Grrl Power

URL: www.grrlpowercomic.com
Creator/s: David Barrack
Run: 8/10-current
Schedule: Mondays
Section/s: Ch. 2

Website: It's got a slick, consistent design, with various aspects of the site all having gray gradient backgrounds. The site also has a small banner, instead focusing on showing randomized images of the comic's main characters. This seems like a great way to present a webcomic that has a large cast. There are a fair amount of ads and vote buttons, but they're at the side and bottom of the page, so they don't clutter up the layout as much as they do in some sites.

Grrl Power really excels at its character bios, and it has a great feature where each page gives some basic information on each character who's present in that particular page. The actual cast page is also very appealing, showing cool "score card" thumbnails that open up into Javascript pop-ups when clicked on.
The comic has a Facebook page, a Google+ page, a Twitter account, and a forum, so there's ample opportunity for interaction, and the Archive page is probably one of the most user-friendly I've encountered

Lastly, I'd prefer to see the comic's fan art put in its own section, and the creator should try to add more bonus content to the site.

Writing: I've mentioned a few times that the Web isn't an ideal medium for superhero comics, and the creator of Grrl Power seems fully aware of this problem, as he throws in a few twists to try to make his superhero concept work.

The protagonist, Sydney, is sorta like Spider-Man or Green Lantern in that she's a fairly normal person who suddenly gets superpowers from a freak occurrence. The twist's that she's not actually all that normal, as she suffers from an extreme case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Instead of trying to depict Sydney's ADHD in a realistic manner, though, the creator uses it as an excuse to have her constantly behave like a super-wacky, semi-retarded 6-year-old. The chapter's filled to the brim with Sydney's random humor, giving her tons of dialogue even though she acts oblivious towards what the other characters are doing and saying. About halfway through the chapter, I realized I was actually subconsciously skipping all of Sydney's dialogue, as everything she says is just an unfunny joke. She would've been much better off as someone's goofy sidekick instead of being the main character. Also, how come there isn't more resistance towards letting her join the superhero group when she seems like she's one sugar rush away from seriously hurting somebody, or even destroying a major city? If I were one of the comic's superheroes, I'd be more worried about Sydney than about any supervillain.

The pacing's unbearably slow, as the comic's cast spends almost 30 pages standing around in an empty room listening to Sydney whimsically explain her various superpowers. It's gotta be the most glaring example of an exposition dump I've ever seen in a comic. There's no doubt that part of the problem's that the creator tries to cram joke after joke after joke into every page, constantly derailing his attempts to get any actual information across. And despite the obnoxious amount of exposition in this comic, I never even got an inkling of what the overarching story's actually supposed to be about; at more than 100 pages in, the plot should be fairly well-developed by now.

The other twist's that the comic's superhero team's almost all women, and aside from Sydney's humble appearance, the comic wastes no opportunity to show its audience boobs, boobs, and more boobs. Superheroines in print comics are known for being overly sexualized, but Grrl Power takes it a step further, having a cast that includes a succubus, a character in a sexy French maid's costume, and a character with multiple bodies whose superheroine alias is Harem. It regularly devolves into a perverted gag comic, featuring such subjects as sticky cleavage, women joking about how slutty they are, women comparing their boobs, and a woman laughing as a guy rubs his face in her cleavage. These jokes are always misses, and they come across as a halfhearted excuse to draw extra attention to a character's boobs, or to show a character groping herself.

Lastly, with a title like Grrl Power, a prominent character who's described as a "rabid feminist" in her bio, and the occasional feminist subject matter, it's somewhat jarring how shamelessly the creator can objectify his characters at times, with the bottom-left panel here being a notable example. And in that page, Mr. Amorphous' lipstick marks are damning for both women -- Maxima looks bad for lacking subtlety, and Heatwave looks bad for losing interest in Maxima's transgression so quickly. Then, in the closest thing the comic has to a fight scene, the superheroine Anvil gets humiliated by a guy who doesn't even have any superpowers. It's clear that every woman in the comic's a sexy airhead, with the exception of Dabbler, who's competent at seducing people, and Sydney, who isn't sexy.

Art: In the comic's About page, the creator explains his motivation for the project, writing, "I thought I could keep my interest up if I was drawing well packaged hot women all the time." While his illustrations might not have much artistic value, he's gotten extremely good at drawing his favorite subject. As a major bonus, though, he also does a great job of rendering the cartoonish Sydney, who looks like she popped out of a Sailor Moon fanfiction or something. I imagine very few webcartoonists could put together such incongruent styles and make it work as well as the creator does.

Drawing porn would probably be a walk in the park for the creator, but if I were a publisher considering hiring him to illustrate a superhero comic, my biggest reservation would be how skilled he is at drawing action scenes. The few fights in the chapter are all very brief and very silly, with the most interesting fight, which is the one between Dabbler and Maxima, literally only lasting one panel. Dabbler's fight with Sydney's about the same length, and Math spends more time posing than he does actually fighting with Anvil. I get that Grrl Power's supposed to be more slapstick than other superhero comics, but I'm sure the creator could've found a few pages here or there to add a decent action sequence, especially considering how much of the story's just random jokes.

Overall: The creator's an insanely talented artist, and he could be a much bigger name in webcomics if only he'd let someone else -- anyone else -- take over the writing duties for him. In Grrl Power, boobs are the setup, punchline, and main character, and while this approach might attract an audience of sex-deprived fanboys, I expect they're less interested in the dialogue and plot development than they are in the characters' cup sizes.

3/5