Welcome back to The Webcomics Weekly!
This is it folks, we’re in the home stretch of the year, our penultimate issue of The Webcomics Weekly of 2019 and of the 2010s. Break out the party popper and a brand new theme because, despite going wildly esoteric, these titles remained consistently set in a future 2019 now past!
It’s another lean one as the year gets thin and the times get busy. We got one old, “A Better Place” and two new, “Wolfsbane” and “Crabgrass,” to help you get to the finish line. Thank you all for reading and I will see you again in the new year, while Mike will be seeing you out next week.
A Better Place
‘Stop’ – ‘Catch’
Updates: Thursdays
By Harry Bogosian
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
Halt, citizen. You have been found to be in violation of citation rule 133.34A, whereby you’ve been consorting to overthrow our God Queen Hannah with these Anti-Theists. If you do not stop reading this comic, you will be found double guilty and Arma will be forced to destroy you and your family. No? Well, your funeral.
“A Better Place” has, thus far, handled the greater power plays of the series with a sense of mystique, centering Nina as an unwitting pawn in a game between various factions. However, that mysterious nature has shifted over the last few updates as the roles and sides of the council members comes into relief, as Leo is dragged out of his prison/home, and as we see more of what happens on the factory floor when the forewoman turns her back. It’s a wheels within wheels storytelling mode that works really well when reading in large chunks but in these smaller batches can be frustrating.
Reveals are tucked into the background details, left by the wayside for 20, 30 pages before being picked up again, or certainly farther off than is to be expected. I ache to know more about the Anti-Theists and their crusade against Hannah, to know what drove Empress Computer to her current mad form, and to know how Hannah let it all go out of control. The pieces are there, though, and putting them together is a real joy.
However, these pages are not concerned with that story so much. Instead, they are the fight between Arma and Nina’s sister’s Giant Mech and Bogosian draws the ever loving shit out of that fight and I absolutely love it. I say it a lot but the sense and control of scale in his art is something to behold. There is nothing held back, perhaps to the detriment to a few panels of quickly drawn background characters that end up looking like a panel from ONE’s “One Punch Man” rather than the Yusuke Murata drawn version. It’s not egregious but it is noticeable when compared to the otherwise high level of quality and sharp detail.
Also, read the tags y’all. They are pure gold and hilarious.
Crabgrass
Just…all of it (Apr 5-Dec 9 2019)
Updates: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays
By Tauhid Bondia
Reviewed by Dexter Buschetelli
Full disclosure: I actually did not read a lot of webcomics before I began contributing to this column.
I know, heresy. But aside from a few things I see shared on social media, or well-known series like “CTRL+ALT+DEL” I just wasn’t a big peruser of them. It’s not any sort of slight to the unsung creators who work tirelessly outside of the mainstream world of comics to fulfill their creative visions, and working on WW has actually helped me to appreciate them a great deal. But, that said, I don’t often continue reading these series after reviewing them. So, lately I’ve been making a point of returning to some of the better ones in my “new series” weeks.
Which is why I was utterly dismayed this week when I chose to catch up on “A Problem Like Jamal” only to learn that work had ceased on the strip, and creator Tauhid Bondia had moved on to a new project. I had given strong praise to Tauhid’s previous endeavor and was utterly gutted but every new project deserves a fair shake so I decided to give “Crabgrass” a try. I feel it is important to note that while I tried to give “Crabgrass” as objective a review as I could muster, “A Problem Like Jamal” was such a fantastic series that it is hard to stack up against.
Continued belowFirstly, the art here is on par with Tauhid’s usual fare without question. Characters are highly emotive and there are even moments where he truly puts some extra effort in with his color work, like when the characters relax on a roof during sunset. The oranges and purples really pop against the foreground and just go to show you how a webcomic can go above and beyond in the visuals department, even when it is providing a somewhat standard newspaper strip-style format. It still amazes me to see creators adopt this big-head look and yet still find ways to make their art look unique despite how ubiquitous of a cartooning aesthetic it has become. In all fairness, this is a masterclass in an artful approach to the four-panel setting.
Beyond how it looks, “Crabgrass” has a lot of heart. The continued misadventures of a poor kid and the slightly middle-class neighbor that moves in, Miles and Kevin are a fun duo that will remind you of growing up with your own best friend. As Kevin often drags Miles into trouble the pair are never willing to rat each other out–unless its pizza day–and Miles spends much of the stories not simply putting up with Kevin’s weirdness that others often find off-putting, but clearly fond of it. The two truly feel like blood brothers, and their supporting cast are also well fleshed out for the most part.
The humor here often gets a chuckle at the least, but is one area where “Crabgrass” is at its weakest. While the tales aren’t strictly vanilla, they often feel in some ways toned down in relation to what we’ve seen from Tauhid. “Crabgrass” isn’t in any way a bad series but when you have already experienced his biting social commentaries it makes this feel almost sanitized and dulled from the edge that preceded it. It is difficult to characterize just what is missing here but the air of it is unmistakable.
All of this said, “Crabgrass” is definitely worth a read, and being a new series you can jump right in from the beginning. But I cannot recommend highly enough that you check out A Problem Like Jamal. In fact, read “Crabgrass” first and then read “A Problem Like Jamal.” And when you’re done with all that make sure to check out Tauhid’s Patreon. Content creators need your help to continue creating the things you enjoy.
Wolfsbane
Ch. 1-2 and Prologue
Schedule: Fridays
Written by Ryan Cady
Illustrated and Colored by Morgan Beem
Lettered by David Stoll
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
“Wolfsbane,” judging by the first three episodes, prologue and episodes 1 and 2, features a story that we’ve seen before. Having learned the trade from her father, Quinn continues the family business of hunting werewolves until one day it goes wrong and new circumstances challenge her reality. What happens when the monster hunter brings home a monster or someone from outside the family into the family business? That generic understanding isn’t a bad thing, it is probably to the comics advantage at this point.
What makes “Wolfsbane” standout is Morgan Beem’s watercolor art. I don’ think I have seen a comic on Webtoon use that medium before. A close aesthetic cousin might be Kate Glasheen’s work on “Varsity Noir,” but that series is clearly composed with digital tools. With Beem’s art I can see how the texture of the paper interacts with her watercolors. It creates a strange reading sensation. The texture is one that I am both not used to seeing in a webcomic and one that highlights the digital nature of the webcomic; I want to feel the papers texture but cannot through the hard glass and plastic of my phone.
It makes me very curious to see what her process is like because compositionally this is some of the strongest vertical comic booking I’ve read in a long time. Beem laces her art with various downward arrow motifs that continually drive the reader to keep scrolling and read on. There are some hard panels but overall everything is open as pictures bleed into one another. This sense of flow allows Beem to pace out well known slasher-monster moments and give them a quasi-cinematic quality. I normally loath such a comparison but the lack of panel borders and the frictionless movement from image to image when the werewolf attacks a campsite recalls peering into a Zoetrope or Kinetoscope.
Beem’s character acting is similarly on point. Quinn is a bit of a silent mystery at the moment, but the family the werewolf attacks is another story. Cady and Beem have only a matter of images to make me at least care about them a little bit, and Beem’s character acting does. The little girl constantly fiddling with her inhaler throughout the camp scene is excellent character acting and character building.
“Wolfsbane” dosen’t look like anything else on Webtoon at the moment and deserves at least an initial glance.
