Ladies and gentlemen of the webcomic reading society, we live in cynical times. What’s up is down. What’s left is right. Boys are becoming men. Men are becoming wolves. It’s in an uncertain world like ours that you have to sit down and ask yourself, “What would Gronk do?”

Gronk was created by Katie Cook, a professional comic artists who has worked on things for starwars.com, Star Wars Mighty Mugg designs, Star Wars the Clone Wars online comics, an ACME Star Wars Empire Strikes Back fine art print, and the Fraggle Rock comic. She also does a webcomic about an adorable little monster named Gronk. And by monster, I don’t mean that metaphorically as in Lady Gaga fans. I mean an actual monster with green skin and scales and a tail. Fortunately, Gronk is one of those friendly monsters, like Cookie Monster, and not one of those Lovecraftian fanged hell-beasts that spread disease and nightmares, like Elmo.

In fact, Gronk is almost too adorable. Like, look at this scene where Gronk cradles a stuffed animal after it’s been ripped apart. Aww, wook at that poow monstew. Dontcha wanna give hew a hug? Gronk chases after kitties, uses supercute phrases like “I had to make a boom boom,” and generally gets involved in After School Specials. And there’s lots of hugging. And hearts floating around everywhere. Which sorta makes Gronk a modern day Family Circus.

After Gronk runs away from her monstrous relatives, she gets adopted by Dale Wilco. Dale is a young woman who live in Middle of Nowhere, British Columbia, which conveniently sequester her from prying eyes who might be wondering why her green-skinned kid is running around naked. She also has a big fluffy dog and a cute little cat, because this webcomic just was not cute enough. Katie Cook Dale is also a big ol’ nerd. She raises Gronk through the power of pop culture. There are plenty of references to Harry Potter, Star Wars, Batman, and Star Trek. Which is… um… (darn it, don’t say cute… don’t say cute… where’s that thesaurus?) … um … pulchritudinous?

Gronk is so darned sweet that prolonged exposure puts you in danger of diabetic shock. It definitely gets far too saccharine for my tastes. Still, its presence is a welcome one. As a whole, webcomics are typically aimed at teens and college students. The humor tends to be cynical and sarcastic. There’s nothing wrong with that: it’s the sort of humor that got me into webcomics in the first place. Gronk, on the other hand, is different. There is not a bad bone in Gronk‘s body.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5).

Through its relatively short lifespan as a genre, webcomics have proved they can do things just as good as any other form of media can. They can make you laugh. They can make you cry. They can make you poo your pants when you get a surprise animation of a creepy anime zombie girl. They can make you find the goodness in humanity through the flooded streets of New Orleans, and they can make you feel the frustration of trying to find a loved one in Iran.

And, yes, webcomics can teach. Moreso, I suspect, than conventional print comics can. There are a lot of webcomic creators out there — such as Kate Beaton and Randall Munroe — that actually respect the intelligence of their readers. They’ll give you a set up using an obscure historical figure or an advanced calculus mathematical equation and trust that you’ll laugh even if you don’t get it at first, and that you’ll do more research if the subject piqued your interest.

Take, for example, Sydney Padua’s 2D Goggles (subtitled The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage), a webcomic about two historical characters that I hadn’t thought about since my high school BASIC programming class.

The comic centers around the legitimately fascinating figure of Ada Lovelace. Wikipedia tells us that she “was an English writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognized as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this she is sometimes considered the ‘World’s First Computer Programmer’.” Well, hot dog!

Adding to the legend is that she was also the daughter of the infamous Lord Byron. You know, the guy who is infamously the origin for the term “Byronic hero”? The kind of guy who, as a former lover described it, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” … and yet cultivates an undeniable aura of bad-boy sexiness at the same time? Honestly, that sounds like a superhero (or supervillain) origin if I ever heard one … only it turns out to be real.

She teams up with the flighty genius Charles Babbage to create the analytical machine, the world’s first computer that runs on giant punch cards. Ms. Padua characterizes them as mad scientists. Despite the gender politics of the Victorian Era, the two are on somewhat equal footing, united by their unique understanding of abstract mathematics. Babbage is a genius, but he retreats into his own personal world of math and equations. Lovelace is more outgoing, but has black moods that mirror those of her infamous father.

Together… they fight crime!

… well, the fight crime as often as the Aqua Teen Hunger Force fought crime. Which is to say, never. Ms. Padua’s blog reveals that this was a one-shot gag that imagined a more exciting future for Ada Lovelace instead of the real life tragedy of her early death at 36. Fans really embraced the idea of action packed of Lovelace and Babbage, and Ms. Padua complied.

The adventures feel like a series of self-contained Looney Tunes episodes with little continuity needed between episodes … or indeed, between even chapter breaks.

To get an idea of the free-for-all-nature of 2D Goggles, let’s take a look at one of the latest stories: Charles Babbage acts on his annoyance over street musicians. In retaliation he develops a harmonic disruptor that creates a destructive interference to destroy the offending instruments.

However, this only causes more problems. The street musicians take marching orders from swingin’ dude named The Organist, who retaliates by turning all of London into a giant instrument and making everyone dance. Meanwhile, Lovelace struggles with her own newly found passion for something completely irrational: poetry.

So you’ve got a healthy irreverent attitude toward historical figures, math and engineering as the basis of smart and clever jokes, and a solid cartoonist doing the artistic chores. It’s set in the visually fascinating of Victorian England. It could probably be described as steampunk, but the most annoying aspects of that genre — the unnecessary addition of flywheels and goggles — seem to at least make sense here. Given my affection for Victorian stuff and my enjoyment cracked historical recollections, 2D Goggles should be the mutt’s nutts! The bees knees! And other British colloquialisms!

And, to my surprise… I’m not 100% on board the 2D Goggles express.

I’m not quite sure why I feel that way. I think I’m a bit thrown off by the juxtaposition of the long from text with the artwork. Much of the humor comes from Lovelace and Babbage are such brainiacs that what passes for scintillating conversation in their circle goes far over the heads of everyone they meet. To accentuate the joke, we usually get long, tortured reams of explanation that show how far away they two are from holding normal conversation, complete with charts and diagrams. And while a decent illustration of how normal people would have trouble following geniuses, it does feel a bit like a reliably overused go-to-gag straight out of The Big Bang Theory.

In fact, most of the jokes center around the same three things: Babbage hates street music. Lovelace hates poetry. They build machines more complex than the task needs them to be. Running gags are fine and all, but resorting to the same goofy themes just feels so … twee.

There’s a gag when Lovelace — realizing that Queen Victoria cannot truly understand the ramifications of their analytical machine — decide to make her happy by printing out a cute kitty. That’s the strip’s most monkeycheese gag … except for the one that actually involves monkeys. I know, I know … it’s funny because it’s the queen and she’s easily distracted by shiny objects, and Lovelace and Babbage are totally acting like the overly self-important programmers of the modern day. Still, it didn’t ring true to me mainly because the punchline is simply that the queen is an idiot and the programmers are pompous. Because 3 chapters was a long way to get there.

