Blog Archives
Metapost: Revisiting the first five reviews (or, PBF is DEAD! Or not.)
Is there a Webcomic Overlook curse? Let’s look at the fates of my first five reviews, ever:
- Nedroid’s Bad Webcomic Challenge: The Bad Webcomic Challenge is a yearly contest it seems, where different webcomic authors try to churn out 200 webcomics in a very short time frame. Despite worthy efforts from KC Green and Shmorky, Nedroid’s efforts remain king. However, by design, Nedroid’s comics only had a limited life and were destined a swift end. Did this curse the rest of the Webcomic Overlook entries?
- Year One: M. Parkinson’s Marvel babies series comes to an end. His follow-up series, When Fanboys Attack!, disappears as soon as it launches.
- Perry Bible Fellowship: You’d think that one of the most acclaimed series on the internet would be the one with the most staying power. Nope. The officious sounding Editor and Publisher website reports that Perry Bible Fellowship … is DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! No, wait a minute, maybe not. (I highly recommend this link. It includes a description of Nicolas Gurewich’s appearance on a bizarre Fox News segment.) In any case, the spectre of death looms ominously over the PBF venture.
- Lowroad: If you click on the Lowroad link, you’re no longer greeted with the comic adventures of Natasha and the gratuitous T&A. Instead, it’s a kid-friendly adventure of a dimension-hopping family called The Smashing Adventures of the Bottomleys. The original Lowroad has been relegated to a .rar or .zip download (neither of which I’ve been able to do at all). I’d like to think that this is a happy consequence of Carlos G. getting married and having kids. However, this also means that all the links on my old review are now non-functional, and it pisses me off.
(EDIT: I’ve been able to download Lowroad via the first mirror site. T&A ahoy!)
- Irregular Webcomic!: And finally, the comic that keeps going because David Morgan-Mar is a sheer workaholic. God bless your weary soul, Morgan-Mar! And frankly, I can’t see Irregular Webcomic! ending until Morgan-Mar dies, which probably won’t happen for another 80 years. And thus, IR! breaks the curse. I suspect that, if it falls, some crazy domino effect is going to happen … and soon we may see the end of Joe Loves Crappy Movies and Marry Me.
So the moral of the story is … I’m not sure there is one. Basically, I wanted to exploit the PBF news (which is still kinda shocking, given that it was often held up as one of the most successful webcomics around) with some crackpot theory on my end. And … it’s not totally successful, since almost every other webcomic I’ve reviewed is still going strong. (Exceptions are Wickedpowered and Fite! … and they were concluded by the time I started reading them, so they don’t count.)
The Webcomic Overlook #2: Year One
Webcomics tend to fragment themselves into easily recognizable subcategories. There’s the parody strip, for one. And then there’s a subset of the parody strip: the one where the characters are portrayed as wide-eyed children. It’s kinda like Tiny Toons or Muppet Babies…. Well, actually, it’s more like the super-deformed or chibi characters that you see in manga and anime. Matt Moylan, for example, combines super-deformed characters with Transformers to create his webcomic, Lil Formers — which may yet be a subject of a future Webcomic Overlook.
“Lil Formers,” however, is just beginning. Today, we’re going to look at a webcomic that may be either drastically changing format or on its last legs. It a series created by M. Parkinson called Year One.
