comics that don’t do this…one being lackadaisy, and I hesitate to call THAT masterpiece a furry comic.)
I’d be interested to know what you think of Wapsi square, considering it’s got the same…problem… of over endowed women who squish their boobs together at any given moment.
Oh oh! It’s women’s history month or something right?? Maybe you should do a set of reviews that have to do with boobs! I mean–!! Women!
http://b1nd1.deviantart.com/art/Doris-2-animated-156169649
cheers santo! Your reviews continue to be fancy fantastic!
Comment by Angelina F — March 4, 2010 #
Also this!
http://binsybaby.livejournal.com/670347.html
I do love Emmy Cicierega’s style. I probably should get around to doing a review of her stuff some day.
Comment by El Santo — March 4, 2010 #
Oh, she’s supposed to be a cow person? They all kind of look the same to me.
Y’know, I never thought too much about the whole “furry scene” until I started my webcomic. People kept calling it “furry” and I was confused.
Then I realized that if you do a comic on the internet with talking anthropomorphic animals, you are by definition a “furry”. So “Garfield”, “Get Fuzzy”, “Pearls before swine” are all considered furry comics as well I guess.
And Disney has been making furry movies for years! You see what I’m getting at? I think “anthro” and “furry” have merged into one, but they’re different. When I think of a “furry” comic, I think of something like what’s reviewed above, where the characters are half human, half animal hybrid, and are mainly focused on sex.
It just gets annoying having people refer to your comic as furry all the time, because when people think of furry webcomics, they have a tendency to think they are all like “Las-Lindas”. And just pass over it, assuming it’s not for them. I guess I’m just saying, don’t always judge a webcomic by it’s assumed genre.
Comment by Isaiah — March 5, 2010 #
I agree with this. Though I hear the artist Philip Jackson for Sequential Art insists on calling his furries anthro just because he thinks it sounds better.
Talking animals does not a furry make. Unless the person drawing them is into the “furry scene” then their comic should never be called furry. It’s like people calling the Navi from Avatar furries when they don’t even have fur. Some people just like throwing the word around until it doesn’t mean anything.
Now everyone who maybe wants to write some sort of high fantasy or scifi and make up their own races rather than sticking with the old cliches runs the risk of having them called furries when the name doesn’t even apply.
It’s probably just as insulting to actual furries out there the way people throw the term around.
Comment by Grey — March 5, 2010 #
This is why I have “furry” and “funny animal” as separate categories on this site.
Comment by El Santo — March 5, 2010 #
Just to throw furries a bone here (heh heh)… The comic I used to draw for my college paper? It was an anthro comic. In fact, it was called “Anthropomorphics”. it was something like the comic strip “My Cage.”
But that was before the internet came along with all the… er… sexually oriented art. And that tended to make furries all weird and on a level below hentai anime. A lot of the bad reputation furries have cultivated, they as a community did to themselves.
Comment by El Santo — March 5, 2010 #
If you think it was the internet that made furries into sex weirdos then boy do I have some comics to show you.
The whole furry subculture pretty much existed in its modern form back in the early 80s.
I love that “furry” has become a pejorative. Like, Usagi Yojimbo isn’t a furry comic.
Why? Because Usagi Yojimbo doesn’t suck!
And that’s all furry means; anthropomorphic animal comic that sucks.
Comment by Christopher — March 6, 2010 #
For instance, I could never imagine calling the Abonminable Charles Christopher a furry comic. Perhaps Furrydom needs an anime/manga sentimentality?
Comment by Anise — March 16, 2010 #
“Harvest moon was a fun game! This guy’s art ain’t half bad, so this comic has potential, right? Sure, those ‘Gag boobs’ were a pretty weak joke, but I can suffer through it for a good comic. Cows are awesome! So Says Far-side!”
Yeah…I was pretty naive back in those days.
I’m pretty much a furry myself, and after being reminded of this I couldn’t help but feel ashamed at the android-bunny creature (100% work safe I swear!) which presently takes up my desktop.
But I had to remind myself that it isn’t the animal folk that make this comic bad. Make the entire cast human, and it’d still be terrible; if not worse due to those bloated watermelons looking alien on the human form. It isn’t even the setting that does it; if expanded on it could very well be interesting to us fantasy nuts who eat that stuff up.
