The webcomics weekly is back in your life, and it’s sending you to another world! The strangely generic world of a fantasy adventure comic you’ve seen a hundred times over and will see a thousand times more.
Surviving a Fantasy Adventure Comic
Episodes 1-9
Schedule: Monday
By Jinoh(story) Marucomics(art)
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
It’s that time of the month again when I choose to look the new isekai comics. I had two main options this week, “World’s Strongest Troll” and “Surviving a Fantasy Adventure Comic”. I choose the latter. As with all good isekai, I need at least an interesting gimmick for my skeptical eyes. This one sums their twist up in the title; the other world it will be set in is an adventure comic! There’s plenty of room for reflexivity with a premise like that. The main character Hero Lee is a dejected reader of “Adventure King”. Or, at least, he was one until the mysterious author started killing characters off like they’re George R.R. Martin. Frustrated by the death of beloved characters Lee sells the 60 volumes he’s collected over the past decade. Only to receive a mysterious text message from the author “all characters must fight to survive” and next thing you know, he’s in the pages of “Adventure King” … as the anonymous Villain 3 and mere panels way from being erased from the narrative.
As far as setups go, “Surviving a Fantasy Adventure Comic” is a pretty solid one. While this isn’t done in the opening 9 chapters, hopefully, the creative team return to Lee’s time reading the comic within a comic. The time to isekai is about a quarter of the first episode, which doesn’t lead much time to characterize Lee as a reader. There is a lot of generative potential in exploring Lee’s fandom of this comic over time and juxtaposing it against what is presently going on in the comic. He doesn’t need to be a Superboy Prime-style character, the comic world already has guards against things breaking the fourth wall and narrative scripting being broken, but the ability to reflexively engage with fandom would be interesting.
The frustrating part about “Surviving a Fantasy Adventure Comic” is that while there is the potential for novelty, artist marucomics resorts to the same tired aesthetics and visual storytelling I have seen in hundreds of isekai comics. Why is the metatext of Hero’s inworld character, Villian 3, realized through video game menus? That doesn’t fit the gimmick of this comic at all, except in that the use of these visual signifiers is itself a visual trope within modern isekai comics. Overall, marucomics art is functionally generic 90% of the time. While there could be room for the kind of generic fantasy setting of a popular fake adventure comic, the generic qualities of the art are not remarked upon in a meaningful way. Worse the 10% where this strip show visual promise completely outshines the rest of the strip and actively makes me wish to read the fake comic this comic is supposedly riffing on. Marucomics does a good job of articulating an art style close to 70s or early 80s manga. These black-and-white images’ heavy use of zipatone-like texture and expressive cartooning are plainly more interesting to look at and consider. It forces me to wonder, if this is supposed to be taking place within the pages of a comic why doesn’t it look like one? Doing a strip in this way would be a major change of pace and organization but that would truly make this comic stand out and lean into the reflexive potential it eludes to.
“Surviving a Fantasy Adventure Comic” asks some interesting questions in the form of an isekai. It just has failed to meaningfully explore them or offer anything novel to make them stand out from the sea of other isekai comics currently out there. Maybe as it matures it could turn into something, but as it stands the potential is unrealized.
