Yesterday was Valentine’s Day which means today is 1/2 off chocolate day. In celebration, we’ve got three comics for you! OK, it has nothing to do with either of those days but segues are hard and I’m distracted by all the chocolate I’m going to devour. I promised my “Dr. Frost” it wouldn’t be an “Ordeal” or much of “A DeadbEAT’s Meal” but that’s a lie. I will definitely make a completely chocolate meal.
All this and far less cocoa based talking in this week’s The Webcomics Weekly.
A DeadbEAT’s Meal
Pages 1-3
Updates Wednesdays
By CHEESE
Reviewed by Mel Lake
Food brings people together. It’s a cliché but it’s also true! There’s a reason so many cultural traditions center around food, from religious ceremonies to sports celebrations involving chicken wings and finger food and a certain show halfway through a certain game. Meals we share together become part of our relationships with each other, and that’s the premise of “A DeadbEAT’s Meal” by the artist aptly named CHEESE.
Jaeho is the deadbeat in the title. He loves food and he doesn’t have a job. He does have friends and a girlfriend of seven years, though, so how bad can things be? Well, in the first episode, Jaeho is dumped via text message, so not great. But we begin to see how things went wrong between Jaeho and Sujeong via flashbacks to meals they shared together. Both share a love of food but Jaeho’s selfish behavior (and a bout of sickness that doesn’t seem to be his fault) gets in the way of Sujeong’s enjoyment of their meals.
Though this comic only just began, I feel like I’ve started to get a good picture of the relationship between the central characters and how they may have changed over the years since they met. CHEESE wisely gives them different hairstyles in the flashbacks, so you’re never confused when you start to take a trip down memory lane. And the food! The panel with fried chicken in the first episode is a work of art. It’s both mouth-watering and technically impressive as a drawing. The characters themselves have basic webtoons faces and expressions but the food is rendered in extreme loving detail, right down to the sheen on a broken egg yolk.
“A DeadbEAT’s Meal” is a slice of life comic that’ll make you hungry, and may also make you think about the meals you’ve shared with the special people in your life (for better and for worse). In terms of character development, I’m hoping Jaeho gains some self-awareness because in the first three episodes he’s a bit of an inconsiderate jerk. But Sujeong also doesn’t communicate how hurt her feelings are, so that’s on her. If we’re meant to root for the two of them to get back together, they’ll both need to do some soul-searching, because a love of good food alone isn’t quite enough to sustain a relationship or a webcomic.
Dr. Frost
‘The Tower of Leviathan’ (1) – (3)
Updates: Saturdays
By Jongbeom Lee
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
These three episodes are absolutely jam packed and if I weren’t purposefully rationing these chapters to be fresh for reviewing, I would have absolutely devoured the entire rest of this arc and beyond.
Frost & Seonga take a back-seat in ‘Tower of Leviathan’ to a character we’ve seen a little of in the last few cases, but not really enough to get a handle on who he is beyond his apparent laziness and willingness to wholesale plagiarize articles. I love how his sleeziness seems to be born of a deeper trauma and how Frost is able to needle that and get him to re-embrace, even if reluctantly, his reporter’s nature. It’s great stuff, following on naturally from the themes of the last arc and continuing the plot without introducing too many new, unrelated wrinkles.
The development of a seemingly normal young people’s political science conversation group being tied to Jiseong’s radicalization is a great way to accomplish the twin aims of giving the reporter a meaningful plot and keeping up the suspense. It also lets Lee explore another facet of Moon’s attempts to manufacture a crisis of hatred AND a fascinating look at the organizational nature of brainwashing. Like, we see how the layers of this conversation group are pulled back to reveal it as an onboarding point for susceptible and potentially vulnerable individuals. It’s easy to see how the same framework can apply to reddit threads, closed facebook, telegram and whatsapp groups; that’s simply the digital extension of the analog methods.
Continued belowMoreover, as with ‘The Trap,’ ‘Tower of Leviathan’ continues to ask questions of the way the modern world can be manipulated and used to affect people psychologically. Fake news (i.e. intentional disinformation,) sockpuppet social media accounts, radicalizing YouTube accounts (or MeTube in Frost’s universe,) are all brought up as contributing to a sense of unease, distrust, and mistrust of everyone and everything around us, feeding on fears and insecurities, and ultimately closing people off from the rest of the world into a siloed and dangerous new one. In this case, much of it is coordinated and deliberate on a large scale, tip-toeing towards conspiracy theory territory but staying close enough to reality – which tends to be more decentralized and uncoordinated in its expressions of the same concepts – to remain scary and resonant. It’s got me wired and ready to see where we’re going next and how Seonga & Frost are going to, hopefully, put a stop to Moon’s plan.
Ordeal Jack
Episodes 1-3
Schedule: Fridays
By Brent E. Bristol
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
“Ordeal” follows in the long line of combat sports comics and anime like “Hajime no Ippo” but with a sci-fi spin placing it closer to something like Megalobox. These are all well worn tropes. It would be easy, and not that far off, to describe lead character Che as Rocky-esque with his poorer side of working-class background. Though any such comparison isn’t entirely apt due to Bristol setting the strip in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The point being “Ordeal” has plenty of generic markers that will make this strip familiar.
That familiarity extends to the core science fiction element of the series, set over 50 years after genetic modification led to the development of Kimyos (read: mutants). Half a century and one war later, one in three residents of Earth has powers of some sort. You could also think of it as quirks from “My Hero Academia”. The larger allegorical and societal structures have yet to be fleshed out. Bristol makes good use of the built-in cultural awareness to homage and use powersets from extratextual characters.
At the center of it all is Che, who isn’t much of a character except he’s a cool dude. A human who is training in a dojo to do metahuman MMA for all intents and purposes. While he hasn’t gone full Goku yet, the series is also clearly drawing on various fight manga as well.
It is incredibly easy to reduce “Ordeal” down to a bunch of references to other comics and media and write it off as shallow. It might be just a little on the shallow side after looking over the first 5 episodes. But Brent Bristol does the important things right: his art isn’t like much else on Webtoon. The future Caribbean setting isn’t like anything I’ve seen on Webtoon. Their art reads like a mixture of Clayton Crain and early 00 Image, there’s a playful cartoonish quality to it mixed against a realist rendering. Their macro strip design thus far isn’t groundbreaking, but they clearly know how to stage fights well in this format.
“Ordeal” does just enough to stand out even as it mixes its references a bit too clearly.
