~It’s the spook, spookiest season of all. There are pumpkins and ghosties, lots of big candies, and tons of our feeaaaaaaar. It’s the spook, spookiest time of the yeaaaarrrrrr.~ Or it will be in a couple weeks but that won’t stop us from getting into the spirit with the decidedly not spooky but still scary “Dr. Frost,” the “Perfect Marriage Revenge” and, well, some “4 Panel Horror” to really hit the nail on the head. Don’t you just love it when things are that simple?
You can find all this and a few hidden skeletons in this issue of The Webcomics Weekly.
4 Panel Horror
Episodes 1-14
Updates Fridays
By Karl Kwasny
Reviewed by Mel Lake
This week, just in time for the spooky season, I found myself in the mood for a webcomic that didn’t require much in the way of commitment or brainpower but that delivered a little bit of a thrill. Browsing Tapas for horror comics, you’ll find quite a few that look promising and I hope to check some of them out soon. But “4 Panel Horror” was exactly what I was looking for: short, to-the-point, horror stories.
Each of these bite-sized episodes is structured in the “yonkoma” or “four-cell” format popularized by gag manga comics in Japan. The first panel is the setup or the introduction to the scene or joke. The second panel builds on the first, usually stretching out the tension in the setup. The third (or in this case, sometimes the fourth) panel is the climax, then the resolution is in the last panel. These types of comics are usually comedies since humor generally depends on a setup, then a punchline that twists or subverts your expectations of the initial premise. Karl Kwasny uses the same method to frighten and occasionally, amuse.
The artwork is simple black and white, with plenty of shadows and the occasional splash of red. The simple art style and spooky typography work perfectly – they are exactly what you’d expect from a comic called “4 Panel Horror.” The halftone dots give it a retro feel, and so too do the faces on the human characters, who look like they’ve wandered from an old “Archie” comic into an episode of Black Mirror. The subject matter varies widely from monsters to ravenous vending machines but the way Kwasny expertly draws everyday objects and then subverts your expectations of them is satisfying, even when the payoff is an ambiguous hinting at a much larger world or story.
Since there isn’t room to expand on each setup, some readers may not enjoy the open endings and lack of explanation in these tiny stories. And the style means none are particularly scary, per se. But if you’re looking for an easy-to-read taste of horror that will amuse you in the ten seconds it takes to read it, or possibly make you scratch your head and go, “huh,” these are worth the four-panel scroll.
Dr. Frost
‘The Illness that Lies’ (1) – ‘Behind the Scenes & Episode Commentary’ (2)
Updates: Saturdays
By Jongbeom Lee
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
Dr. Frost in season 3 is a very different person from whom he was before. He’s angry, he’s having auditory & visual hallucinations, and he’s slipping. It’s a far cry from the usually in control and knowledgeable Frost we were getting to know but it doesn’t feel like a step back. Rather, this Frost has progressed forward, even as that progress illuminates and brings into relief the many faults he had plastered over.
These are the kinds of stories I love to read about and Lee does an excellent job of getting me invested in Frost’s new conflicts as well as the other members of the protective ward. Part of this comes down to the tight focus Lee keeps on characters’ faces. We don’t get many panels that have the focal characters recessed into the background, only appearing when a sense of secrecy is necessary, and this creates a slowly building uncomfortably that comes to a head in the sixth episode of the arc.
‘The Illness that Lies’ is about alcoholism and the people it touches but it is also a title that reflects Frost, as he is hiding his hallucinations of Seong from the doctors and nurses. Throughout the arc, Frost is contrasted with another character Mr. Kim but it’s not apparent this is what Lee’s doing until we get to episode 6 or even the final episode. Sure, the parallels between the two pretending to be alright is apparent from the get go, but the feeling of moral superioring born from a mismatch between self-worth and self-esteem is condemned in Mr. Kim by the framing and unexamined in Frost until Frost fails. Then, and only then, does he realize he was no different from Mr. Kim and that his belief that he knew better ended up causing nearly irreparable harm.
Continued belowIt’s all wonderfully and horrifically conveyed through Lee’s clean and expressive faces. You cannot turn your eyes away as the action escalates and the inevitability of what’s to come crashes down upon you. What’s especially exciting from a story perspective is how effectively Lee reframes Frost’s past actions, placing a different light upon them in such a way as to highlight not how Frost succeeded because of who he was but how he failed in ways he, and we, couldn’t even perceive.
‘The Illness that Lies’’ story is not just about Mr. Kim’s alcoholism and Frost’s reaction to it. It is also the arc in which Frost, and by extension us, see and understand the hidden harms of the detached, blunt, unconnected, “purely logical” actions he has taken. This isn’t to discount the role anger played in this arc’s conclusion but that is a red herring, meant to distract from the purposeful repetition being created in order to shock both Frost AND the readers. We are primed to see things from the main characters’ perspective and to see them as the hero of the piece. Lee plays on this throughout ‘The Illness that Lies’ and realizing it at the end leaves me invigorated and excited to see more.
Perfect Marriage Revenge
Episodes 1-3
Schedule: Sundays
Original Story by Yibamb
Adapted by so young
Illustrated by Jerryball
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
“Perfect Marriage Revenge” has a lot going for it and some moments of friction that might turn away some readers. When the story opens Iju Han is living a less than idyllic life between her nagging in-laws, kids who don’t respect her, and an absentee husband. Things go from bad to worse when said absent husband is caught proposing his love to her step sister and through a series of events Iju ends up hit by a car and dead – this vehicular demise is fairly graphic but also likely the most graphic moment in the series. All of this is in the first episode!
The creative team have a knack for just getting into excessive melodrama a series like this requires. It is in this moment of death that the strip shifts and becomes a variant of the Isekai genre. Isekai generally involves the death-transportation to another world and reincarnating as anything from a slime to a vending machine (“”Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon”). “Perfect Marriage Revenge” doesn’t transport Iju to another world but instead to a year previously, the day of her marriage. In the American context you could consider this more a riff on 13 Going on 30. With this second chance Iju sets out to live her best life.
As it stands however there are some moments of translation friction that stop “Perfect Marriage Revenge” from being an immediate and easy recommendation. I am unsure what the process of translating the series into English was. The end result is a strip with some stilted and awkward reading dialogue. There is a bit of a camp charm to it in spots, but that also just acts as a recognition of the distance created between reader and text. Jerryball’s art is overall fine in that generic Korean Clip Studio kind of way, nothing is technically wrong, but it doesn’t stand out much either. As always, the gutter spacing in these types of strips can be a bit much in spots, but overall, their construction is effective.
“Perfect Marriage Revenge” has a lot of promise and could turn into something later on after the creative team work out a few kinks. If nothing else, it’s worth checking out for the genre mashups.
