The Webcomics Weekly #142: You Are Welcome Within My Reaper Boyfriend(6/22/21)

The Webcomcis Weekly is back in your life. This week we have continuing coverage of “Lavender Jack” where last we left off Jack was atop a crumbling building! We also have a look “Within” and at “My Reaper Boyfriend.” Readers are also “Welcome to Spud.”

This review is going to primarily focus on Episode 56, there’s just a lot of to unpack. Episode 57-58 are well done and shift the perspective to Honoria Crabb which isn’t something that happens all the time, but episode 56 just has a lot of interesting pieces to pull at.

When we last left Lavender Jack things were not going well for him as he dropped off a collapsing warehouse. Schkade creates that danger in the first image of the strip, before modifying it into something potentially not as bad in the second panel only to dash that fleeting sense of safety by the fourth image. Of note the second fully body image of Jack falling has the arms mirroring the first image, it creates this sense of travel. And travel we do as the first roughly third of the strip is dedicated to Jack falling through spaces. Jen Manley Lee’s coloring really stands out in this section both in the pinkish red to darker red gradient that ends the first chunk of strip, and the dreamlike vibrant colors Jack finds himself in when he wakes up to see Gio, Agatha, and a chalk board (truly all his loves in one spot.) Lee’s coloring does as much as Schkade’s line work in guiding the reader through several stages of consciousness that flow together in dream logic. The choice of paneling the dreamy sequence in these wavey panels is a good visual tell compared to the more secure panels of Jack waking up in a night club.

The dream sequence isn’t that long, about 12 panels/images. There is a moment of Mimley trying to strip of his Jack persona repeatedly telling himself he can “take this off whenever [he] wants” that is just this nice encapsulation of the motif of identity that’ll be running through this season of the series. Instead of the normal pure black gutter, everything in this sequence is replaced by that soft pink creating this softness in contrast to the violent failure of Mimley extracting himself form the costume.

Episode 56 packs in encapsulates much of “Lavender Jack” wants. It wouldn’t make much sense, but if you had to only show one strip to demonstrate what it is capable of this would be a good example. You have the previously remarked upon artwork, which serves as a good example of what this webcomics format is capable of.

The second half of the strip deals in the aftermath of all that ruckus. It’s here that “Jack” gestures towards not so much a dark and gritty deconstruction, but recognition of that inherent violence of costumed vigilantism. The Watchmaker who caught a rivet to the eye is obviously the humanized element, but for me it’s the discussion about the call to shatter all the lights. A ‘heroic’ gesture that resulted in everyone being showered in shards of glass! I doubt “Jack” is suddenly going to turn into (or is capable of) “Miracleman” #15 excess, but the willingness to recognize the violence and danger helps ground it. The same way the dancers tell Jack they politically and sartorially like him, it grounds Jack in an understandable reality of class politics that make the eccentric notion of the Black Note land. It also helps to earn Inspector Crabb’s annoyance at Ducky being “Excited” at a worthy opponent appearing.
As a bit of a sidenote, it’s nice Schkade took a second to write the characters questioning their male defaulted pronouns for the Black Note. It’s brief but they just recognize as a group they don’t know really anything about the Black Note whose costume is amorphous and even than that isn’t indicative of gender identity. For now, they decide to use male pronouns, but that’s the kind of brief aside I wouldn’t ever really expect to read.

It’s pride again. Despite the over commercialization, as a queer person I always look forward to pride. It’s not just parades and parties and drag shows. These are all terrific. It is time for people to celebrate how far we’ve come and recognize just how far we have to go worldwide. Do we really care that AT&T has a rainbow logo for one month out of the year or that the new iPhone commercial prominently features two men with their arm around each other? No. But it is a testament to the sheer economic impact queerness has had upon the world. And representation matters, so in honor of pride I chose the absolute cutest little queer comic to hit WEBTOON in a while that has just reached episode 7 on WEBTOON, “My Reaper Boyfriend” by writer/artist TwilightPrince. It is updated every Tuesday and Friday.

In just over a month over 100,000 eyes have feasted upon the adorkable, flawless, visual stylings of TwilightPrince. And gleefully, I am one of over 6,500 people who have subscribed to it. The style is faintly reminiscent of the extremely common Japanese influence on most comics on the platform. However, it stands out from the pack particularly in the faces of and dress of the characters and has a decidedly Western flourish that makes it unique. The story follows reaper Jax and a young gay kid Charlie who is in love with being in love. Charlie is continually decked out in warm pastels while Jax in both his human and reaper form is a classic goth kid. Charlie’s wispy sandy brown mop is hip and so are his round Harry Potter glasses. Jax (in human form) has fang piercings and wears all black hoodies pulled up over his head. In his reaper form his skin is the blue of an angry Hindu god.

The backgrounds are pretty minimalist, which I think is a good thing because it doesn’t take away from the characters that drive this story. Often a generic queer solid pink is all that is in the background, but it is not a cliché. It suits the whimsical tone of the story.

And whimsical it is through and through. As Charlie wishes aloud that he could sell his soul for a date with Jax, Jax promptly steals his soul and places it in peach colored alchemical flask and displays it proudly to another reaper who is lime green in color, unlike Jax’s ocean azure. His friend is horsing around, making fun of Jax for falling for a pure soul, instead of his typical bad-boy and his cohort nearly drops the flask.