Padua also comes from a traditional animation art style. It’s very attractive, admittedly. She has a good sense on how to design each character so uniquely that you can guess the personality just at a glance. Lovelace looks always on edge, Babbage has a manic edge to him, and Queen Victoria looks like a wide-eyed child.

Still, I’m not quite sure it’s the appropriate one to use for this kind of comic, mainly because everyone has to be drawn in a style that exaggerates their emotions to a wild degree. There are many, many scenes of the characters looking slack-jawed and bug eyed. There is no room for subtlety.

It’s a comic where everyone takes everything to be a big deal. It’s almost like they’re always yelling… which, indeed, is probably the case since everything ends in exclamations. It’s very tiring. In comparison, one of the most charming things about Kate Beaton’s Hark A Vagrant! are the slow burns a lot of her illustrations imply. If someone I staring out with a bug-eyed expression, you get the sense that he’s been standing there for quite a while and the realization had slowly dawned on him. In 2D Goggles, people go crazy for no reason like a pack of crazed chihuahuas.

Maybe this is why my favorite character is perhaps Isambard Kingdom Brunel (good Lord, that’s a man’s name). In real life, he’s a celebrated engineer who design several steamships and England’s Great Western Railway. Here, he’s the no-nosense guy who lends and air of practicality. Best of all, he doesn’t do crazy reactions shots. He has the aloof demeanor of a man who just does not give a f**k. He just sorta stands around, cool, collected, with a “who are these buy-eyed weirdos I have to share this comic with” look on his face.

And yet, 2D Goggles is smarter and better researched than your average steampunk webcomic. This is why I’m recommending the comic despite giving it a rather average grade. For all my complaints, 2D Goggles is rather unique, and you’ll certainly learn a lot about British history by reading it.

I also tried the “Lovelace and Babbage” app, by the way, and the comic looks better on the iPad than they did on my desktop. The dimensions of the panels were clearly optimized to the screen. The downside is that downloading issues can get pretty pricey, especially for a guy like me who also tends to drop a lot of money into Comixology’s pockets.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

It sometimes astounds me how many posts I’ve devoted to webcomics. It’s, like, more than “a lot” and just short of “a buttload.” The peril, at this point, is that sometimes you run the risk of saying the exact same thing about one webcomic that you said about another webcomic. Repeating myself is perhaps my second greatest fear in the world.

The first is my mom’s dog, Cinnamon.

Curse that Japanese Chin his sharp, pointy fangs. Why am I the only person he ever seems to bite?

So when I sat down to write about Tim Sievert’s Clandestinauts (a webcomic that I chose to read primarily because I am a big fan of the world “clandestine” — seriously, when I was a kid, I even created a superhero with that name), I was set to write, “Well, as much as I like the art, I wasn’t too big a fan of the story.” Then I thought to myself, “Wait. Didn’t I write that once? Like, at least five times before?”

If I had the time or inclination, I could probably track down all instances I expressed the exact same sentiment. I’m pretty sure I said the same thing about, say, What Birds Know. But life is short, and plan on spending my free time owning noobs on iPad/iPhone game Valor later, so let’s just say that I’ve said it a lot.

That doesn’t make the sentiment any less valid, though. One of the things I liked about Clandestinauts was the art. You immediately notice how … drippy … everything is. Creatures are drawn slimy and saggy and uncomfortably organic. People get processed messily through tracks of intestines. If you’re lucky, you might see someone’s eye get poked out.

And that’s OK! A lot of folks in fantasy webcomics — and any media dealing with fantasy in general — tend to look unbelievably clean and well-groomed for folks living in an era before toothpaste or even a workable sewer system was invented. I’m pretty sure that division between popular depictions and reality is what Monty Python & The Holy Grail was making fun of.

Clandestinauts, though, is proudly gross, messy, and very organic. There’s nothing more off-putting than when everything in the world is rendered like a sentient tumor. There’s wrinkles, folds, and bodily fluids everywhere. There’s also a good chance you’re going to run into some NSFW dangly parts. There’s nudity here, but it doesn’t feel exploitative or even raunchy. In fact, a lot of it has a sickly, intensive-care-wing-of-the-hospital-feel to them. There are so many wrinkled, pendulous boobs on display that you start feeling that you might have made the wrong turn into the sauna at your local retirement home.

(Incidentally, I’ve always wanted to incorporate the phrase “wrinkled, pendulous boobs” into my review. Thanks, Clandestinauts!)

However, like I said, I couldn’t really get into this comic… mainly because I have no idea what the heck is going on half the time.

Most of it is by design, mind you. Mr. Sievert explains it himself in his “About” section:

The Clandestinauts is a dungeoneering webcomic updated every other Thursday by me, Tim Sievert. I write this comic in “straight-ahead” style, so I don’t really know what’s going to happen until it happens. It’s a challenging way to tell a story with so many characters and subplots going on, but it’s a lot of fun.

It’s a technique that does work surprisingly well in the fantasy genre. Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, for example, did a fine job with their Dragonlance series, and according to their appendix the trilogy was crafted from an AD & D game that they were playing. And, shoot, that’s basically the mentality I went forward with writing my NaNoWriMo novel.

The difference, though, is that Hickman and Weis did a good job slowly introducing the readers to their cast of characters, telling us why we should care about them, establishing their distinct personalities, outlining their circumstances, and then thrusting us into battle. (At least, that’s what I think happened. I haven’t read Dragonlance in, like, 15 years. I’ve tried to re-read it, but using the lizard-like Draconians as orc stand-ins only gets sillier and sillier as the years progress.)

So what happens in Clandestinauts? We’re immediately thrown into a skirmish with Cavetrool McSaggyboobs and barely a mention to the characters we’re supposed to be following. The group of dungeon crawlers are very, very similar to one another. Oh, sure, they do look different… but are He-Man action figures, and I’d be hard pressed to tell those dudes apart from each other either.

There’s a… robot, I think?

And some guy with a headband and cape?

The longest story arc belong to Rutger, a young warlock with long hair that covers his eyes. He dies in battle… and as much as I’ve praised the art, it took me a third reading to realize that the monster is actually chomping down on our poor warlock here. And yet, death is only the beginning of his story. The guy sold his soul to the devil, it seems, so he soon cold and chained and lying naked on the floor in the bowels of Hell.

It was actually a pretty interesting arc. Through a flashback, we learn that he’s a moral stalwart that refuses to make a deal with the devil, discovers that he cannot really escape his destiny. It’s all when and good to say that you won’t become a servant of Satan. However, when you’re being falsely accused of a crime you didn’t commit, and your very life hangs by a very thin thread, then moral fortitude becomes a secondary consideration to matters of life or death. Our hero, though, soon discovers the true meaning of getting the raw end of the deal.

