The Webcomics Weekly #134: Afterglow (4/27/2021 Edition)

Welcome back to the Webcomics Weekly your round up of webcomics every 7 days. This week things get spooky with “Boo! The Ghosts Away” which is from a newer creator and has some rough edges but shows promise. Meanwhile in “Lavender Jack” Dan Schkade turns back the clock and explores the origins of the Hawthornes and their delish alliance with Van Lund. It was a pact forged in blood, surrounded by nuns, and the middle of a jungle.

“Boo! The Ghosts Away” is clearly a first time work by a young creator, from its plot progression to its art, which has changed dramatically since its first few pages, becoming more confident and clear. It is often hard to critique and talk about works like these because it’s clear where GhostTundra is experimenting and trying to work out how to best tell this story. Page 33 is one example of this, breaking from the usual full-color, fully inked pages to a sketchy one, white on black, with chunks of more expository, prose-like text, a far longer update than the previous single pages. It’s an intriguing choice, one which successfully communicates the nature of Tree’s dreams and his relationship to Haruko in his mind. It seeds more questions and develops the mystery without giving up the ghost.

That said, it doesn’t connect to the previous scene in a noticeable way, making the transition from page 32 to 33 jarring. Despite the quality of the scene across pages 29 to 32, and 33 on its own, this sudden change throws off the rhythm of the story. Currently, “Boo! The Ghosts Away’s” biggest shortcoming is this irregular rhythm. As I said before, the artwork is confident now, in a style that reminds me of a rougher mix of Cotton Valent’s “Meawbin: The Creepy Cat” and Kohei Horikoshi’s art on “My Hero Academia,” with a plot that’s thin at the moment but thickening with each passing scene, and characters that are striking and play well off each other, even if they don’t always feel like they have much depth. The pieces are there for a good story, they just need to be woven together better.

Scenes taking the time to breathe, to let the characters interact with motives that feel internal rather than imposed, are vital for letting the narrative develop. Right now, there haven’t been enough pages to do this and it’s clear that GhostTundra is chomping at the bit to get to certain aspects/characters/plot points, which is one of the big challenges with webcomics and their glacially slow update pace. I have confidence, based on the development of these pages & the experimental ethos within, that time and practice will yield a story that’s engaging, cohesive, and lives up to the vision in GhostTundra’s head. It may not be there yet but it will get there eventually and if you want to see that happen in real time, give “Boo! The Ghosts Away” a read.

Schkade weaves a story of past and present in this batch of strips. In the present Crabbe and Ferrier are arresting Lady Hawthorne, which is contrasted with the story of her origin. Schkade does a good job of fusing these two threads together by using the newspaper page as a transition point in both episode 44 and 45. Van Lund’s printed testimony becomes the caption that accompanies the visual elements. Surprisingly the fusion of these elements isn’t as strong as one would expect. The art takes on a more graphic-minimalist approach for Van Lund’s story which does a fine job giving the reader what they need. It’s just blocked in a few segments by the lettering, the overall placement makes sense and Schkade’s scripting reads as if Van Lund were recalling it the boxes are just a bit too big.

It’s a story all about how Van Lund’s world was flipped turn upside down and he found himself riding through the jungle to Fort Riss with a group of Nuns on a humanitarian mission searching for the lost heir to the Hawthorne fortune. The strong more graphically oriented approach comes into play with the introduction of the Fort Commander. Schkade never gives us a real human depiction of the Commander, his eyes are always shadowed or in the case of episode 46 beaty white dots on a face of madness. The art in this narrative does a good job of reducing everything down that isn’t important, mainly our quartet of characters: Van Lund, the real Lord Hawthorne, and the future Mr. & Mrs. Hawthorne. In this way he can effectively create the feeling of a human connection between Lord and Lady Hawthorne, as monstrous as their eyes and shared gaze become prominent motifs and emotional anchors for the story. The affecting nature of the visuals helps to make up for Van Lund’s limited perspective, narration reduced more to an expository function than showing character. The readers perspective is limited but we can still feel the connection which is perhaps more important than getting the details.

It is the kind of melodramatic storytelling that allows for the creeping sense of tension and isolation to develop in episode 45, as everyone is rained in for months. Jenn Manley Lee reduce the color pallet as the rain comes in, everything is black, blue-grey, and a small hint of brown, it slowly just bears down on the reader even as Schkade shows more of the future Hawthornes connection or the well-mannered nature of the true Hawthorne. Until suddenly the strip explodes with the color of fire and it is blinding. Lee’s coloring is the key narrative tool in this section as the first slowly builds and engulfs everything, we know this because the colors begin to take over everything.

While the lettering was obtrusive in spots it was near excellent in the forty sixth episode as the means to create the rhythm when our group of survivors stared down the mad Fort Commander with a shotgun. It all turns on the use of multiple em dashes to split one sentence into three and make the space for the darkly humorous part “as Sister Sarah shoved His Lordship into the path of the shot.”

This little diversion is what a good prequel can be. It is at once “How the Hawthornes came to be” which creates the idea of the kind of plot driven, world building, explanatory, formula that too often gets in the way of good storytelling. Schkade and Lee instead use that as the space to show us who these people are: survivors. No matter what that is what they are programmed to do and, in that crucible, the Hawthornes found a relationship, it isn’t normal, but the creative team earn the emotional connection between the two. Instead of creating sympathy for the devils it creates understanding. The kind that makes Lady Hawthorne’s downfall all the sweeter.

Lady Hawthorne’s arrest is a wonderfully planned sequence. Schkade lays out the spatial relationship for everything so that when it is sprung nothing is surprising and yet it is incredibly entertaining with even a hint of humor. It’s the kind of yes moment that good stories are built on as Crabbe takes a step forward and maybe up the promotional ladder.