The Webcomics Weekly #136: Plundercats are Loose (5/11/2021 Edition)

Plunder, Plundercats, Plundercats Ho! Keep an eye out the Plundercats are loose. Thundercats refrences aside, “Plundercats” isn’t too far off that nostalgic anime. Mel Lake gives you the over view of episode 19-26. Meanwhile things look grim in the best way for Cirrostatus and their comic “Grim Reaper.” Meanwhile The first season of “Lavender Jack” comes to an end, will all the plans come together or will these best laid still go wrong.

These pages of “Grin Reaper” are the strongest of the comic thus far, showcasing Cirrostatus’ coloring chops and successfully seeding future plot points without being too heavy handed about it. I think part of why these pages work better than the opening ones is that it has a greater sense of motion & focus. AJ is fleshed out as a person, and the stakes are set for future events, romances, and mysteries without having a character exposit about them. I particularly like how the phone conversation transitions into the visual of some red creature hovering over AJ back when she was dying. At this point, that’s new information and while we were already informed about the “red spirit” earlier, the visual emphasizes how otherworldly and kinda terrifyingly beautiful it actually was.

Cirrostatus’ art style is clean and simple, with a playfulness that is infectious. It’s also a little stiff at times, especially when characters are farther in the background. This was really more of an issue in earlier chapters, though Uriah, AJ’s brother, suffers from some inconsistencies on page ‘1-19.’ It feels like Cirrostatus is trying to find the right balance in terms of a consistent, easy to produce visual style that can be released on a weekly basis and taking the kinds of risks that push a work to new heights. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the trajectory is upwards and that’s what you want to see from a new work.

The “I am an apprentice grim reaper” story is one that thrives on new concepts and while we have yet to explore many of them here, it’s clear there are fun and interesting ideas that Cirrostatus cannot wait to get to. Like, why is AJ allowed to have a home life “alive” when she’s a reaper in training? What are reapers in this universe? Will she and Jae get together later? What’s with those wild looking red spirits? I’m glad we’re taking the time in these pages to, instead of answering these questions, slow down and set the baseline for AJ and her life. It’s the right move so that when the story is ready to move to its next complication, it can do so with gusto.

All in all, “Grin Reaper” is off to a solid start and anyone looking for a new reaper story that’s more serious than funny should give it a look.

Space pirates are common enough in movies, television, and anime to have a well-stocked page on TV tropes. So too does the anthropomorphism of cats into cat-like people. Combine these two tropes and you get space-pirate-cat-people, which is the premise of “PLUNDERCATS,” an ongoing comic by LankyCat, available for free on Tapas and Webtoons.

The art style of “PLUNDERCATS” is sketchy and a little grunge, which perfectly fits the world of the ragtag gang of outlaw animals the comic follows. The characters are anthropomorphized animals but their faces are expressive and somehow all very pointy. LankyCat draws their frustrations with each other’s antics into both their faces and amusing action words that describe the situation, like “agonized chewing.” In addition to animal antics, “PLUNDERCATS” includes fun sight gags such as the spaceship’s message system being literally just a bird yelling “call” at the cats.

Even having read the first story arc (‘Job’), I’m not entirely clear on what the gang is running from or towards, however, and other than the lone dog crewmember, it’s difficult to tell the characters apart. The two most recent mini-arcs (‘Rendezvous’ and ‘Overflow’) are mostly panels with characters talking to each other about the situations they’re in but not doing a whole lot. While the dialogue hints of past complications between the characters, since we don’t have any plot context to hang the interactions on, the conversations fall flat. The comic includes the speech disfluencies like “hmm” and “umm” that crop up in any conversation between two people and which makes for realistic dialogue. But in this story, it’s overused and becomes a distraction from the main point of the conversations.

The world of “PLUNDERCATS” has enormous promise and the artist clearly has big plans for the cultures/species of Tabbans, Vulpins, and Keynin, but the issues currently available haven’t explored the world much at all, choosing instead to focus on character relationships.

This isn’t always a bad thing, of course, but without context, it’s hard to feel invested in the interactions and make some feel forced and awkward. Hopefully, in future issues, the artist will use plot developments to drive character growth instead of focusing solely on dialogue, because the world they’ve envisioned is intriguing. And full of cats! As a cat and dog lover plus a fan of space outlaws, I’m rooting for the gang and the artist in the hopes that “PLUNDERCATS” grows into the promise of its space-pirate-cat-people premise.

We finally made it the season finale of “Lavender Jack.”

In the focus on the story of Lord and Lady Hawthorne, I’d neglected to note a very important moment. Textual confirmation that Sir Mimley is gay! This isn’t too surprising considering signs like the name of the strip “Lavender Jack,” the way Schkade has drawn him both when thinking about Gio Sakakibara specifically and a few others, the general structure of revenge narratives, and some playful double entendre in the dialog. There was plenty of subtextual, coded, evidence but plainly textual confirmation is always appreciated. The declaration that “I’m here because you murdered the man I loved” is also the kind of statement that this sort of narrative needs, it adds an even more personal tie to everything. Interestingly the moment is somewhat subverted visually. It is a bold, clear, statement visually Jack is shown two faced with half his face obscured in black ink contrary to the overall lighting continuity of the strip. The break from continuity makes the image stand out more as Jack and not-quite-Lord-Hawthorne have banter about the nature of their existence. Lord Hawthorne is heavy but has received an enormous amount of characterization compared to their limited page time. It makes you understand the Dragon, even though you still don’t like them.

As always the action continues to be supremely effective. How it gets its affective charge is a bit different this time. Previous fights didn’t have the breakdown in paneling that defines episode 47. As each panel progresses the ability for the panel and the meta panel of the vertical strip continues to strain and breakdown. The panels seem to morph with each impact, everything becomes a dutch angle. The sixth panel in ep 47 wouldn’t be nearly as effective if it didn’t have that inclination, which is followed by an image with no panel attempting to constrain them at all. All of this breakdown leads to the implementation of contingency ‘B’: Reichenbach Fall off the edge. The art as they fall becomes one big panel, using the momentum of the scroll to simulate their crash (with appropriate onomatopoeia) that makes it seem impossible either of them could live. Jack manages to land in one of the softer areas of the fountain. Lord Hawthorne landed right on the edge and lays shattered – in what might be the most violent image shown thus far.

The final strip of the season does an efficient job of wrapping things up. Characters say their goodbyes, we get a wonderful kiss between Ferrier Marguerite, Lady Hawthorne promises Kingpin like vengeance from jail. Sir Mimley has to think about what to do next now that he has taken a life. With his personal vengeance satiated the question becomes could Jack be something more than a tool for vendetta driven vigilantism, could he become more of a symbol? There’s also the question of escalation, now that he wears a mask what’s to stop someone else from donning a Phantom of the Opera-esque outfit and speaking in delightfully meta terms? The season finale of “Lavender Jack” is the right mixture of narrative closure with a glance to the future.