The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life. And this week Elias is bringing in the clowns!
Clown Corps
Chapters 1 & 2
Updates: Mondays
By Joe Chouinard
Reviewed by Elias Rosner
There are three types of clowns in today’s media: the silly, the scary and the sad. For many, including myself, scary seems to have edged out silly & sad – barring the occasional silly within the scary. Yet there remains a hunger for the good old clownery of yore, a hunger I did not know I had until I checked out “Clown Corps.”
Set in a world where clowns are more akin to the Armed Detective Agency of “Bungo Stray Dogs” than the party & circus adjacent professions of our own, “Clown Corps” is the story of McBell, a thief with a surprising knowledge of clownery, Binky, the grizzled veteran clown worn down by the world, and Mustard, a teacher at Clown College and the energetic new partner of Binky. Together, or apart, they’ll unravel a sinister conspiracy happening beneath their red rubber noses. Splash on a side of a robbery gone wrong and a college/school story and you’ve got yourselves a “Clown Corps” pie.
If I were to try and pitch this, it’d be a hardboiled detective story full of slapstick comedy and high-energy shounen action. Paradoxically this combination of conflicting tones actually works, for the most part. Much like the comedy and the drama in “Demon Slayer” or the later arcs of OG “Dragon Ball,” Chouinard is good about not letting one tone step on another; you kind of have to if the crux of your series is also the central joke.
And boy is this series funny. I laughed my way through every chapter. I’ve been thinking about McBell slipping on her own pie, as well as Ollie’s Pog Attack, for hours now. Oh, and did I mention that pies in this universe that are snap generated via special clown gloves and are actually non-lethal restraint devices ala Spider-man’s webbing? It’s wild, folks. It’s not all fun and games though. There’s also a brewing discussion within and without their ranks about the role of clowns and the ethics of where they are now, seeing as how they used to be firefighters and are currently a pseudo-merc group hired out by the highest bidder/the police. That’s a dynamic I love and cannot wait to be explored via McBell (an outsider,) Binky (jaded insider,) and Mustard (perceptive, optimistic insider.)
Tonally, Chapter 1 is a lot more jokey, jokey, the whole way through while chapter 2 lets the world be more serious. There’s a greater blending of tones, even if it’s still an uneven blending. Also, Chapter 1 is a bit long in the tooth and would have benefited from having a break in the middle, seeing as how it’s really two distinct halves: the robbery and the trial. This isn’t an issue with chapter 2, which intersperses McBell’s Clown College acclimation and her first training/making friends arc with the developments in Binky & Mustard’s investigation into the rocket launching clowns. There’s a more natural progression that makes it feel like a cohesive unit rather than a few disparate parts.
This is one of those things that doesn’t really matter but brothers me all the same. It’s a particularly bad problem in webcomics where chapters are way more arbitrary than they should be and it leaves one feeling overwhelmed and unmoored.
What’s more of an issue for me is the hard shift from crime/heist story to a school story and the lack of stakes for the latter. Once chapter 1 is over, her worries over money – she has to pay back everything she stole, after all – disappears and the set-up of “you need to pass or else” is subsumed into the character’s other anxieties. It reorients her character to be around growing as a person within this new environment. And that’s OK. It’s good even! I like the small emotional arc she goes on, learning the value of friends and letting herself be vulnerable, even just a little. There’s just a thinness to it when considering the story as a whole and a disconnect from the rest of the narrative because we didn’t
Continued belowStill, I’m impressed with how quickly Chouinard managed to hook me with “Clown Corps.” Within just a few pages I was already invested in the antics of McBell, Mustard, and Binky, not to mention the cavalcade of clowns who get pied into oblivion during McBell’s daring escape from her robbery gone wrong. The writing is snappy and funny, the cartooning is fluid, and the story is shaping up to have the right amount of short, medium, and long term threads to follow. They’re not always dolled out in the right proportions but they’re there and I’m intrigued enough to not care.
Chouinard is also very good at portraying motion and impact. It’s stretchy, perfectly suited to the comic’s goofy concept and the inherent silliness of clowning. I feel like I’m looking at the in-between frames of animation, with smears and broken proportions, before it coalesces into panels of clear end points to said action. The key frames, if you will. All of this is aided by the art’s simplicity of form and color. It’s not particularly flashy or, at the start, very polished. The coloring is barebones flat with zero shading and the linework is all about function over form. It enables a greater mobility on the part of the artist but ends up looking uneven outside of fights. Obviously this improves as the comic progresses and it’s never a deal breaker. It just won’t be winning any drafting awards anytime soon.
Despite my gripes and grouses, “Clown Corps” is shaping up to be a well-constructed story with plenty of room to grow. The characters are endearing, the themes are meaty, and it’s so damn funny I wouldn’t care if the plot fell apart. Best of all, it’s got 3 more chapters after what I read. So long as I never have to see the villain’s disturbing chin and teeth again, I think this is one to follow for a long time yet.
