Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit (6 Pints)

Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit
by Wendy W
www.gilbertandgrim.com/

Fuck, shit, cocksucker, motherfucking Barbara Streisand!

I feel better, now.

After reading Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit, I felt the uncontrollable, Tourettes-like need to say a bunch of offensive words and stare at porn while slathering myself in bloody, raw meat and smoking cigarettes rolled in dried, dead baby skin. It was that fucking cute. It may have actually raised my purity score and I'm almost certain I'm a diabetic, now.

Wendy's art isn't exactly polished, or even terribly consistent, at times, but it's more colorful than a Gay Pride Parade and more adorable than a baby kitten. You want to hug it. You want to buy plushies modeled from it. It is, quite simply, almost too cute to be allowed to exist. But thankfully, it does.

The writing is also fairly hit and miss, with a few pages that are close to genius and other pages that seem almost pointless other than the cuteness factor. I think Wendy can be a good writer, if she keeps working at it and focuses more, but it feels like sometimes she's just phoning it in. When the writing can match the charm of the art and characters, she will truly have a winner on her hands.

To be honest, I've laughed more and laughed harder at comics I've rated far worse, but what those comics lack that this comic has in spades is charm. It jumps off the screen and demands that you love it, and you find yourself powerless to resist. It's original, it's adorable and it's unapologetic in its existence. Even a jaded, snarky cynic like myself is unable to resist it.

The Borg have nothing on Gilbert and the Grim Rabbit.

Abandon: First Vampire (3 Pints)

Abandon: First Vampire
Wriiten by Greg Carter
Drawn by Elliot Dombo
www.abandoncomic.com

Abandon has a decent following, so nothing I say is really going to hurt it - or help it. That makes it kind of like a sacred cow, untouchable. But just as McDonalds opened restaurants in India and is now serving up God on a bun, a McDeity with Cheese, if you will, I am not above taking shots at sacred cows, either. So allow me now to take a bite out of Abandon's soft, romantic, lesbian-happy flesh.

The story is basically about a vampire - the first vampire, no less, cursed for all of time to be immortal and remember her One True Love(TM), who is cursed to be reborn forever and never remember her.

And many emo boys wept.

Said vampire is, as all hot female vampires should be, a total slut and jumps in bed with a human girl before we are even ten pages in. A human girl that has a human girlfriend that hates said vampire. Which she just fucked. And then she lies to her girlfriend and fucks her while said girlfriend's brother goes missing with said vampire, who both want to fuck each other, and said brother may just be the aforementioned long lost love cursed to reincarnation for all of time, yeah verily.

If that was disjointed or confusing to read, so was the back history provided that is supposed to explain the whole universe and the gods.

The dialogue is so-so, with moments of cringe-worthy lines, like when the ancient slutty vampire chick calls someone a doofus. Shit, I haven't said doofus since Lost Boys came out. There are occasional clever bits of writing, mostly involving segues between scenes, like a line about landing on his feet followed by the brother tumbling to the ground, but these are easy to forget amidst all the emo romance, gratuitous lesbian action (never actually shown, mind you) and head loppings. And seriously, if the writer has a hard-on for lesbians - we've seen all of five female characters, and four are at least bisexual - why play coy with the hot lesbian sex? We're not quite two issues in and there have been two completely gratuitous and unnecessary sex scenes minus the sex. Why waste pages with them if there's no real story point and you're not going to show the rug munchers actually munching rugs? Fan service? Please, you don't need post-coital scenes to give panty shots or show girls in bras. I'm actually one of those rare males not into girl-on-girl action, but even I think the comic is a cock tease. Put out or stick to the emo romance and head loppings. I'm supposed to believe some chick, worried about her missing brother after disappearing with the vampire she despises, is going to go, 'Hey! Before we go look for my brother, I wanna eat some pussy! OMNOMNOMNOM!'

No.

As for the art, it's pretty hit and miss. Close-ups work best, but when characters are seen from a distance or in full-body, they suddenly become Hobbits and their proportions go all out of whack. Also, profiles: please learn to draw them. Thank you.

I can't tell if this comic is trying to take itself seriously or not. If not, then go balls out. Let it rip. If it is trying to be serious and tell a moving, interesting story... As I've said before, good luck with that.

It has an audience, though. Any comic with sexy slutty vampire lesbian sex and heads flying all over will. It's kind of like the yaoi genre - there's an audience for it. That doesn't mean every single title is actually good.

67th Avenue (3 Pints)

67th Avenue
by Jamie Sawatsky
67thavenue.nfshost.com/

They often say Seinfeld was the longest running TV show about nothing. If that's true, then 67th Avenue is the Seinfeld of webcomics.