But then that story segment ends. By this point, I’d assumed that Rutger was the main character, and the intro sequence was a mere setup. But no. We’re back to the visually distinct but lightly defined characters that were introduced in the opening scenes. Only now I have even less of an idea about what’s going on now.

This time the story spits into three: two of our guys have stumbled onto an army. Two of our other guys run into an scantily dressed pudgy one-eyed wizard. And the head-band-and-cape guy (whose name I always keep forgetting but is apparently named Chuck Ronan) finds a naked woman inside a gigantic skull.

I suppose you could say that there’s nothing to worry about. Mr. Sievert, after all, did a fine job fleshing out his first character by splintering his adventures from the ongoing saga. Nothing thus far causes me to doubt Mr. Sievert’s abilities at crafting such a storyline. What worries me, though, is that I think it’s going into too many directions too soon. The “breaking of the fellowship” portion is a beloved and integral part of most fantasy tales, but only after we’ve already established the characters and their relationships to each other. And this hasn’t yet been established in Clandestinauts. It feels like too much, too fast.

This is one of those webcomics that I think I may have a different opinion about once it’s completed and all the threads tie together. Maybe Mr. Sievert will go back and establish the character relationships later on. You can tell, after all, that despite Mr. Sievert’s declaration that he’s making it up as he goes along, he does have a framework in mind that he’s working off of. Clandestinauts feels just loose enough to feel spontaneous yet not aimless.

Still, that’s the big risk with starting things in medias res. You have to trust the readers stick on long enough for the big reveals. I’m not sure that there’s enough to this comic that makes me want to stick around. As a serialized webcomic that’s presented page by page and fights to retain my attention on a day to day basis, I fear that I have to stick with my original assessment: as much as I like the art, I wasn’t too big a fan of the story.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

(I’m still on hiatus! However, David Herbert was kind enough to do a review while I’m away. In this review, he tackles previously reviewed webcomic So… You’re A Cartoonist? with a different take than mine. It’s time to get hit up with … a second opinion.)

When I first got into webcomics, I tended to gravitate towards comics that were somewhat based in the author’s real life. So when I found this comic by Tom Preston, or Andrew Dobson, it seemed like something that would interest me, not just because I like diary comics, but also because this is about being someone who makes comics and their own tales of doing what they love.

Basically it’s my comic, Living with Insanity, except the writer can draw and it doesn’t devolve into insane nonsense.

However, one of the first things you’ll notice is that the title doesn’t really work until nearly 18 pages in, where being a cartoonist becomes the main focus. Up until then, it’s about being bullied as a kid, watching shows with his girlfriend and stuff his roommate did in college.

And when it finally gets into the subject, it’s mostly him being a tool. He starts off by berating a manga fan for drawing her comics right-to-left because it’s not how it’s done in America, despite portraying the girl as just being a fan of manga who is doing what she loves. Then he gets into the subject of critics. Now, I fully admit, when someone tells me “You suck because I say so” I find it annoying, which is what most pros are talking about when they say “Ignore criticism.” Here however, he has someone who knows what they’re talking about, going into detail on what’s wrong with his comic, and then he responds like a douche.

And yet I identify with him because I’ve been through all of this. I hope I’m not that pretentious, but trying to draw with a tablet when you’re not used to it, constantly reworking scenes in my mind at all hours of the day, even missing out on all the great events at a con because I was so busy dealing with people coming to my table. Hell, the guy who offers unwanted ideas? I know a guy like that. Every con I go to, he comes by my table and tells me I need to make comics that support the wars going on. Getting misty eyed when you hold your own printed comic in your hands? That’s my reaction too.

I think that’s the main reason his comic is always on the front page of deviantArt when he posts it there. The other people are creators themselves and have been through all of this. It’s a niche audience market but it does well for him. The people who wish they paid more attention in art classes. The ones who know they should work, but find the call of video games too compelling. The creators who discovered that doing a regularly updating comic is much harder than most people think.

However, even despite understanding all this, it’s not as good as it could be. The art is bright and colourful, which fits into Dobson’s work as he’s trying to market a kid’s book, and it does a good job of conveying everything that’s going on, but the jokes are quite bland. That’s unfortunately a problem with auto-biographical comics, they’re grounded in reality and so you can’t do much unless you change to semi-autobiographical like Penny Arcade, have a natural charm like Johnny Wander or just have a naturally funny person making the comic, like DAR. Hell, that’s the main reason I stopped being the focus of Living with Insanity, I just found myself to be too boring.

All up, this comic is nothing special but if you like diary comics, or are a comics creator yourself who has been in some of these situations, you’ll probably enjoy it.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5).

There was a short lived TV series back in the 1970′s called Electra Woman and Dyna Girl. It was created by Sid and Marty Krofft, those crazy puppeteers who made bizarre, psychedelic shows which tread the line between fantastic and nightmare-inducing. They’re likely lost to younger Webcomic Overlook readers these days: H. R. Pufnstuf, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and Land of the Lost. Electra Woman and Dyna Girl was supposed to be a callback to the much more famous 1960′s Batman series. They wore spandex, rode around in Electri-Car before the Nissan Leaf made it cool again, and fought villains with names like Empress of Evil and Glitter Rock… who, frankly, sound like they should be opening for KISS.

If you could sum up the seventies in the span of one minute, you can’t get more accurate than the show’s opening sequence:

Electra Woman and Dyna Girl was never really that popular, and it lasted all of 16 episodes.

And yet … in 2001, some genius decided that it was ready for a reboot. Seriously. And it was as stereotypically 1990′s comic book reboot as you can get. Electra Woman (played by Night Court’s Markie Post) was a washed-up, drunk, divorced superheroine who was brought back into action by an all new Dyna Girl. Now, admittedly this sounds like a pretty terrible concept. However, it’s pretty remarkable when you consider that a) this was a year before Spider-Man officially kicked off the decade when superhero movies dominated the box offices, and b) a full three years before The Incredibles, which rode a very similar premise to boffo returns. (To be fair, though, the whole “washed up superhero” trope had already been done with Watchmen.)

There’s also a webcomic entitled Dynagirl, written by Cary Kelley and illustrated by Harold Edge… and … it’s not that same Dyna Girl created by Sid and Marty Krofft.

Or … is she?

Because, despite the fact that she’s sporting hot pants rather than spandex, Dyna Girl follows what sounds like a very similar story arc as the one Markie Post did in the 2001 reboot.

Our heroine is Kerri Masters, a.k.a. Dynagirl. She first appeared in Red Handed Studios’ Fallen Justice, a sort of Justice League-like print comic where everyone looks like they were drawn to as background characters in Subnormality. I’ve never read Fallen Justice, as it seems to primarily exist on the rack of comic book shops in Texas. Dynagirl, however, sorta works as a standalone title… though knowledge of Fallen Justice does help to make a few details a little less confusing.

