The Webcomics Weekly #162: Turkey Season Opens (11/9/2021 Edition)

The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life! The leaves are starting to change but not the Webcomics Weekly. This week we have a look at the “Con Job: Revenge of the SamurAlchemist” as well as the season finale of “Lavender Jack” and more of “Lore Olympus.”

It’s been almost a year since I checked in with “Con Job” and a lot has happened, which means I can now offer a much less qualified recommendation. With 91 pages under its belt, “Con Job” has moved past the set-up phase and well into the meat of the story. Riley has had their world shattered and now is trying to piece it back together with the help of their friends. Like I said in my first review, if you know who Marc Montagna is lampshading, it’s fairly easy to see the contours of the journey up until this point and likely from here on out but what makes “Con Job” so compelling is how Baron & Jones have crafted their characters.

I may be biased because it makes me so happy to see Riley struggle not with their Judaism but in balancing its priority in their life but it’s present in all the characters. These most recent pages are less focused on this aspect, as it’s a bunch of info gathering for the larger plot stuff, but I wanted to focus on what came right before. Baron & Jones have dug into all of these characters, even the toxic members like Helldogg, and found their empathetic centers. They’re not the most nuanced centers – the bluntness and tidiness of the dialog coupled with its casual nature sometimes reads less natural than it should, mostly in expository scenes – but they’re important complexities nonetheless.

What’s important to remember is that these are high schoolers and high schoolers are constantly flailing about. Harlan aka Helldogg thinks being cool is being snarky and cynically ironic, defining oneself in opposition to those around him, and embodying a toxic premise because it gets a rise out of others and makes him feel powerful. But in the end, as we see, he’s mostly just insecure and the front is him acting out. The story, though, still shows the consequences of this toxic legacy he’s created when the rest of the club can’t tell if he’s being earnest or not in his desire to help because the club was the only place that he felt safe.

And this insecurity, manifesting in different ways, is at the heart of much of the characters’ inner turmoil, as is the case with many young people and, hell, most people. Insecurity, uncertainty, and the anxiety they breed are powerful forces that can shape a life, for better or for worse. “Con Job” and its characters understands this, thus allowing us to be given an empathetic picture of characters struggling in many ways against these internal forces alongside the kinds of external forces that take advantage of them: the King Johns and Mark Montagnas of the world. If “Con Job” can keep this focus up through the end, I think this will be a webcomic I’m going to come back to again and again.

Well, that’s the season finale of “Lavender Jack ” season 2, I rather think the creative team pulled it off. Unlike the previous finale this one was more of a chamber piece with all the players in one big room playing out a melodrama of family and desire not too far off from The Phantom of the Opera. Despite this contained, if cavernous, space Schakde does a good job of making the cave feel rightly fungible as Jack and the Note in the way comics action often does. They are off battling in the vaguely specific somewhere and Crabb is set up to fix everything and save those who maybe don’t deserve the second chance. That sense of the vaguely specific is achieved through a mixture of inky black fades for lack of a better term and harsh panel delineations. The former effect has a way of unifying the image such as at the top of episode 86 and about a third of the way as Jack gives the note a coup de grace (the wrestling move not the literal French meaning). The latter is more efficient at marking space and separating one image from the other. Unlike the fight with Not-Lord Hawthorne that relied on a lot of vertical space this one played more with perspective to create the sense of action.

The question of who the Black Note is under that mask is both the most important question to ask and the least important. You can insert your “no one cared who I was until I put on the mask” reference here. Up until the point we knew their name, Cecil Cragen, that was the most concrete information we’d had as Schkade artfully hid any direct depiction of his face. But even with a name reader already knew what mattered, the relationship with Tom and Eddy. So the cherry on top being the explanation for how Van Lund had leverage over Gall all these years was satisfying and not entirely out of left field. The final vision connecting the father and son in a sort of fading match of one another is an excellent image and the kind that only really works in this format.

Despite all this heavy melodrama and fair bit of death – I couldn’t help but read the laughing onomatopoeia of the Note at the end the same way Joker laughs at the finale of Mask of the Phantasm. Schkade really hams it up with just a solid one liner. These aren’t cheesy action movie gags or Marvel Studios styled bathic humor, but the kind of wordplay that is built into the series and Jack as a character. They didn’t lessen the sense of danger but heightened it.

In the end Schkade stays true to the bombs he dropped earlier by having Gall live with the knowledge that Jack is Sim Mimley (and apparently an embarrassment to knighthood.) Gall gives them 24 hours to leave town before he goes “Over the Edge” again, after being freshly reelected. It puts the series in an interesting space of possibility. I actually haven’t been reading season three thus far, but it would be interesting to see if “Lavender Jack” goes on tour for a bit before inevitably being called back to Gallery.

It’s bro time! This week on “Lore Olympus,” Hades goes to brunch with the guys while Eros takes Persephone and Artemis shopping.

In these episodes, our main duo, Hades and Persephone, are still separately processing their night-slash-morning together. Nothing happened but they both clearly want to see more of each other while both having reasons to think it’s impossible. This is like if the “Tell me more, tell me more” song from Grease was performed by a trio of bad boy gods. It’s fun to see Hades getting roasted by his brothers and while the jokes are good, they’re also a little dark. (Zeus pinching bottoms and Poseidon looking for a new wife – both on the nose references to much more serious infractions committed by the gods who are here portrayed as harmless doofuses.)

In the meantime, trouble appears to be on the horizon in the form of Apollo, Artemis’s brother. What actually happens between Apollo and Persephone is yet to come though, so for now I’m content to enjoy Hades getting knocked down a peg by his brothers, who correctly scold him for wanting to take back Minthe, the terrible nymph he’s been seeing, and Hera, who rightly scolds all the men for talking about Persephone like a trophy to win. Hera probably has her own motives for sticking up for Persephone and dragging her husband, but we only get a hint of them as of episode twenty.

Until the main two are actually reunited or another event happens to carry the plot, these episodes have been fun but feel like a transition to the larger story to come.