The Webcomics Weekly #150: Anniversary (8/17/21 Edition)

For the 150th time the Webcomics Weekly is back in your life! Time really has flown by even as it seemed to have ground to an interminable halt. Thank you everyone who has read from the beginning and just today. This week we have coverage of “Lavender Jack,” “Nevermore,” “Rosarium” and “Plundercats” (Plundercats, Plundercats HOOOO).

The start to this batch of episodes emphasizes the aural senses. Inspector Crabb arrives on scene and has no time for the parking police no matter the job they’re doing. She is distracted by a familiar sound which is qued by a shift in the panel. It isn’t exactly explained what that sound is, the panel just shows a cracking class and muffled speechbuble. Is it that she hears Sir Mimley-Lavender Jack or is she just have an ear for fisticuffs now? The second bit of sound play is dialogic. Schkade achieves a good amount of subtly and wordplay in this strip, but “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to politely just die” is an all-time scene chewing line that as a reader you just must emphasize. The lettering itself doesn’t do much of that for you, the “die” is slightly bolded but that doesn’t stand out all that well actually. Schkade also uses the two parts to the Black Note’s phrase to make a sort of hidden cut/panel transition going from portrait to point of view perspectives of the Note as they blast at Jack and break that clock.

Despite the theatrics of everything Schkade captures a sense of weight as Jack and Note wail on each other, no small feat either due to the large amount of pure black involved.

The destruction of Prosperity Bridge was a given, and when the clock strikes 9 it mostly all comes tumbling down. With a mixture of twisting panels and an overall emphasis on angles the destruction lands as chaotic and dangerous. Not every panel is vertically elongated, but the easy scrolling adds to the effect. The whole thing reminded me of those great California earthquake movies.

All that destruction more than earns Crabb’s traumatic reaction in the latter half of the strip. The environment drops out for the most part and she is isolated, until Tom shows up. Schkade does a great job of capturing the thousand-yard stare in Crabb without it feeling overly cartooned. This is the first time Crabb has really failed, she saved half the crowd but that doesn’t feel very good. Team Lavender Jack have never been perfect, but they also never really failed with such loss of life this way either. This was a dark chapter for “Lavender Jack.”

Depending on who you ask, comics have been around as long as people have been creating visual art. The oldest documented cave painting in Cáceres, Spain has been dated over 64,000 years old. And our earliest art were likely attempts at forming something like a narrative. The earliest comics that most closely represent comics from our era can be traced back to 18th Century Europe. Artist Scott McCloud has a lengthy definition of comics. Comics to him are much more than simply sequential art. McCloud says in his 1993 book Understanding Comics “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.” His definition is clunky and needs to be streamlined and pithier but there’s a lot to unpack there. But the main thing that’s compelling to me is that it is deliberate to illicit an intended response. When searching for a comic to review my main criteria is what type of response it generates in me, almost as a reflex. From panel one episode one, all the way to chapter 1 episode 7 of Nevermore on WEBTOON my jaw has been like a slinky, continually dropping to the floor. The comic is made by Innocentcinamonbun and are uploaded Fridays.

I should note there is a mature themes warning, but so far it hasn’t been too intense. At the end of the most recent episode there is also a trigger warning about abuse and violence. We start the story with a scene at the opera. I like comics, especially those classified a suspense to take place in opera houses and old theaters. People who are afflicted with a mysterious disease called Hunterdrax are being kidnapped. Before going on stage, some mysterious man in a mask confronts. At the play a rather tall man who has the Hunterdrax virus Nicholas. Apparently the virus gives you some sort of powers and the infected a called “hunters.” If only the Delta variant could give us superpower. There’s still a fair amount I don’’t know about this universe but I think this means that Innocentcinamonbun, is making us hunger for more. I’m not one hundred percent sure how the virus is spread and what it does to the body. But the angle with the possibly kidnapped famous opera singer seems like it has a lot of dramatic potential. I always love a good “classical” literary reference and this is called Nevermore and there is a character named Lenore, both references to the grandmaster of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe.

