Daily Archives: February 28, 2011

Koltreg’s off raising webcomic awareness at Socialfist

Aside

1

Koltreg, who once regularly blogged about webcomics and even did an interview with me once (the poor sap), is raising awareness of some lesser known webcomics at his main webcomic site, Socialfist. There are some titles in there that I’ve never heard of but would love to check out. Titles like Awesome Hospital, which takes the whole “random” thing to such an extreme that it more or less qualifies as ironic detachment. Anyway, give it a chance and check it out if you’re feelin’ the hunger for some webcomics.

Crabcake Confidential: The Cape Online Graphic Novel

Posted on by
6

I’ve made no secret on this site that I admire NBC’s uber-cheesy superhero TV show, The Cape… even though I know that it’s a pretty bad show by most measures of quality. Why? I think the AV Club’s Todd VanDerWerff summarized it best:

The Cape is awful. It just might be the worst TV series you see all year, and the year is only nine days old. It’s bad enough that you can watch it, proclaim it that, then feel fairly confident in saying so, even with the other 356 days to go. And yet something about it is so watchably terrible that I can’t wholly pan it. I can see why some critics I really respect kind of liked it, almost in spite of themselves. Somewhere, buried deep within itself where it’s almost afraid to even admit it exists, The Cape rather knows that it’s this bad, and it’s having fun with the fact that it exists and made it to network television at all.

That’s about right. The cheesiness is what makes it special. I love the silliness of the main character’s powers. I like the awful one liners. I like the colorful Carnival of Crime, the Merry Men to The Cape’s Robin Hood who are led by the sonorously voiced Keith David. I especially love the villains, who have names like Chess, Scales, The Lich, Dice, and Goggles and Hicks. They have silly Dick Tracy-like gimmicks and are, for the most part, surprisingly well acted.

Also, Summer Glau.

Unfortunately, I’m probably only one of a very infinitesimal group of The Cape fans out there. The show hasn’t been doing spectacular in the ratings. It’s original season has been cut from 13 episodes to 10. The very last episode may air next week… if the networks even allows for that small shred of dignity. Thus, right now is perhaps the last time in history fans can revel in all things The Cape.

One of those things you can skip, though, is The Cape online graphic novel. I’d heard about this project when browsing through the Wikipedia entry for The Cape. In fact, the article called it a “webcomic.” “Hooray!” I thought. “What a very convenient opening for me to go off on a related tangent for the sole purpose of discussing my love of The Cape on my webcomic-related blog!” It turns out, though, that Wikipedia has, once again, lied to me. This is not the panel-by-panel webcomic that we all know and love. Hell, it doesn’t even live up to its official categorization as a “graphic novel.”

Instead, it’s the dreaded “motion comic.”

Continue reading →