Dynagirl plays many roles: Single mom. Former waitress. Superhero. She gained superpowers after she’d fallen down a well trying to rescue a childhood friend. The well gave her and her friend … superpowers! Dynagirl claims she’s an energy sponge, absorbing the energy of anything thrown at her. They manifest into has Superman’s powers (flight, super strength, etc.), only instead of shooting lasers out of her eyes she emits energy beams from her hands. In her first outing, she was captured by the villain Simon Hurst, who physically and emotionally abuses her. Sometimes later, Justice Theta — a fellow superhero and live in boyfriend — was killed.

All of these things took a toll on Dynagirl’s mental health, and she spends a lot of time crying. After Justice Theta’s death, Dynagirl retired from the superhero biz, focusing instead on being a mom.

But, like Michael Corleone once said, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.” A super-secret corporation somehow not named Cerberus tracks down Dynagirl and give her an offer she can’t refuse: join our team of corporate-funded superheroes, and we’ll make sure your family is provided for.

Kerri agrees to join, but on the condition that she gets to choose her own version of the Justice League. This is, frankly, a lot tougher than it seems, especially since Dynagirl’s world follows immutable comic book laws where two people can’t just sit down and talk like adults. They pretty much have to smack each other around first. For example, Dynagirl visits a woman named Amanda (a.k.a. Mindfire). The exchange goes something like this:

Amanda: “What the hell?!”
Dynagirl: “Amanda, if you’ll just give me a second.”
Amanda: “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!”

During which Amanda hits Dynagirl with her superpowers. Dynagirl makes a big deal that she didn’t come here to fight, and Amanda snaps back that Dynagirl shouldn’t have come here at all, since she put her entire family in danger. Mind you, this is after Amanda has already caused untold property damage by using her telekinetic powers to smash cars, lawnmowers, and televisions in a desperate attempt to not talk to Dynagirl. This was pretty much the standard storytelling device in the 90′s: people just standing around, talking? Boooooring. Hear that click? That’s 13-year-old boys shutting down their browsers so they can go skateboarding or hang gliding or something more EXTREME than watching people act reasonable.

Also joining the team are Waypoint (Kerri’s childhood friend whose truly awful costume includes a half mask and a spandex leotard that’s zipped down to her belly button), Zig Zag (who probably took the only speedster-related name that hasn’t yet been copyrighted by Marvel or DC), and Batman. OK, technically he’s The Knight, which is the most transparent reference to Batman you can muster without calling him Batmanuel. The difference, of course, is that Batman doesn’t have a catchphrase half as cool as “It’s Night Night Time!” His design is oh-so-90′s: The Knight has pouches so big that they’d make Rob Liefeld jealous. The way these pouches cover up his abs makes me wonder if he’s hiding a little bit of a gut underneath.

Since the comic is about a superheroine who’s been emotionally scarred, you can expect this comic to go for big emotional moments. Unfortunately, these are, for the most part, pretty hokey. Take for instance, Zig Zag, who gets all of Issue 3 to develop his backstory. (In fact, he’s pretty much given the role of co-lead. I have a feeling that he was originally slated for his own title comic, but was perhaps shoe-horned into Dynagirl for economic purposes.) Zig Zag is a time-traveler, and he’s looking for someone. He zips to present day and meets his younger self. And then he sees his mother, who is apparently deceased in his timeline. They share a full page hugging scene.

Why doesn’t this scene work? First of all, we JUST got introduced to Zig Zag. We don’t know him. We don’t know his Mom. So does that really merit a full page scene pregnant with emotion. Second, this setup, precluded by — you guessed it — tears welling up in Zig Zag’s eyes, just feels so sappy, manipulative, and unearned. If you try to force me to feel sad for the main characters, I just end up resenting it.

Our heroes band together after a freak storm threatens the East Coast. It’s being caused by Kerri’s friend, Dervish (who last appeared in Fallen Justice), who has the double-whammy power of weather control and speed. Zig Zag, our man with his eye on the future, says that if our team kills him, then millions will die!

Dervish, though, isn’t acting under his own accord. He’s actually being manipulated by his brother, a man they call Cane. He has wicked voodoo magic that lets him summon elementals out of thin air. He’s using these powers to, I don’t know, find a lab filled with cloned superheroes so he can steal toxins or something? I wasn’t too sure about his motivations here, since I have a feeling he could’ve walked into the building without summoning up a hurricane.

He also he wants Dynagirl to be his wife. Yes, Cane is a villain straight out of a Saturday morning cartoon. He even does the whole maniacal laugh thing. He generally gets some of the comic’s cheesiest lines:

“Now you pay the price for your interference!“

“Ah! I do love a girl with spirit!“

At some point, I expect him to say, “Tonight, I dine on turtle soup!” Of course, you’ve got to leave the corniest line to Dynagirl herself.

“No suit can make you a hero. It’s your heart that defines you.“

Good Lord, I had no idea I was reading Captain Planet.

The plot is seriously all over the place, and you get whiplash trying to figure out why certain plot elements were introduced in the first place. The first issue introduces Kerri’s waitressing job, a town filled with superheroes, and an initial corporate funded superteam that’s training in the Danger Room. These plotlines are more or less dropped as we head toward the “Dynagirl recruits her new team” plot. Toward the end of the Dervish/Cane saga, when the team is on the way home after a job well done, Dynagirl disappears and somehow travels back in time and has to fight dinosaurs. Well, somebody enjoyed The Return of Bruce Wayne!

In a way it’s charming. Just like TV’s Dyna Girl, this Dynagirl is a throwback … specifically to comics and Saturday morning cartoons from a decade ago. I can sympathize. I am the proud owner of an almost complete run of Chris Claremont’s X-Men Forever, his revisit to the era when Jim Lee was artist. Comics these days to be a little too serious, and I sorta miss the bombastic posturing of the comics from the 90′s and the “all dialogue consists of one-liners” disciple of the 90′s X-Men cartoon. Yet the pacing is too sloppy, the plot is too haphazard, and the characters are all too alike for me to recommend this webcomic.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Chris Sims is one of the top writers at Comics Alliance. His style is enthusiastic, winsome, and often adorable. He’s referred to as the Batmanologist, since he’s many pertinent questions about the Caped Crusader, such as, “If Batman dies, which two superheroes would Batman select as dads for Robin?” He’s also probably a Punisherologist, since he unabashedly admits that he’s read every single Punisher comic published, including that one where he rented out a jet ski.

Along with writer Chad Bowers, artist Matt Digges, and letter Josh Krach, Mr. Sims also co-writes a webcomic entitled Awesome Hospital. It stars a doctor who is also a guy who rides a dirtbike. That’s right: the whole “doctor who is also something much cooler in the eyes of an excitable 7-year-old boy” pioneered by Dr. McNinja is now officially a genre (subset of General Category: Manchild Webcomics).

