We’re just one week away from our 150th column and that milestone seems so wild to me. I (Elias) just wanted to thank everyone for reading week after week, or however often you read, or for reading this now if it’s your first one. It means a lot to know we can get even a few more eyeballs on the wild, wide, and weird world of webcomics. Speaking of, this week we’ve got the continuing “Adventures of God” alongside “Dr. Frost” who’s gotten ready to take on “The Ink Apprentice” in order to advert the crisis brought about by the “Doom Breaker.” It’s sure to be a great time.
All this and perhaps a dash more sincerity in this issue of The Webcomics Weekly.
Adventures of God
Pages: Episodes 58-65
Schedule: Fridays
By Teo Ferrazi and Corey Jay
Reviewed by Devin Tracy Fairchild
From “Gulliver’s Travels” to the work of Trey Parker and Matt Stone satire has been an effective means of conveying truth and playfully questioning and undermining authority. From the diminutive Lilliputians to the Broadway musical parody of Joseph Smith and his ilk, comedy has often been the preferred method for unpacking and digesting complex truths. Those expert in the art of exaggeration, are able to take sacred beliefs and push them past all logical limits and show that even things we hold the most dear, can be illogical or even immoral. The best comedians are also iconoclasts. George Carlin was critical of his Catholic upbringing and Sacha Baron Cohen isn’t afraid to take a joke too far at the expense of religious and political extremists.
Even Irish satirist and author of the aforementioned Gulliver’s Travels didn’t shy away from controversy when he penned his 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal.” People actual thought he was actually serious when he suggest poor Irish families should sell their young children as delicacies to rich upper class English families. In a flash of brilliant irony (in the real sense of the word Swift wrote “A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.” Swift used his biting wit and humor to call attention to the extreme poverty and neglect his own Irish people faced daily in 18th Century England. In sense he was an effective, masterful troll. A modern example this level of satire is Dave Chappelle’s famous “Black White-Supremacist” skit featuring blind Black KKK leader Clayton Bigsby. Episodes 58-65 of Teo and Corey’s Adventures of God are more of the same. A Catholic and agnostic pack the perfect punch of irreverent sacred satire, same as they always have.
This batch of episodes open with yet another spin on Noah’s Arc, this time with a vacationing God hitting the snooze on the massive worldwide catastrophe. Noah muses that God is counting down the days when the punishment will be sufficient and God will bring them reprieve from the rising tides and torrential downpour. Really he is marking the days of his vacation. The next episode features Adam and Eve getting stoned with the serpent in the Garden, because that wasn’t expressly forbidden by their creator. The details are on point. The serpent is a red and black hooded snake with yellow eyes and four limbs, in keeping with the biblical description. But this is a uniquely modern apocryphal tale that even John Milton in his 12 book poem Paradise Lost could never have imagined. Unless he too partook of the wacky tobaccy. Wouldn’t surprise me. Soon the naked first couple are laying on the grass philosophizing with the serpent of old. With red squinty eyes they pat their bellies and proclaim they have the munchies and that is the real reason they ate of that forbidden fruit.
Teo and Corey are experts at the call back. Two episodes later we find Adam and Eve under the forbidden tree, apple cores everywhere, eyes cherry red, stoned out of their gourd, being scolded by the giant floating head of God. He curses them with pain in childbirth and a finite lifespan. But frizzy haired Gabe, ever the logician, points out that that is basic human biology but God laughs to the point of tears over this Swiftian irony. The serpent laughs to but God curses him to crawl on his belly, right at the moment he is using his arms to roll the perfect joint. Perhaps the best gag of this batch is “project Adam” where Gabe shows the RPG like character sheet for Adam where all his stats are equal. God decides to max out Adam’s intelligence and he has a massive existential crisis immediately wanting to know his purpose. But God also wonders that and Gabe is unable to offer a reasonable answer.
Continued belowIn the next episode, the line at heaven is overcrowded and God asks if someone is willing to go to purgatory for a while until the line dies down. One person volunteers and is given a cell phone and a charger. But once he gets there his cellphone only has one bar and is out of battery. So he goes to plug in his phone only to discover that the outlet is an Asian outlet and the plug is North American. Then the next few panels are zooming out on this person, miserable and unable to use the worthless phone. The zooming out effect emphasizes the solitary discomfort that purgatory has to offer. The last episode of this batch features a man being sent to hell for being a modern day slave laborer, who exploits his workers for financial gain. His consolation is that he will get to finally meet George Washington. The clerk at the gates of heaven sidesteps this claim by saying George Washington isn’t in fact in hell because he lived in a different time. The last panel shows the angel on a couch talking to a therapist bemoaning his plight asking “what have I been doing.”
In an expertly subtle way, Teo and Corey are turning an old argument completely on its head. The argument is that people from previous eras can’t be held accountable by our current standards because they lived in different times. This is a common argument. True standards evolve and grow with the times, but there is a sense where wrong is wrong no matter what era of human history it is. I stopped just shy of episode 66 because I have a feeling the boys have something special planned. This batch is even better than all previous ones, and has no signs of slowing down. Currently there are 470 episodes total and update every Friday.
