One of my tips for webcomic creators, and really for life in general, is: “If you've got it, flaunt it.”
What that means is, once you've figured
out what you're really good at, make that a central focus of your
work and your life. It also means to not be meek and hesitate to show
others what you're really capable of.
For a well-known example, take Neil
Patrick Harris' character on the How I Met Your Mother TV
show, Barney. Barney could've just been a goofy minor
character, but the creators realized the character's potential and
how good Harris was at playing him, so they made him the funniest and
most prominent character in the show.
And while Barney
was mostly just a wacky womanizer early on, the creators wisely
fleshed out the character over time by giving him a love interest, a
family, a job and a backstory.
The
creators knew they had something great going on, and they flaunted
it. How I Met Your Mother would've
been a much worse show without Barney, and it might've even gotten
canceled had it focused more on the main character, Ted,
who isn't nearly as funny and entertaining.
For an
example of this in webcomics, there's Looking
For Group by
Ryan Sohmer, who's probably better-known for writing Least
I Could Do.
Looking
For Group,
based on what I've seen of it, would be an unremarkable World
of Warcraft fan-fiction
comic if it wasn't for the character Richard, a hilarious
chaotic-evil warlock.
Most of the webcomic's humor comes from Richard being psychotic,
antisocial, overly destructive and very random, and excessive
violence is his solution to every problem. I'm not a fan of Sohmer's
writing in general, but I'll give him credit for being so good at
writing this one character. He also made the right decision to make
the comic revolve around Richard, since he's easily the most
entertaining and original character.
Now
that I've given you a sense of what my idea of flaunting is, I want
to show you a webcomic that doesn't
flaunt it...
Webcomic: RetroBlade
Creator: Freya Horn
Run: 6/15-current
The webcomic's title doesn't give much of an indication of what the
story's about. It's basically a sci-fi comic about a hero and
heroine who can't stand each other, but you just know that they're
going to end up together eventually.
The predictability's OK. In any rom-com, you know that the
super-attractive young movie stars are going to fall in love by the
end and live happily ever after. Those stories are really more about the
obstacles they overcome to get to that point than the conclusion.
In
that sense, as a whole, the writing in RetroBlade
is
excellent. The two protagonists are both likable, strong-willed and
independent characters with a lot of personality, and Freya Horn does
a great job of writing the banter and arguments between them while
building up the romantic and sexual tension.
So the characters and dialogue are awesome. Sounds like a great
comic, right? It is … once you get past all of the exposition in
the beginning, anyway.
Writing
Before
RetroBlade gets
to its first chapter, it has two introductions: a four-page preface and an 18-page prologue. Horn paces these sections as well as she can, but
we're still stuck with 22 pages of exposition, mainly about the power
crystal that lets the protagonist time-travel.
Then Chapter 1 finally starts, and the comic dumps all of this
information on us:
This
page has some really clever futuristic concepts going on. For
example, the city's residents get to vote on what the weather should
be the next day —
this is the first time I've seen this idea in a sci-fi story. The
city also runs an augmented reality system to help residents find
their way around and learn about local events, which is a cool
implementation of a technology that we're just starting to use today.
Of course, these concepts would be way better if Horn had stuck to
the classic writing rule “show, don't tell.” But my main point is
that we're 27 pages in, and we still haven't gotten to the good stuff
that I highlighted earlier in this post.
I
know, I know: You have to set everything up first before
you
get to the good part. I've heard this attitude before … and I don't
buy it. There's no valid reason why a story can't be good from start
to finish, and let's face it: A lot of webcomics suffer from bad
pacing, whether by being too fast or too slow.
What
if RetroBlade
started
on Page 28,
and explained everything in bits and pieces as the story went on? I
think it'd be a better webcomic that way.
I
mean, the first Terminator
movie
is a time-travel story that's basically set up like that. In the
beginning, we just see a guy trying to stop a killer robot, and we
don't understand what's going on until later. The movie fills in the
details during breaks between the exciting parts.
(Of
course, James Cameron's a legendary filmmaker, and I don't expect
RetroBlade to
be as good as the first two Terminator
movies.
But it's a good idea to study the experts' work and learn from them.)
Once
the webcomic gets to Page 28, everything flows perfectly, and I have
no complaints after that. In fact, RetroBlade
actually
has me eager to see what happens next, which is how I can tell that
Horn did a great job with the writing.
Art
While the exposition-heavy introduction isn't as engaging as it could
be, the colorful and highly detailed artwork is terrific, and it's
more than enough to hook readers from the beginning. And to Horn's
credit, the exposition is accompanied by amazing visuals, so it's not
like some other webcomics where you have gigantic captions or speech
bubbles engulfing the panels.
The
art in this comic constantly blows me away, and it's convinced me
that Horn belongs in the top tier of webcomic artists. She clearly
puts an all-out effort into every single panel, and I'm extremely
impressed to see this kind of work ethic from an amateur.
Essentially, readers are getting professional-quality content for
free —
and you can't beat that value.
As is the usual case when I review webcomics that have excellent
artwork, I'm not going to flex my vocabulary to try to describe how
appealing the art is. Nothing I could write is more effective than
simply showing you these spectacular illustrations.
However, I'll mention that RetroBlade has a blue-and-orange
color scheme that I heavily associate with the comic. The
archives page has thumbnails of all the pages, so it's easy to
see what I'm talking about if you go to that page and view the
webcomic as a whole. Note that the hero carries a blue crystal and
the heroine has orange hair, so the character designs fit this color
scheme as well.
Conclusion
RetroBlade
takes a while to get going, but
readers can just jump in at Page 28 without really missing anything.
And after that point, it's an awesome sci-fi comic with great artwork
that I can easily recommend. Dialogue is clearly Horn's greatest
strength when it comes to writing comics, and the more she recognizes
that and flaunts it, the better.
| Scores (out of 5) |
|
No comments :
Post a Comment