The characters of Awesome Hospital all have “awesome” alter egos. There’s the aforementioned Dr. Dirtbike, who we first see cutting an incision while doing a 360 forward flip. There’s his girlfriend, Dr. Robot, who is a frightening machine person and also, somehow, pregnant. There’s a baby who is also a time-traveler, a guitar solo enthusiast, and a bulldog on a skateboard. There’s even a Dr. Luchador, whose presence I would normally laud except he’s hardly in the comic. And the Chief of Staff is Santa.

Hmmm. My diagnosis is “too much sugar.”

Their mission is to treat medical conditions that are too fantastic for other hospitals. Patients zapped by a death ray, for example.

The webcomic starts out as a parody of General Hospital/Dr. House with all its melodramatic twists and turns that, in the old days, would’ve been accompanied with an ominous organ sting. Dr. Dirtbike’s boss … is his crazy ex-girlfriend (dwwwoonngggg! Or whatever an organ sound like.) The entire hospital is folded, and team has been reassigned to … Weakass Hospital! (Dwonnngggg!) To stop an epidemic, the team needs Dr. Super-hero … who is depressed and is under the care of the hated Weakass staff! (Dwoonnnngggg!)

Then later the comic decides to go off the deep end with time travel shenanigans. Eventually, our characters take a fateful trip to the dystopian future of Awesome Hospital 2099. Which is, I’m certain, the sort of cross-time capers that Dr. Gregory House wishes he went on.

Strangely, Awesome Hospital is character introductions. Admittedly, there’s something funny about a guy on the Weakass Hospital staff with the name of Dr. New Country. To know about him anything beyond his one-dimensional gimmick, though, would kill the fun … or so it’s assumed. Every character is no more than a walking punchline, and that can be to the comics’ detriment.

I get what Sims and Company are trying to do: they want to retain a goofy atmosphere by making sure that no one takes the comic too seriously, as if every panel were loudly and vehemently declaring, “Dude, lighten up.” But you eventually get tired of all gristle and no meat. Throwing a bunch of silly mix-and-match action figures on screen works for Axe Cop to an extent, but with Awesome Hospital you can’t dismiss the lapses in logic on account of being written by a six-year-old. (At least … I don’t think it is.)

Awesome Hospital can be funny. It lampoons several obscure bastions of geekdom, like the explanatory caption boxes. I liked the parody of the opening scenes from Star Trek V, which comes out of friggin’ nowhere. However, most of the time, Awesome Hospital doesn’t even try to reach for this simple level of cleverness and, instead, opts for throwing anything against the wall and seeing what sticks.

As a result. though, it’s a comic that’s never truly awesome or weakass. Weaksome? Aweass? I’d go with “terminally average.”

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5).

Having read my share of Scandinavian comics, I’ve come to the conclusion that the folks up North are way more comfortable with nudity than my relatively South East Asian upbringing. That seems topsy turvy to me somehow. My heritage is from an equatorial nationality, and my ancestors lived on a waterfront fishing community. Shouldn’t people who live on a tropical island be the ones more comfortable with running around in the buff, not those pasty white people who hail from the land of ice and show?

Apparently not, as Denmark’s Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler’s webcomic Wulffmorgenthaler can attest. (All links here are assumed NSFW.) It received a one month run in the Politiken national newspaper, got adapted on Danish channel DR2, and became the subject of animated shorts broadcast on MTV Europe.

And yes, at least in the earlier strips, nudity is a matter of fact. People in the comic walk around with no clothes on, sometimes for reasons that escape me. One that really baffles me is a couple that’s naked while robbing banks. How does that help? Wouldn’t running around starkers leave DNA everywhere for police to collect? And how does being naked have to do with the punchline, which is “Women be shopping”?

It’s not just nudity, of course. Wulffmorgenthaler can also proved to be a little bloody at times. Other times, it’s just bizarre. So, wait, the punchline is that this woman wants to help, so they hook her boobs up to a milking machine? I’m not going to accuse Wulff and Morgenthaler of being misogynist — they come out on the side of the ladies often enough — but I’m not going to take anyone to task for taking it that way.

Wulffmorgenthaler also tends to employ the yellow caption boxes a lot, and I’m not sure if this is a purely cultural artifact of Denmark or not. Maybe it’s funnier in the original language, like it’s some awesome pun that doesn’t make sense at all. All I know is that it seems really unnecessary in English. Does a cabbie taking ET home really need the caption box? Or that we really needed to be told that the thing on the guy’s head is not supposed to be there? You’d think the visuals would be doing the lion’s share of communicating the humor-mongering. Explaining something that adds nothing from the joke that we can already see makes the caption box seem far too wordy.

That said, when the art is allowed to speak for itself, Wulffmorgenthaler does sometimes get a chuckle out of me. Everyone’s lumpy, pear-shaped, and unattractive. The facial expressions are often all you need to sell the joke. The aesthetic also works well with the nonsequiturs, which remind me of The Far Side more than anything else.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5).

It’s been almost a decade since I’ve last watched anime. At some point, I think, I just got too old. I began prioritizing artistic and storytelling cues that anime was just not delivering. The characters were just too … young now. The complexions were too smooth and attractive. Nowadays I enjoy visual imperfections that give some character. And, for the most part, the hallmarks of youth — the uncertainty for the future, the need to define one’s destiny, the feeling of invincibility one gets when at one’s peak physique — are now concerns that I haven’t though about for years. Anime and adolescence are intricately tied.

More than anything, though, I think you get to be a certain age where staring at pictures of teenage girls in short skirts gets to be a little creepy. You think “Read Comics In Public Day” is some sort of brave stand against societal norms? Wait until I establish “Grown-Ass Men Read Shoujo Manga Day.”

Westernized manga, though, tends to solve a lot of my most pertinent issues. They retain the art style, the trappings, and the story beats from their Japanese originators. At the same time, they are more likely to mirror attitudes and mores less embarrassing for Western audiences. Take, for example, Ferran Daniel’s Turbo Defiant Kimecan, a manga-style webcomic that hails from Mexico. (For you readers from a primarily Spanish-speaking country, you may be happy to hear that there is a Spanish version of the comic.)

The title is clearly meant to recall adjective-heavy monnikers of animes past: Magic Knight Rayearth, Idol Defense Force Hummingbird, and — my personal favorite — All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku. They’re very visually descriptive, aren’t they? Like, with Turbo Defiant Kimecan, you at least expect something fast, perhaps the chance of seeing something death-defying, and … I don’t know, a little can-can, perhaps? One can dare to dream.

Kimecan is an urban fantasy. Our hero, Lucas, is prone to having strange dreams about being half-furry. Specifically, he turns into an anthropomorphic black-and-white talking cat. He’s also whisked to another world that’s filled with lumpy slime monsters and other assorted creatures. He repeatedly encounters a raven-haired girl in a Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts band outfit. Then Lucas wakes up, does the whole “That sure was a crazy dream!” routine, then goes about his boring, routine life.