Doom Breaker
Episodes 1-3
Schedule: Saturdays
By Blue-Deep
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
“Doom Breaker” starts off as a generic if artistically stylish fight strip set in a post-apocalyptic setting. After the gods leave earth a lone human champion, Zephyr, stands in the way of absolute destruction at the hands of demons. It’s all very The History of Trunks. Artist Blue-Deep does a good job of efficiently creating the stakes and sense of scale to Zephyr’s final battle with Tartarus, the lord of demons. They begin at the end but with a series of large-scale vertical images give you the feeling that you’ve just been watching a real slugfest. And then Zephyr dies, in fittingly Vegta-esque fashion, and “Doom Breaker” twists into something of a bleak comedy in the vein of “Spawn.”
Zephyr is given the chance for a due over, sent back in time 10 years to train again with all his memories intact. In that time maybe he could stop Tartarus from invading in the first place or hundreds of other possibilities. It doesn’t really matter as the petty and vain deities only care about the entertainment value of Zephyr’s fighting. Which reads like a sad commentary on the nature of fight manga and their readership.
Back in the past “Doom Breaker” takes another surprising turn as it adopts the logic of video games to exposit the nature of the world. Zephyr was sent back in time with his memories, not all the perks and skills he’d picked up while enslaved. As left field the sudden video game logic is, Blue-Deep’s strong graphic design sense makes it work. In the end it is still exposition, but the design work that tells the reader the exposition is strong and at least entertaining. The turn to video games also enhances the fight manga aspect as it clearly tracks his progression.
“Doom Breaker” is an odd assortment of genres and styles, it isn’t the most cohesive strip, but it has the visual flair to never be boring. The “Spawn” like elements of suddenly being a puppet yanked around petty deities and other sudden moments of dark humor like taking out a loan by selling your organs all help to push the series into territory beyond a normal fight manga. The fact Blue-Deep manages to cohere most of what happens in these first three episodes into something fairly engaging is surprising. “Doom Breaker” is scattershot and not as original as you’d hope but there is enough there that warrants checking out if you’re in the market for a new fight strip.
Continued below
Dr. Frost
‘Mirrors’ (1) – ‘Mirrors’ (Case Closed)
Updates: Saturdays
By Jongbeom Lee
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
‘Mirrors’ focuses once again on the counsellors, centering Seon as she becomes the target of threatening letters coming from one of her early patients. It’s a tense set of eight episodes as figures hidden in shadows, ominously one sided phone calls, and the escalating severity of content in the letters keep us guessing as to how everything will end up. Thankfully, this is one of the happier endings and a very important case for Seon as a character as well as for the readers. It’s a reminder that, within and without, counsellors are still people and that, while we can try our hardest, there will always be mistakes.
This is a theme we touched on back when we first learned about the death of Seon’s sister. By repeating it here, Lee is communicating through Seon to us also how it’s possible to understand this on an intellectual level but not an emotional one. Seon knows that she likely made mistakes as an early counselor but she still was unable to forgive or understand Frost’s own mistakes in that field. Now she is given the chance to and to reconcile her own mistakes. It’s different, obviously, but her conversation with Seonggyeom, the aforementioned patient, is only able to go well because of her growth in maturity and experience in the last ten years and because of her realization with regards to Frost.
One last wrinkle though. Last time, I expressed my concern about Moon and it looks like he was meddling in the affairs of this case. He’s got a sinister edge to him still, from spying on Seon to having one of his minions lurk in the shadows at the university. His declaration that he’s going to take her away only makes that unsettling feeling grow and I expect we’ll be seeing more of that in the next case.
The Ink Apprentice
Chapters 6-8 (Pages 12-46)
Updates: Fridays
By Lydia Ling
Reviewed by Mel Lake
A girl with a disfigured hand, a one-winged dragon, and a puppet walk into a haunted house. (Well, okay, the puppet doesn’t walk, but the setup doesn’t work otherwise.) The story that follows is a mishmash of How to Train Your Dragon, The Dragon Prince, and, well, you can basically take your pick of any other non-HBO magic-adjacent franchise that includes a dragon.
“The Ink Apprentice” starts out a little rough, story-wise, since it’s not clear why either the girl, named Nine, her puppet named Izzy, or the dragon have found themselves in the aforementioned haunted house. After the setup in the first few chapters, things get interesting when Nine and the dragon have to work together to free a shadow spirit imprisoned in the house. Again, the reason behind this isn’t very clear. And the nature of the battle, which ends up literally being against the house itself, also isn’t very clear. But the thing is, it’s cool? Visually, Nine’s magical battle and the shadow-skull being are just … neat. The action is fast-paced and the stakes are shown to be high. The whole battle takes place in a shadowy nothing realm, which means the reader is focused solely on the action and the banter that takes place during the scene. Nine uses the power of friendship (literally) to bust open the house that imprisons the Ink Mage and in return, he promises to teach her his ways.
Where “The Ink Apprentice” really shines for me personally, though, is in the expressive way Lydia draws faces, even non-human ones. The artwork in the comic so far is excellent, all-around. The way the ink mage looks like a character that stepped out of a metal band’s t-shirt design is great, and Nine’s character design could easily fit in on the cast list for an action-adventure RPG video game. The cel shading and colors Lydia uses are gorgeous. But the way the dragon goes from fearsome to confused to annoyed in no-time flat? That’s what put a smile on my face as I was scrolling. Each character may still be thinly drawn in this early stage, and sometimes the switch from humor to action to too-thick exposition is a bit clunky. But a comic that includes a shadow skull that is simultaneously deadpan and scary, a dragon that speaks terrible English, and a girl willing to punch a demon house with the power of friendship is one that I hope finds its stride.
