The Webcomics Weekly #164: Brain Themed Webcomics (11/23/2021 Edition)

The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life with BRAINS!!! That might be a motif suited for last month, but it never really goes out of style. This week we look at the doctor of brains with “Dr. Brain,” a couple of very special strips for “Lavender Jack” and the continuing courtship of “Lore Olympus.”

“Dr. Brain” is nothing like the other webcomic featuring a doctor I review. Yes, they both feature protagonists with tragic pasts that drove them into a field of medicine, one psychology, the other neuroscience, they have simple, easy to remember titles, and they both have a mystery/thriller tone to them but that’s where the similarities end. For one thing, “Dr. Brain” is readable through Tapas rather than Webtoon. For another, “Dr. Brain” is far closer to a crime thriller with a sci-fi twist than a character driven drama featuring mystery elements. I bring this up because I think “Dr. Brain” is better off for having this tone and also suffers from it.

The first chapter of “Dr. Brain” is, I think, the weakest of the bunch. Artistically, it’s full of muddy colors and scratchy linework, both of which remain the style in subsequent chapters but feel more deliberate and cohesive as the comic goes on. It makes some odd, hard to parse comments about Seowl, the main character, being on the autism spectrum & having savant syndrome before dropping that with a hand-wavy explanation about him being “bad at communicating with people.” It starts the comic on a discordant note but not the kind Hongjacga seems to want.

Chapter one is very much a pilot, cramming in as much background as it can before getting to the actual meat of what “Dr. Brain” is going to be. If you were only reading this one chapter, I don’t know if it would have enough of a hook to get you to read on. Thankfully, there are currently three free chapters available with more available on a timer/coin basis, and chapters 2 and 3 provide plenty of intrigue and mystery to keep you invested. Having read further on, I can also say that while the premise of the comic is a bit head-tilting for those expecting something more grounded in reality like “Dr. Frost” – I won’t spoil it for those wanting to go in fresh – the way Hongjacga slowly parcels out reveals and narrative details surprised me on more than one occasion.

As I said before, the artistic style is gritty and rough, emphasizing the seediness of the work Seowl is doing and the grey morality of his actions. It’s a good fit but, again, it takes a bit for Hongjacga to find the right balance between moody and muddy. Even so, the characters are identifiable and despite side-characters getting a minimum of (or no) facial features, it’s easy to figure out who is who thanks to the cast’s relative smallness and enough diversity of faces & bodies.

“Dr. Brain” won’t be for everyone. It can be gruesome to look at and the heightened sense of reality that the thriller creates, combined with the looser, dirtier artwork, can be enough of a turn off for someone who’s looking for a bit of medical or sci-fi drama. But fans of Psycho-Pass and Gone, Baby, Gone will find more than enough here to latch onto and enjoy.

“Lavender Jack” is likely the longest running webcomic I’ve read, consistently and most definitely on Webtoon. Stuff like “Trekker” has been serialized longer but I didn’t just pick it up and run. That length though has created some potentially interesting challenges. Long runtimes are used as a reason for why certain comics aren’t popular and so on, “Detective Comics” is over #1000 issues people can’t read and so on. As it applies to print comics, I think it misses the real point which is to say the extraneous world building on the fringes that marketing makes believe is important and a distribution and publication system that fails to create a satisfying experience. “One Piece” has been going on for decades and still selling well or other 20+ volume Tankōbon. Length doesn’t seem like as big a deal for a webcomic, it is fundamentally immaterial, new media studies school aside. Access isn’t a problem as Webtoon doesn’t gate the archive of content. For the most part Schkade and Jenn Manley make individual strips feel satisfying unto themselves and as a group.

And yet the appearance of length still presents a different kind of challenge as you would, ideally, want a reader to pick up the new stuff first which has led to the creation of a recap strip. I love a good clips episode, Community probably did it the best, as they are efficient recontextualization of previous events meant to tell a new or different narrative. They are bricolage. With the framing device of Honoria Crabb doing her best Jack Webb “just the facts ma’am” readers new and old get a condensed plotting of the previous two seasons and a look at the forthcoming third one. The creative team don’t try to do something entirely new so much as distill “Lavender Jack” to its essence and catch you up on ~2 in world years of storytelling. It’s nicely done and the kind of thing I doubt a Marvel or DC would be able to produce. Not for lack of trying but due to the conservative nature of the direct market. Still it is an interesting possibility for long running Webtoons.