Lucas is also mopey and somewhat downbeat. By his own admission, is nobody. Eeeeeemmmooooo. In fact, his mopiness is almost cliche. How cliche, you ask? There’s actually a scene where he’s standing over his mother’s grave. Will that very same scene also include a shot of his father, who’s standing by the car some distance away? Yes. Will this scene also have a dramatic revelation where our hero blames his mother’s death on himself and estranging him from his father? Yes. Will there be a scene where Lucas creepily asks if he can visit the next day, revealing his morbid fascination with death? No, you’re thinking Cop Dog.

But it would not be out of place!

Lucas dismisses the other world as dream until he meets an eccentrically dressed girl on the subway. Wait… is this … Kimecan? Wait, the character guide says her name is Gala. (And also that no one is actually named “Kimecan.”) For some reason, I don’t ever remember her name being called out in the story at all. Let’s be honest here, though: her name is really Haruko from FLCL. It’s not just because of the pink hair and the form-fitting tights. Everything about her screams “Haruko.” She’s in love with a giant mech. She’s recless and loud. There’s even a scene where she does a barrel roll with a van. All she needs is a Vespa and a boss Rickenbacker bass guitar model 4001 and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. But at least he’s not lifting characters wholeheartedly from Cowboy Bebop or anyth-… oh wait.

Haruk- … uh, Gala is a multi-level threat, and everything that Lucas is not. She’s playful. She’s boisterous. She’s sex appeal. She’s athletic, which makes her an expert monster slayer. And she’s part of a team, which includes an old man who can transform into a giant rabbit and a big dude in a hat. They seem to be tasked with protecting Lucas from a bunch of otherworldly demons, who, in the real world, take the forms of some swank-looking clowns.

Why is everyone after Lucas? While it’s not been explained in detail yet, it probably has to do something about Lucas’s otherworldly transformation. Not the cat… but rather a giant robot. And not to harp too much on Daniel’s anime homages, but add a Pillows soundtrack and it’s Giant Robots coming out of Naota’s head all over again.

While the imagery — which resembles anime screenshots — is undoubtedly pretty, the flow from panel to panel isn’t the easiest to follow. Daniel doesn’t take advantage of the visual language of comics to tell his story, and the information tends to come out as a jumble. To be fair, Daniel tries a different, rather novel approach to storytelling by controlling the presentation of the pictures and word balloons through semi-animated sequences where one panel is presented per click through.

“Wait,” you’re saying. “Did you say … semi-animated? Is Turbo Defiant Kimecan done … in Flash?!?!?!?”

No! I mean, yes. I mean, technically it’s HTML5 … but most of you are going to call it Flash. (Ed. Note: No wait! It WAS Flash. I blame my poor reading comprehension skills.) It was, in fact, Scott McCloud specifically called it out as one of the “new webcomics using navigation techniques that neatly sum up this interesting technological moment we’re in.” Fortunately for the Flash averse, Kimecan is also available in standard HTML.

Guess what, though? In an unexpected twist, I actually liked the Flash verison better. Kimecan is basically a shonen manga, and those are all about action. That’s why there are so many speed lines, reaction shots, kick-ass action sequences, etc. Adding sequences that resemble a limited form of animation feels like a natural fit for this genre.

The HTML-version only, on the other hand, feels sluggish by comparison. I had tasted the sweet adrenaline thrill of the Flash interface. I can’t live the button-down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors — oh, I’ll never be the darling of the so-called “City Fathers” who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards, and talk about “What’s to be done with this ….”

Oops. Sorry. Got on a bit of a Simpsons quote kick there.

There are parts of the story that I found somewhat poignant. For example, Lucas is having one of his pity parties. He goes to the circus, and an unexpected prank seems to have changed his mood. He’s cheered up, and he seems like a totally different person. He smiles, he drinks beer, he even comes close to getting to first base with Jessica, the girl who’s obviously had her eyes on him for some time. (Incidentally, this runs up against the relative innocence of shonen manga. Live-action teenagers who get drunk and make out on the couch? Sounds like the latest episode of Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family. Teenagers who get drunk and make out on the couch … in an anime-style comic? Something about it just seems really off. Shouldn’t Lucas be bleeding out of his nose like crazy or something?)

Of course, it turns out he’s some sort of crazy replicant. Here’s where the hero’s journey comes into focus, though: the biggest clue that our monster wasn’t the real Lucas was because misshapen, otherworldly monster doppleganger Lucas was actually likable… which is a sly indictment on the character himself. It reminds me a little of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. In that novel, our hero discovers that no amount of magic or wonders can ever truly make him happy, because at the core of his character he really is an insufferable bastard and no amount of adventure in the book’s version of Narnia can really fix his emptiness inside. “Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life,” snaps his girlfriend Alice. “Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

I get the same sense of deep emptiness from Lucas. He’s a guy who’s miserable, but no amount of transforming into a cat or a giant robot or adventuring in magical realms fighting demons is ever going to truly turn his life around. If Lucas is going to change and become a fraction of the winner as the monster masquerading to be him, his attitude’s gotta be the first to go.

At the end, though, there’s little original storytelling with Turbo Defiant Kimecan. If you’ve watched a lot of anime — and chances are if you’re even at all interested in this comic, you have — then the story will come off as a little derivative. Kimecan offers few surprises. The characters are mostly one-dimensional echoes of characters from better comics and anime. The only reasons to read Kimecan is to enjoy Ferran Daniel’s art and his novel implementation of the HTML5 … which, admittedly, is pretty darned nifty. But visual tricks can only carry your comic so far, and Kimecan just isn’t one of those webcomics I feel compelled to read again.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

I think I’ve mentioned it on this site before, but I’ve never gotten into MMORPGs. Oh, I’ve played RPGs that bear striking similarities to to modern MMORPGs. I’ve played my share of Ultimas and Final Fantasys and Dragon Ages and Baldur’s Gates, but I’ve never experiences the glories of joining guilds, grinding, and dealing with mods. I’m most familiar with MMORPGs through the South Park World of Warcraft episode, perhaps my favorite South Park episode of all time.

We have a former professional gamer who just joined us at the office, and when he shows us Youtube videos chronicling his World of Warcraft exploits, my eyes completely glaze over. From what I have gleaned from my discussions with him, there are sanctioned competitions and joining a party requires filling out forms in a process that can be more strict than a job interview. This probably strikes to the heart of why I never got into MMORPGs. I love me some fantasy literature and imagery — a love that has endured since I picked up my first Hickman & Weis novel when I was a wee one — and from what I hear about the politics surrounding MMORPGs this seems to be anything but. In fact, it seems like math. And if I wanted more math, I’d go to work. Like, more often.