But only in that respect.

As far as I can tell from the archives - and this comic goes back years - it's basically the ongoing story of a character named Jamie and his daily struggles and exploits. But the comic rarely has much of a story, or at least much beyond a simple thread of a story. This can work in gag-a-day comics, where jokes trump story, but the problem is that 67th Avenue can't seem to decide if it's a story comic or a gag-a-day comic, and as a result it does neither very well. There are often several strips in a row with little to no gag or joke, yet they don't exactly move the plot in any interesting way, either. Take the current arc - the Aqua Ranch Kit.

Jamie sees an ad in the back of a comic book for one of those sea-monkey deals, and decides that he has to have one. Problem is, he has no money. We're 5 strips in - that's 5 updates, or basically a month's worth of strips - and the only thing that's happened is that Jamie opened his piggy bank for money. The strip where he breaks said piggy bank is done in a funny manner, but really - 1 in every 5 strips is not a good number. The rest are filler.

Before this arc, there was an arc that lasted 35 strips - a year's worth of time. It's basically the same thing, but on a far more staggering scale. An entire year of mostly pointless mediocrity with a few funny moments mixed in.

A fucking year!

It could have been epic. It could have been a highlight of the strip's history. Instead, it's just more of the same.

The art is decent when it involves characters, but too often backgrounds and action get muddled up, making it hard to follow at times. Jamie does show a serious amount of growth over the years, but background problems still nag at the strip. Even fantastic art, however, couldn't change the fact that the writing needs tons of work. Jamie seems to be having fun, which is great if that's all that matters. If you have fun creating something, that alone is reason enough to do it. But Jamie is asking for a review, an outsider's opinion, and outsiders aren't impressed by self-indulgence and don't care if the creator is having fun. They want to have fun.

Basically, it's my belief that a gag-a-day comic needs to be relentlessly funny - which is one reason I don't like most of them, as few can pull this off. A story comic needs to be interesting and compelling, otherwise the reader won't care enough to come back. 67th Avenue is, alas, rarely funny or interesting, and hardly ever both at once. This comic really needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

Revenge Reviews: Why Get Mad When You Can Get Even?

I will now be posting Revenge Reviews, where creators of webcomics I have reviewed are given the chance to say any fucking thing they want about my little webcomic. Fair is fair, after all, and if I am going to say harsh things about others, I should allow them the same opportunity.

And so now I am.

All Revenge Reviews will be posted without edits or alteration. They are the exact words of the person that wrote them. No matter how harsh, how mean or how unfair I consider them to be, I will not change them, censor them or take them down. The first one can be found below.

Revenge Reviews: Eric Flores Reviews Slaughter U: Dark Zoey

(Note: This review was provided by the creator of a webcomic I have reviewed. I am posting their review of my webcomic un-edited and untouched. What follows is exactly as it was presented to me.)

Slaughter U: Dark Zoey
Plot: Slaughter University: Dark Zoey is a story about Zoey, a young college student who is a budding Serial Killer. The Comic is done by Red Right Hand.

Artwork: Awesome!If you happen to like the Bratz Dolls, you will enjoy Red-Right Hand's artwork, It's Dark, it's Crisp and it's Clean. One bit of beef with it, is that it tends to be very dark (Well Dyuh it's about a serial Killer) The only splash of color that we see is Blood, and there is A LOT OF IT. Gore fans will definitely enjoy the Kills, He puts a lot of Detail into it. My second Beef is that the expressions, He should really work to include more facial expressions, the characters have a doll like qualities (Again the Bratz Reference), and sometimes it's hard to see what Zoey is thinking. While I realise Serial Killers do tend to be tightly controlled individuals up until the time of the kill, If something Pisses a character off you should at least see something.

Story: Since it's still in the beginning stages, He is trying to put as much History as possible. One thing to Keep in Mind when reading it, is that it SEEMS to be based on a lot of the Cheesy Slasher flicks. However, it's Well written and He often speaks from Zoey's point of view. One thing I would Like to see is perhaps Some of Zoey's thought processes in a more visual fashion. Yes He does a good Job with the written word, but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Aside from that It fits Perfectly with the Genre it's trying to cover.

Characters: Okay Keep in Mind that Zoey is a Serial Killer, and it's supposed to be hard to Identify with her. But Dammit, You actually start to Like her, especially when she deals with her room-mates and her friends. The Writting almost makes her seem Human in a way, so when you see Zoey do something really fucked up, you are actually surprised without it being a Pleasant surprise. You are left thinking "ZOEY WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING??? OMG THAT IS SO FUCKING WRONG!"

