Strange Investigations

URL: strangeinvestigations.smackjeeves.com
Creator/s: "Grey Annis"
Run: 10/11-current
Schedule: Once or twice a week

Website: Hey, it works, and it looks good. I guess there's not much you can do with a Smack Jeeves site, although it'd be nice if the website had at least some kind of special feature.

Updates have been all over the place, but February was the most prolific month so far, so I can't really complain. A regular schedule would be nice.

Writing: After doing two extremely negative reviews in a row, I wanted to reward myself by reviewing something I'd actually enjoy reading, which is why I was drawn to this comic by its artwork. But to quote "The Blitz" from How I Met Your Mother: "Awwwww, maaaaaaaaan!". The creator seems to have slept through her "Writing Supernatural Stuff" class, and should have been disciplined by her supernatural-writing professor by being assigned 10 classic supernatural movies to watch.

The first rule of Supernatural Club is: Don't give away your spookster on the second page! If supernatural stories are cars, then their gasoline is foreshadowing and suspense. If pages one and two went down the Memory Hole, then there would be a lot more tension in the story, and the big encounter on page 19 would be a lot more awesome and exciting.

Awwwww, maaaaaaaaan!

The second rule of Supernatural Club is: If your protagonist has an awesomely cool secret, don't blow it two seconds after we meet him! This comic would be way better if Paul had just glued his damn hat to his head. That way, it could be a mystery why he knows about all this weird, supernatural stuff, and the big reveal could have been a huge and awesome moment for the comic once the readers actually got a chance to get to know and care about this character.

Awwwww, maaaaaaaaan!

And the third rule of Supernatural Club is: Unless it's a zombie comic, don't make your characters act like brainless idiots! I'm seriously supposed to buy that Millie's stupid enough to follow a demon into a haunted house? And it's when the whole reason she hired a paranormal investigator in the first place is because she "[doesn't] have the courage to go in there"? This chick would probably lose her mind in one of those fake haunted houses they have on Halloween; yet here's good-ol' Lucifer in the abandoned house of Millie's dead sister, and how does she react? She's totally cool about the whole thing, of course.

Awwwww, maaaaaaaaan!

Aside from that, the characters have no personality, pacing issues, yadda yadda, let's just skip ahead to the praise part.

Art: Yay! Every single panel is 100% awesome as hell. Terrific line art, terrific shading and contrast, terrific style and perspectives, terrific character designs, terrific backgrounds and architecture... just phenomenal everything. Cue applause. Every struggling webcartoonist out there should aspire to have their comic look half as good as Strange Investigations looks.

Very nice.
 
Overall: Read this comic now so that later on down the road you can brag that you read it back when nobody knew about it. That's assuming the creator eventually figures out how to write, anyways. But it's only 25 pages right now, so it won't take long to read, and you can even ignore the writing if you want and just look at the pictures.

3/5