This makes me seem like I’d be terribly ill-equipped to review Gianna Masetti’s webcomic about life in an MMORPG. Fortunately, the comic is told from the perspective of … The Noob.

The Noob follows a newbie who has just signed on to a fictional gaming series called Clichequest, which is not too unsimilar to Everquest or World of Warcraft. (WoW does got name-checked often as Clichequest’s biggest rival.) Our hero’s name is a big-nosed guy named Ohforf. Why, do you ask? Because, after a frustrating login procedure, he said “Oh, for f’s sake” in anger and got stuck with it. Wah-wah! Get used to this kind of humor, by the way, because most of the jokes in The Noob are so corny that they probably would be improved if they were followed by the sound of a crazy slide whistle.

Ohforf teams up with Hypatia, a fellow newbie who uses a sexy, midriff-baring gal as an avatar. Hypatia is attracted to Ohforf because he’s a newbie she can push around a lot got a big nose, which means big ubersmex dressed up as a hobo, and she’s into that kinky stuff a wide-eyed innocent. Ohforf is attracted to Hypatia because boobs. They first join up with with a community of roleplayers, who, while friendly, have an annoying habit of typing out long strings of text that sound like terrible fantasy novels. Ohforf’s quest is rather simple: he needs to LEVEL UP! Cue the Paul Stanley!

Live to win! ’til you die! ’til the light dries in your eyes!
Live to win! Take it all! Just keep fighting ’til you fall!
Day by day, kick it all the way, I’m not caving in!
Let another round begin, live to win!

Ahem. But I digress.

First, though, let’s talk about the art. It is oh so not very good. It looks very much like those awkward junior high doodles that you’d stick in the margins of your algebra notebook. Hypatia is supposed to be homina-homina hot, but her face always looks weirdly misshapen. Other characters, like Lady Tacobell seem like they came straight out of the horribly animated Legend of Zelda CDi games. Worse, The Noob has been going on for seven years now, and there has been very, very little improvement. At least Ms. Masetti doesn’t seem to paint fill her backgrounds anymore with the concrete texture.

In fact, I had considered docking The Noob a full star on the art alone, but I ultimately decided against it. Why? Well, it turns out that The Noob sorta plays out like Dilbert for the MMORPG set. It lampoons the foibles of fellow players and moderators with the same wan sarcasm that Scott Adams had for co-workers and bosses. Dilbert had Phil, a guy who dresses up as a devil and wields a giant spoon; The Noob has GMs who dress up like members of the Ku Kux Klan. So, in a rather twisted way, the rough, unpolished art style makes some sort of sense. Intentionally or not, the grotesque features of each character is highlighted, making them look more like the flawed, imperfect human beings that they are. Is this appropriate for a story set in an MMORPG, where typically everyone chooses a character that looks like a medieval ubermensh? Well….

Make no mistake, though, The Noob would be much, much better if, say, a Xin Ye or a Jamie Noguchi were handling the pencils/WaCom Tablet. However, the rough aesthetics do not significantly distract from the humor and the story that Ms. Masetti is trying to tell, so I’ll give it a pass.

As Ohforf tries to level up, he joins up with several Clichequest subcommunities. He gets kidnapped by a bunch of PK’ers, who, it turns out, are much more sympathetic than the roleplayers. They have a more realistic outlook on everything being a game, at least. Ohforf moves on to the elven world where everyone is named “Legolas” and obsessed with the Lord of the Rings — the movie version, at least. He also befriends Sir Bob, a power gamer who wears a ridiculous outfit because while his clothes clash, they’re significant status increases. who wants Ohforf to join his guild, Efficient Omniscience.

Why would the powerful Sir Bob want a total noob to be on his team? Partly because a noob tends to attract a lot of creatures, which translates to experience points. Ohforf is able to stand his own, though, becuase I imagine that his luck stats are through the roof. The guy manages to gain powerful items just by stumbling on them. Ohforf manages to accidentally bogart a wish-granting orb for a team of advanced gamers, defeat the game’s creator through the power of dance, and become the Clichequest Raider of the Year just by being at the right place at the right time when a very powerful dragon bites it. Oh, Ohforf, you silly! He’s got a better batting average for doing nothing than Inspector Gadget.

Ohforf’s biggest threats are, in fact, not his fellow gamers. After all, if he dies in game, he just respawns and keeps on playing. Getting killed is a minor inconvenience … unless you’re one of those hapless fools who wanders on a permaban/permadeath. Ohforf’s biggest challenges are actually the staff of Clichequest themselves. The GMs are bored, underpaid employees who are never helpful and dish out arbitrary judgments, usually banning the most innocent of players. The head developer is worse. He’s an egotistical megalomaniac who plays Clichequest in secret. Since he knows the ins and outs of the programming, he games the system to try to win glory and accolades.

Interestingly, the Clichequest staff are the only people we regularly see in the real alter egos … making them something like gods who deign to visit the puny mortals milling around the world they created. There are only snippets of the real world lives of players. Their in-game avatars might as well be the characters themselves, especially since Clichequest is apparently working on Otherland code as there’s little you can do in the real world that you can’t do in the virtual one. (What keystrokes do press to boil someone’s headpiece in a stew, anyway?)

Ohforf isn’t a nerdy guy at a computer, but rather a bumbling oaf who sleeps under the stars. While the PK’ers act as if they’re above the role-playing aspect of the game, they make believable thieves and cutthroats just being themselves. The paradox of The Noob is that the less characters try to construct a fantasy facade, the more they fit into their actual universe.

The Noob gathers a large cast of characters. None are particularly multi-dimensional (in the same sense that Dilbert is just a long-suffering office worker and the pointy-haired boss is simply clueless), but the are nevertheless memorable. The story typically splits into three or four different plotlines. It isn’t that hard to follow along with the adventures outside of Ohforf’s circle.

Ms. Gasetti’s sense of humor can sometimes be baffling. She loves doing send-ups of pop culture, which is nothing unique in a gamer comic. Still, a Blair Witch Project parody … in 2005? Which is at least 5 years after Scary Movie and Blair Witch 2 made all Blair Witch jokes tired and obsolete?

Or how about her parody of the 70′s cult movie, The Warriors. Now, I love me some Warriors references, but the Warriors gag goes on for way too long. I estimate that there’s about a hundred strips between when Lord Ironman makes his impassioned plea to unite the factions to destroy the PK’ers and the inevitable “Warrrrriorrrs, come out and plaaayyyaaayyyyy” parody. Ms. Gasetti is so devoted to her Warriors homage that there is a character named Cyrus who says, “Can you dig it?“

The rest of the jokes are typically about collecting xx amounts rat tails/spider silk/animal appendage for your quest and how people take things way too seriously. As corny as the comic can get sometimes (i.e. lots of times), Ms. Gasetti does a great job walking real-life noobs like me through the frustrations, tedium, social interactions, and fun of an MMORPG.