The other strip this week is a metatextual question and answer session that is more text and fan art dump than traditional comic strip. Which is fine and cool since I’m pretty sure Scott McCloud would still qualify it as one anyways. I am a process nerd, so this is just a delightful look behind the curtain. One that also points to returning and new characters.

The “Q&A” strip came out in October 2020 the recap strip was released in May 2021. That is a meaningful gap of time that probably made the presence of a recap strip more necessary since not everyone would check out the Lavender Jack wiki to refresh themselves.

What these strips do best is show what digital distribution can do to offer up paratextual content in a way that is still unified and able to directly feed back into the main text.

Okay, so. If you’ve already read this far with Lore Olympus because you either already have the trade paperback or you read the webcomic when it first started, feel free to skip this opening paragraph. (Also, I’m very curious to see what you think of the physical edition because I have it on hold at my local library but I have a feeling it’ll be a while before I actually get to read it unless I decide to purchase it.) But if you haven’t read this far, please</strong consider this warning and the warning included in the actual episode itself: episode 24 contains the depiction of a sexual encounter that may be disturbing or hurtful to some readers. Proceed at your own caution and take care of yourselves.

Last time, I wrote about how Hades and his bro pals were called to task for talking about Persephone as if she were just another piece of meat or a trophy to be had by Hades for persevering in a dead-end relationship for a long time. In these episodes, Persephone is actually preyed upon by Apollo, Artemis’s brother and god of the sun. Hermes is with them, and participates passively in Apollo’s gross behavior, showing in real time how even well-meaning bro pals can end up complicit in their friend’s predatory behavior if they don’t call them out on it. Hermes and Apollo’s behavior is in stark contrast to that of Hades, who when called out by Hera, immediately backed down and ran back to the Underworld instead of continuing to mess around with his brothers. Unfortunately, Apollo takes advantage of Persephone, and their encounter becomes a blurred mess of “maybe this is okay,” in her mind, while she tries to justify what’s happening and reconcile the fact that she does have earthly desires she thinks are wrong. Persephone is in training to be a virgin goddess for all eternity, which means her burgeoning flirtation with Hades and her confused, coerced encounter with Apollo is all the more complicated.

The artwork in the episode itself switches back and forth between Persephone in the present and Persephone in her own mind, which shows how she tries to disassociate mentally during the assault. It also does an excellent job of showing just how conflicted Persephone is, as she’s really not sure what “normal” is, despite seeming to understand how her experience with Apollo does not measure up to what she thought her first sexual encounter would be like. To make matters worse, Apollo takes pictures of Persphone after the assault, assuring her that it’s no big deal. (Of course, it’s a big deal. Even though I knew this storyline was coming, I still find myself enraged at Apollo’s shockingly awful behavior. However, the way Smythe portrays Persphone’s reactions both during and after the assault is heartbreakingly spot-on. She disassociates, decides the choice was hers to make even though she clearly didn’t want to have sex with Apollo, then tries to move on immediately by becoming engrossed in her conversation with Hades. It’s a complicated, messy way of responding to trauma, and one I know we’re only just beginning to unpack.)

Meanwhile, I decided not to stop at episode 25, because I wanted to get to the end of Hades and Persephone’s conversation. When the narrative switches back to Hades’s perspective, we get a glimpse of his own trauma, at the hands of his father, Kronos. Seeing as this is another callback to a very complicated Greek myth, I’m curious to see how it’ll feature in this modern retelling.

As Lore Olympus the physical edition hits stores and Americans get ready to acknowledge a holiday this week, please take care of yourselves, everybody. I particularly appreciated the line in episode 27, where Persephone is despairing about her role in the universe not being significant. Hades reminds her, “Saying that what you do isn’t important is like saying we shouldn’t bother learning how to read or write because it doesn’t keep us alive.” He says that Persephone bringing spring is one of the reasons mortals see the gods as gods instead of monsters, and I think all of us could benefit from seeing ourselves and our contributions that way. Till next time!