Flying Tigers

URL: flyingtigers.comicgenesis.com
Creator/s: Rob O'Brien
Run: 7/11-current
Schedule: Sa/Su

I'm just gonna get this outta the way: There are several "sexy" drawings on the site of children without clothes on, and I find them extremely distasteful. I think it'd be best if the creator removed them from the website.

Website: At first I thought the yearbook- and scrapbook-themed pages were a good idea, but then I realized they set my expectations too high because the characters are way more interesting in the side pages than they are in the actual comic. And how come Dr. Chan, one of the most prominent characters in the comic so far, isn't shown on the cast page, while Naomi, a character who hasn't even appeared yet, is?

Aside from that, the background color looks terrible, the navigation drop-down doesn't work, the HTML for the Facebook plugin is sloppy, and there's a huge Twitter box taking up space on the home page that has nothing to do with the webcomic.

Writing: The story falls into four main sections so far, which can be labeled like this:

1) Harli almost gets gang-raped
2) Harli hangs out with two attractive male friends while in an undershirt and panties
3) Harli strips naked in her bedroom
4) Harli catches a pervert stalking her, then bends over in front of him

For what I'm concerned, this comic is 100% about Harli being degraded as a sexual object. She also looks dangerously anorexic, although she's never overtly conveyed in the comic as having an eating disorder. And she shows zero personality or emotion -- amazingly, her most emotional moment in the comic is when she gets laughed at for doing the laundry the wrong way.

I'm baffled at what the creator's trying to accomplish by this. I considered the comic might be trying to make some sort of hyper-feminist "society brainwashes girls to be sex robots" statement, but I don't view the writing as nearly sophisticated enough to be that subtle. And even if the comic is feminist, it'd still fail pretty hard at being political. No, I think the answer's more simple than that: The creator enjoys drawing super-skinny teenage girls with huge eyes, and that enjoyment has manifested into a 40-page webcomic called Flying Tigers. And if doing this makes the creator happy, then that's great. But I'm not going to continue to read it, or really even regard it as a legitimate project, and I don't expect others to, either.

Art: There are a massive amount of problems with every facet of the artwork, to the extent that it seems pointless to even begin to get into details. Instead, I'm going to suggest the creator drops down to a once-a-week schedule, and uses that extra time to either put more effort into the pages or practice with other artwork. He may also want to consider switching to doing black-and-white pages in order to focus on improving the line art. In any case, the comic's in terrible shape right now and requires drastic change.

Overall: I haven't felt this put off by a webcomic since I read Boston and Shaun, which I feel dirty even mentioning. I'd like to be able to offer a friendlier perspective, but I have literally nothing positive or encouraging to say about Flying Tigers, which goes beyond being merely awful by being obscene as well.

1/5