It also made me realize that I was never, ever going to sign up to play an MMORPG, because damn does it look like a waste of time.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Hey, I’ve got a sitcom pitch for you: take one unlucky schmo. Put him in a house with four roommates. There’s a redneck, a nerd, a wigger, and a homosexual. But get this! All of them are alternate reality versions of the same guy! They’re on a collision course with wackiness!

Which, to be honest, isn’t that farfetched an idea for a sitcom. Isn’t there a comedy about a guy in a doggy fursuit currently on the air at this moment on FX? However, this sort of pitch probably works best in the crazy 80′s. I suppose you can point to the Sherwood Schwartz era as true cartoony cheese in sitcoms, like when two cavemen traveled through time and space and five passengers setting sail on a three our tour. And yet, those 80′s sitcoms tried everything they could do to top that earlier weirdness. Ah, that was the time when you had sitcoms about alien life forms, robot little girls, and nerdy next door neighbors who build Urkelbots. And the “dramas” (if you could call them that) were even more cartoony. Need I remind you about four soldiers of fortune touring the LA area in a black van or a couple of moonshiners in an orange Dodge Charger? Of course I don’t.

Dave Dwonch has the same idea. His webcomic, Space Time Condominium, frames the situation as a failed 80′s Canadian sitcom. Yes, not only is it a cheesy sitcom, it’s also Canadian. Sorta gives it a nice aura of shoe-string production values, off-kilter wholesomeness, and a heaping dose of whiteness, doesn’t it?*

All five principle characters are named Griffin. Each of them is as one-dimensional as you’d expect. The wigger Griffin unapologetically dresses like Vanilla Ice and talks ghetto slang, and he’s secretly pursuing Earth-1 Griffin’s old girlfriend (who has a thing for black dudes). Redneck Griffin is a hothead who uses any excuse to punch someone. Nerd Griffin is a sexually repressed virgin. Gay Griffin is a total slut who will make passes at every man he sees, whether they’re straight or not.

This, by the way, also includes the “normal” Griffin, who’s stuck with the role of the straight guy. My guess is that he’s the one we’re supposed to sympathize with — the fish out of water who’s confronted with the weirdness around him. He’s just so bland, though. With the exception of nerd Griffin, normal Earth-1 Griffin tends to blend into the background the most… and at least with nerd Griffin, it’s partially intentional.

In fact, if there was any character that could make a claim to main character status, it would probably be the redneck Griffin. He’s just more interesting. He’s unashamedly frank, short tempered, a raging heterosexual… and just more interesting, overall. Despite adhering to an established template, redneck Griffin feels less one-dimensional than the other Griffins. Interestingly, Mr. Dwonch does a graphic novel collaboration with Daniel Logan called “Back In the Day,” which he posts in between Space Time Condominium “seasons”… and the most interesting guy is a redneck-Griffin-like guy, but played straight. Clearly this character is near and dear to Mr. Dwonch’s heart.

There’s also a sexy female Griffin named Griffine, who, let’s face it, you sort of expected since I mentioned that there were alternate reality versions of the same person. Also to be expected: she’s also a cold, pistol-wielding badass and the object of lust for all the straight male Griffins. I guess being utterly generic is par for the course since this is supposed to be some lame sitcom. Still… how come she doesn’t look anything like the other Griffins? The Griffins all have the same square chins. Griffine’s jaw is more tapered and feminine. I know her hair has the same shade of brown, but come on. That’s just sexist against lantern-jawed women!

The Griffins are brought together by a mysterious old man named the Gate Keeper. He seems like a typically nice guy but, as you might expect, he has a hidden agenda for bringing the Griffins together. It has something to do with a guy who looks like the unholy spawn of Darkseid and Toy Story‘s Emperor Zerg, and he apparently employs DeSaad Griffin.

By this point, Space Time Condominium comes down with a heaping case of the Cerebus Syndrome, to the point where Earth-1 Griffin lashes out at his roommates because they’ve been hiding their personal lives from him. I’m so wrapped up in so many layers of parody and irony that I have no idea if I’m supposed to take this development seriously or not. Why have you abandoned me, laugh track!!?!

Space Time Condominium feels like it runs out of gas on numerous occasions. I guess much of this can be written off with a “Hey, it’s supposed to be a cheesy sitcom. Everyone’s supposed to be a one-dimensional cliche, and none of it is supposed to make sense.” Maybe. The bottom line, though, is that it’s more awkward than entertaining.

For starters, the early comic tries to deliver on several flimsy premises, but almost immediately seems embarrassed about introducing them in the first place. There’s the laugh track, which we readers have to be reminded of every time it pops up with a reference note. It’s not a particularly funny joke, and it’s one that becomes more and more tedious the more times it’s repeated. It’s more like an obligation, something Space Time Condominium was stick with just because it was established in page 1. The “laugh track” disappears by Season 2, and it had become so superfluous at that point that I barely noticed.

And then there’s the characters. Again, it’s to set up the joke that everyone looks alike and is named Griffin. But seriously, how long can you do that joke before it’s tired? There’s not much material you can wring out of it beyond, “Wait, no, I meant the other Griffin.” In fact, the characters were created one-dimensionally to service that one joke. Again, shallow characterizations are likely a parody of standard sitcom characters… but, seriously, though, denizens of cheesy sitcoms about, say, a guy pretending to be gay so he can live in an apartment with two hot ladies tend to have more personality than they typical Space Time Condominium resident.

Supposedly wacky plots are tossed in and left hanging with little character development or payoff. There’s a plot where the rest of the Griffins try to get nerd Griffin laid. Things go wrong, as they are bound to do, and nerd Griffin becomes a little upset. So upset, in fact, that he talks to a picture of an 80′s supermodel, who commands him kill his roommates.

This twist falls flat on several fronts. First of all, it came out of nowhere. My reaction wasn’t, “Ha! So random!” It was, “Man, that was a desperate move to give nerd Griffin something to do.” Second, having nerd Griffin conclude the panel with a diabolical “Praise Jesus!” DID make me say “so random,” but NOT in a good way. And last but not least, I really didn’t care about what happens to the other Griffins at this point. They are, for the most part, just props. As broadly sketched as the characters of Punky Brewster may be, I still gave enough of a crap that I was rooting for them to get out of the haunted Indian cave alive.

I guess I’m being a little hard on Space Time Condominium because there are quite a few things I do like about this webcomic. I do like Mr. Dwonch’s oddball daring fortitude in commit to oddball ideas. I do like his quirky (but overall good-natured) sense of humor. I enjoyed his cartoony illustrations, which worked well in both the comedy sequences and the heavily dramatic portions where the fate of the multiverse was at stake. It’s just a shame that the story never comes together, becoming instead a messy, predictable compilation of worn-out gags and bland characters.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

(*Note to offended Canandians: come on! Rick Moranis, John Candy, Mike Meyers, and early Jim Carrey made that their entire schtick!)