No…it’s the card-board cut outs this comic calls characters that’s the problem. All with only one dimension, and almost always an unlikeable one.
That said, let’s give credit where credit is due: The man CAN draw. I might not like rap music, but I’m not going to call all rappers talentless hacks. He might not use a style (or subject matter) some prefer, but he’s still fine at what he does.
I… suppose it couldn’t hurt to make things a bit more modest though. If someone is the type to like that sort of thing: great for them! Like, what you like I always say… but you might do better browsing fur-affinity then reading this comic.
Comment by Bri — March 5, 2010 #
Well said.
I would point out that the only way the comic being furry makes this comic worse is the connection between the main character having huge breats and her being a cow person. It’s as if he drew her, realized that because she was a cow she should have bigger boobs, and then tried to make a world and story based around her. This is usually how Mary-Sues work, the world is all about them because it was made for them.
I recall reading in a book by the author C. S. Lewis about the difference between his, what we would call in these days, “fan fiction” about the Norse gods, and his childhood writings (ironically) about a world inhabited be talking animals (more like the Redwall series than furry), and it was in the later that he believed he grew the most as a writer. In creating a world with depth and history he was able to make characters in it that themselves had depth and history.
I’m just rambling on now…
Comment by Grey — March 5, 2010 #
Really, the principle? The creepo who tries to break into one of his students’ home? Not Ferris’ perfectly nice sister?
As for Las Lindas, you know what I don’t get about these furry comics? Why do they always have such complicated backstories?
Like, okay, Las Lindas is kind of like one a them Japanese harem comedies, yeah? Like, a bunch of sexy girls work on a farm together and have wacky misadventures, right?
So why does it have this weird sci-fi space opera alien invasion back story, and a whole fictional government and everything? How does any of that nonsense about high primes and space men add to or enrich the basic story? What’s the sense of it?
And it’s not just this comic, either; lots of furry comics do this.
Comment by Christopher — March 6, 2010 #
Answer: because it’s trying to be Tenchi Muyo.
Comment by El Santo — March 6, 2010 #
I think the link on “getting laid” should go to this -> http://laslindas.katbox.net/index.php?strip_id=160 instead. The one it’s linked to doesn’t make show that as well.
Comment by chartreuseflamethrower — March 8, 2010 #
I like your suggestion, and I’m going to run with it. Thanks!
Comment by El Santo — March 8, 2010 #
When I saw this crop up in Google Reader I had to do a slo-mo style “nooooo!” before I had to stop because I was freaking everyone in the office out.
I like the review though, ignoring the fur and the funny ears and just getting to the crux of the issue: this ain’t no John le Carre masterwork in fact its just “baby got back” on loop with the words “butts” replaced with “boobs”.
Comment by Prestwick — March 8, 2010 #
[...] Webcomic Overlook #111: Las [...]
Pingback by The Gigcast » Blog Archive » Webcomic Wire - 3/9/2010 — March 9, 2010 #
[...] Webcomic Overlook #111: Las [...]
Pingback by Webcomic Wire – 3/9/2010 — March 9, 2010 #
While I like the art, the characters are basically everything I dislike about anime or manga boiled down into one dimensional archetypes: the over the top violent-slap stick female, the jerky guy who always trying to get laid, the weird god like being randomly thrown into the mix, etc.
Comment by Tabby — March 9, 2010 #
[...] Webcomics Critique) Luprand on Inhuman (Luprand’s Webcomic Musings) Larry Cruz on Las Lindas (The Webcomic Overlook) Coyote Trax on Lemon Sherbert (Coyote Trax’s Webcomics Critique) Mike [...]
Pingback by Zahra’s Paradise, Dreamland Chronicles, and Haunted | Paperless Comics — March 10, 2010 #
Did you see the bonus comics too? Man, if you hate the fanservice and sad-ass excuse for plot, you’ll definitely hate the bonus comics. And one in particular, Learning Curves, is full of Miles worship and fratboyish takes on public sex and lesbianism.
Comment by Al — June 17, 2010 #