Over All: I would seriously recommend this comic to any horror fans. Keep in Mind that it is Rated A(dult) for extremely graphic depictions of violence towards women.
As for me I give it a 2.8 out of 3.

Current Music: "Let it Die" Foo Fighters

Monster Lover (0 Pints)

Monster Lover
by Eric Flores
monsterlover.comicgenesis.com

In my few, limited interactions with Eric, he seems like an okay guy. Which makes me feel a bit bad about the fact that I'm about to spank him like a middle-aged fat man streaming Japanese schoolgirl bukkake at 3AM on a work night. But just as Jesus lets kittens die and babies drown because he has to, some things simply must be done.

Monster Lover isn't so much a comic as it is wank-fulfillment. Like all the leading men in his comics, Adam has a massive cock. We're talking torso-length, Freaks of Cock (no, I'm not linking to them, Google if you're wanting to lose sanity points) shit, here. And of course, all the chicks want it. He can't help it - he's a sex God. Life is hard, sometimes. Adam's hard all the time, like Chinese arithmetic. Oh, and there's some arbitrary story about him training monsters to fight monsters, but it mostly serves as an excuse to rescue new creatures and girls for Adam to fuck. That is, afterall, the real point of the comic: four-breasted cat sex and female minotaur milking. I'm not fucking kidding. He milks her every morning in the most personal of ways.

Adam is everything a guy wants to be - manly, hung like a sperm whale and deadly with a weapon. Women - of the human and non-human varieties - are all easy, sex-crazed sluts just waiting to get naked and see what it feels like to be fucked by a telephone pole. Every. Single. Fucking. One. Of. Them. Dude, when the guy who has a webcomic depicting young, scantily clad college girls with melon-shaped breasts running around getting slaughtered by crazy serial killers says your depiction of women just might be misogynistic? There might be a problem.

The art - the only thing that can save a comic like this, if you're doing porn comics (which is fine, if you do it well) the art needs to at least be sexy - is something I'd expect to see on a pro-life protester's sign. In clearer terms, it's an abortion. Not only is it not sexy, it's downright frightening sometimes. When characters are talking, we get to see molars and shit. Are they talking or trying to swallow my head? It's almost enough to give me nightmares. He seems to have some grasp on anatomy and proportion, but his lines are messy, his colors are ugly, his shading is haphazard and he doesn't bother to clean any of it up. There are spots, blurs and smudges on many pages that he could at least touch up in post-production. But he doesn't.

By all statistics, he should be great at drawing by now. The law of averages suggests that the more you draw, the better you get, and this guy is fucking prolific in the number of pages he churns out. And yet, there is little improvement. It's an impressive feat.

Look, there's nothing wrong with porn. The internets wouldn't exist without it. There's also nothing wrong with porn webcomics. There is, however, something wrong with bad porn webcomics, and bad webcomics of any kind. And this may be one of the biggest examples of why.

Now excuse my while I go wash my eyes out with bleach.

How Sweet It Is (8 Pints)

How Sweet It Is
by Scott A. Jenkins
www.howsweetitiscomics.com/

Not to beat a dead horse, but have I mentioned that I hate gag-a-day comedy webcomics? I do. I hate them with the power of a thousand burning suns. Why? Because they are - usually - unoriginal, poorly written and lame. Everything under the sun has been done, before. There is no such thing as a completely original gag-strip, and yet with all the vast power and freedom of the internets, so many people seem determined to make their own version of bland, stale drek rather than something different and challenging. All you can really do is try to write better and think more uniquely than the thousands of others doing what you do.

How Sweet It Is does just that.

Yes, it is the very type of comic I profess to loathe, but Scott at least does something slightly different with it - he makes it about married life. He doesn't feel the need to mug for the reader, doesn't throw outrageous situations at his characters. Scott understands that the best humor flows naturally from daily life and sticks to that principle. Based loosely on his own marriage - I'm assuming - he fills his strip with the real, everyday problems and situations married couples are familiar with, told from the perspective of a slightly clueless, slightly insecure husband with a long-suffering but devoted wife. He's the lovable loser, the everyman that, despite his faults, you can't help but root for.

The art is on a professional level - this could easily be published in today's newspapers. His characters are consistent, his backgrounds clean, and nothing is every visually confusing. I admit that it disappoints me when he has several panels in a row with the exact same art, just new dialogue, as it seems lazy. When you're doing a webcomic strip once a week, how hard is it to change angles, at least? To be fair, this problem is practically a staple of the medium, so he's hardly alone in this, but with so much attention paid to the writing I feel cheated on the art every now and then.

Scott has made me regain a bit of faith in webcomics, and for that I am grateful. If you're looking for a witty take on marriage and life in general, you can do much worse than How Sweet It Is.