The only thing you all need to know about this week’s reviews is that there is a good doggo in one that will pull at your heartstrings. Is it in “Dr. Frost” or “Lavender Jack?” You’ll just have to read on to find out. How’s THAT for a hook?
All this and some potentially personally applicable psychology in this week’s The Webcomics Weekly.
Dr. Frost
‘The Psychologist in the Yellow Room’ (4) – (5)
Updates: Saturdays
By Jongbeom Lee
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
No, you’re not imagining things, this week’s batch of “Dr. Frost” is bookended by episodes of the four panel chapters ‘The Psychologist in the Yellow Room,’ which continue to be a lovely delight. Lee’s art is getting more confident, most noticeably in the central three chapters of this batch ‘The Psychologist in the White Room and Pavlov’s Dog,’ but even in these Chibi gag shorts the jokes land with more oomph thanks to the more consistent style and cleaner lines. The Professor Oh saga was especially fun, seeing as he’s been out of the spotlight for a couple arcs.
What’s most important about these chapters, however, are the revelations we get about Dr. Frost’s past as well as his current self. I’ve made reference to how Frost reminds me of Holmes as a protagonist but the way Lee makes Frost differ from your usual “emotionless & logical” character is in the way he controls the audience’s perception of Frost, as well as the complexity baked into his still mostly mysterious origin. Frost has emotions but they are either dulled and abstracted or absent entirely. He has the knowledge of what these emotions are but it’s all theoretical and so his decisions are made based on a different axis than that of, say, Seonga. It’s the difference between having someone tell you what it’s like to swim in the ocean when you’ve only been in knee deep streams your whole life and swimming in the ocean.
This is exemplified in the addition of a new character: Pavlov the dog. Seonga & Frost are worried about this stray dog they find, who’d been abused but once the vet tells them that, unless someone is able to adopt the dog, it will be euthanized, Frost wonders why they should wait since “Isn’t it obvious that no one is going to want an abandoned dog in that state?” He isn’t uncaring but the utilitarian approach to life here fails to consider the emotions of others (here, Seonga) or the potential emotional motivations that could propel someone into wanting to take in a dog that had been abused and barely survived a life-saving operation. It’s a compelling scene that gets to Frost’s own internal strife and shows him to be flawed in a nuanced way. The rest of this mini arc shows too that he can learn, in his own way, and to understand the motivations of others through a lens that he can conceptualize, while Lee teaches us more psychological concepts and a bit of dog psychology.
We also now have a good doggo as a new character so I look forward to more of his antics as we enter our next arc: ‘The Desire of Others.’
Lavender Jack
Pages: Episodes 39-41
Schedule: Tuesdays – currently on seasonal hiatus
Written and Illustrated by Dan Schkade
Colored by Jenn Manley Lee
The final strip in this batch up for review, episode 41, does the same thing very well and very poorly within the same strip. Episode 41, “The Three Rivers Affair ~ Part Two,” is the final bit of place setting before things “happen very quickly” as Ferrier puts it. In order to pull that off it ends on not a cliffhanger but a promise, with all the pieces on the board finally setup. The ending to episode 41 is excellent. Schkade sends readers out with images of Lord Hawthorne approaching Ferrier and the Butler Masters ready to strike them down. It is effective because this strip and the one preceding it spent time clearly setting up the space of Three Rivers Hospital allowing readers to understand the trap that is being set.
Continued belowThe functional how of this illustrates why the start of the strip is so shaky and unappealing as Abbey Quarrel meets with Van Lund. Schkade gives Abbey a line about their meeting place and it gives off a certain kind of mood. That line, however, is ineffective because the spatial relationships were not clearly set up. It took till the third panel for it to be clear Van Lund’s meeting place is a cemetery. Jenn Lee’s coloring has been a consistent presence for this strip, and it takes a rare misstep with this sequence. Panels become overwrought in grey tones which don’t work with the ink black nearly as well as you’d think. It helps to further obscure things, which lessons the supposed tense bartering the two are having.
Effectively guiding the reader in the spatial relationships of this drama is a core mechanic of this batch of strips. Episode 39, which deals with how Ducky and Crabb came into the possession of the dog, is built on it as a Rear Window-esque drama plays out between Crabb’s hurried tips to Quarrel to follow the money and the oncoming military officers. Schkade balances three positions and viewpoints against one another and makes an effective story-within-a-story out of them.
Schkade’s cartooning does a lot to imbue a feeling of emotion in his characters. The Hawthorne’s are at once fairly one note villains who are doing evil for what seem like basic capitalist reasons. But the way he draws Lady Hawthorne commanding Lord Hawthorne to go out and finish what they’ve started has the same energy of Vincent D’Onofrio as Kingpin, it seethes with this energy and threat. You can tell something is driving them deep down even if you don’t know the specifics you recognize its presence. That sort of weight also comes through as Chief Justice Gall does Van Lund’s dirty work to give Lord Hawthorne his shot. The image of him on the other line that has the real sense of weight to it as he hangs up the telephone. The way his eyes are looking off to the side and his shoulders lump. It and the profile are only two images, but they do more to sell the sense of an emotional interiority to him than previous full scenes with him have.