Later Jax is caught breaking the rules, because apparently in a short time he has become smitten with Charlie, something that is decidedly not kosher in the world of underworld politics. As a punishment he is put in a holding cell. Meanwhile true hearted Charlie is laying in his bed obsessing over his date. He hilariously quips to his cat “this is why you have gay friends.” The next panel shows him arms crossed, eyebrows in downward curvature conceding to his cat “Or just friends for that matter.” With “friends” double underlined. I will comment here on the unique lettering style that is like the hurried handwriting of a neat freak with good penmanship and it further adds to the whimsy of the comic.

Charlie can’t seem to pay attention in class for the life of him and the passage of time is noted by a swirl of peach colored clocks with different times on them circling his head as the peach colored bell rings bellow him. Only a comic could show the passage of time in this way and I love it when comics stretch the temporal potential of the medium. Charlie waits under the tree for Jax to show and a peach colored heart is rent in two beneath him.

Jax is released from his underworld prison. But for his blatant transgression against a cardinal law of the underworld (not to fall for your mark) he is relieved of all his otherworldly duties indefinitely. However Jax may have an ally in one of the impish, catlike little goons that he discovers hiding in his locker. Jax goes entirely unnoticed as his crush Charlie walks by and it is evident that he is being further punished by having to watch Charlie fall in love with his traditionally handsome stand in. A tiny black heart is rent asunder. Opposites attract and the black and grey goth motif is the perfect yang to Charlie’s pastel colored yin. The new boy meets up with Charlie under the tree, apologizes for standing him up and corners a blushing Charlie. Will they have their first kiss so soon? Not yet, but perhaps soon. “My Reaper Boyfriend is funny, quaint, cute and even a little waggish and will make for a rainbow colored cotton candy-like read for pride.

Back in March, I looked at Hey Bob Guy’s other comic, “A Kid Named Hannah.” I had a ton of fun and so when I heard he had a new comic, I figured I’d give it a look. Fans of “A Kid Named Hannah” may not immediately connect with “Welcome to Spud” but for me, it gave me an intense bout of nostalgia for the early 2000s…for better and for worse.

“Welcome to Spud,” thankfully, is less “lol random, edgelord” humor than that description sounds but it still channels that spirit through its rotating cast of nameless but not faceless characters, acerbic tone, and simplified visual style, chiefly in the juxtaposition between the cute, button-eyed design of the Spudlings and the dark situations they end up in. Punchlines end with characters getting stabbed, the Evil organization being sexist because of course it is, and parents ragging on their kid about their looks when everyone looks identical. In fact, multiple of the jokes that come about in this batch revolve around this mismatch, between what the characters perceive and Hey Bob Guy draws. It’s effective at adding an extra layer to the jokes and infusing more satire into these sometimes tired gags.

In fact, the Spudlings are the perfect vehicle for the satire of corporate power, authoritarianism (of which Monarchy often is a form of) and the problems with negative (and positive) labels. This batch begins with a breakdown of the Spud society & the universe at large, presenting a hierarchy that on the face is ridiculous but is often how we humans live our lives. Once a person is branded one way – be it ugly, stupid, dangerous, or poor – it often remains, depsite the complexities beneath it all, and despite those very traits not on their face being a bad thing. “Welcome to Spud” both lampoons the people to whom we apply these traits as well as the ones who are applying them. It is not the deepest work but it is well crafted and a vehicle through which to question aspects of our current society while also getting in a laugh about murder robots working around their “no killing” programing. What’s not to love!

Chapter 7 of “Within” is called “The Cracks.” The title is appropriate because the wall separating the protagonist’s waking and dreaming worlds is indeed splitting apart. Literally! His apartment walls seem to be crumbling. In past chapters, sticky notes with lines indicating the faults appeared every now and then but the cracks are spreading faster than he can identify them. In this chapter, his dreams physically invade the real world, too, in ways that endanger more than his fragile grip on reality.

In this chapter, the red butterflies bursting through the cracks of the dream world seem to correspond with the cracks in his apartment walls but it’s still not clear what they are or why they’re important. The red butterflies are joined by blue butterflies that appear in the real world and seem to be the mirror image of the red ones from the dream. When he encounters them, the protagonist also encounters real-life danger, in the form of an oncoming car and an attack by some rough guys looking to steal the package he’s supposed to deliver. It’s easy to forget while reading “Within” that the protagonist is a cold-blooded hitman, but this incident serves as a reminder that while he may be clueless and psychologically unstable, he’s not exactly an innocent guy, either.

Chapter 7 is mostly without dialogue, as the protagonist and his dream self come even closer to merging and the worlds blur into each other. Though he doesn’t say or think it, the protagonist seems like he might be closer to accepting whatever his dreams are or whoever he becomes in the dreams. (Or maybe I just want him to, for his own mental health!) Although the meaning of the dream world is still unclear and the protagonist’s past and job as a hitman are left mysterious, the art of the individual panels in “Within” is rarely confusing. I’m continually impressed by the artist’s consistent style and ability to communicate action and movement even within a surreal landscape with few recognizable features.

Things seem to be escalating for Redhead the hitman, in his dreams at least, but we’ll have to wait for Chapter 8 to see if the ant lady he encountered at the end of his last dream or the cat that appeared in his window will stick around long enough to have an impact on his life.