The art is crisp and harkens back to the classic anime and manga Hellsing. The coloration reminds me most, off Cowboy Bebop. Buts no overly derivative either. Everyone has their teachers, either in person or across time and space; Details on clothing and fabric are intricate and elegant and the dress is inventive in a steampunk way. Everything has a naturally haze rose tinted view but the colors still pop. The villain is dressed in a medieval plague doctor mask, which might be a wee bit overexposed but I think it is done in novel aesthetically pleasing manner. I know its kind of bullshit and douchey to use words like “atmospheric” to describe a work of art. But the world is rendered in such detail, it feels like you’ve left planet earth and are in a planet where viruses really can give superpowers. A world is being created ex nilhilo and so far it has a lot of potential. I would recommend this to fans of supernatural horror. Even if you find it a little too complex in places (like I did) the art is dazzling more than Dazzler from Marvel.

When we last left the “Plundercats” crew, things were heating up after the gang of space cats stole a McGuffin of some sort. This McGuffin led them to an informant that didn’t actually need or want the McGuffin … Whoops? Ferran Black, the captain space plunder cat, is looking to be acquitted for unspecified crimes. And it appears this might actually be possible with help from a lamb who brings them to a … bunny. It might be a robot bunny? In any case, it’s an intimidating bunny with the power to acquit people (animals) of crimes.

The idea that Ferran might be able to gain an acquittal for the crimes he’s supposedly committed forms the main plot of “Plundercats,” but the plot is still very far in the background of the strip. The author instead focuses many of the panels in the “Boss Bunny,” “Self-Service,” and extra story pages on the interpersonal relationships between the crew members. They banter constantly, seemingly never in dialogue with one another without a quip or two ready to sling at a moment’s notice. (Which, to be fair, is maybe how we communicate with one another now that the MCU is a dominant cultural force? Maybe? Have we all become one-liners waiting to materialize in a Joss Whedon world?) When the characters do have meaningful dialogue with one another, they sometimes reference events that we as readers haven’t seen, which becomes frustrating because it hints at the depth of the character’s relationships but that depth doesn’t feel earned.

In these stories, the author experiments with a more focused point of view type of storytelling, using captions to show a character’s train of thought instead of solely using dialogue and facial expressions. This is a welcome change of pace but the characters aren’t quite differentiated from each other enough for it to be fully effective. One of these focused on Enno, the ship’s mechanic, but since Enno’s voice isn’t fully developed or different enough from Ferran, I wasn’t sure who the point-of-view character was until they were shown. We get to see a little bit of Enno’s background as a nobody on the boring-but-pleasant planet of Veldan and the change of pace is refreshing. I would welcome more bits like this to shed light on the character’s background and history via thoughts and remembered events, which would help differentiate them from one another and help the reader care about them as individuals as the main plot proceeds.

“Rosarium” is a gorgeous comic, with dark and abyssal environments punctuated by shocks of red from neon signs or roses in hair and contrasting against the rich, deep greens of the characters. The angles of view change from tense, extreme close-ups to harsh portrait, always keeping you wary, as if no matter what, the characters were always looking out for what might be around the next corner. It evokes a feeling of dread and tragedy, the bread and butter of any good gothic mystery, supporting the story of a missing sister, a sinister world, and a troubled main character who just wants to reunite with her missing loved one.

At times, I almost think we’re looking at a video game transformed into comic form. The fixed angles help with this but primarily it is the isometric view of certain rooms that do this, giving us a full look at every locale yet creating a distance from it, as if we were evaluating these scenes for clues. This, combined with the minimal amount of dialog per update, creates a sense of distance from the characters and the story, which is both a good and a bad thing. Good because it fits the isolated, lonely tone of the comic. Bad because it can be hard to grasp the details necessary to follow the story and the world.

I think “Rosarium’s” biggest issue is that it’s a comic rather than a video game. The whole project screams at you to explore. To wonder “what’s in that drawer.” To want to take control of a conversation and make choices to solve the mystery that’s being kept tantalizingly out of reach. “Rosarium” does not have a clarity of storytelling, rather conveying through mood and context clues the important details of what’s going on, but that’s not enough to buy into the world as it is. Because this world operates on a logic different from our own, the stakes should be properly conveyed in order to understand when a character succeeds or fails, when something is in the present and when it is the past, and what constitutes a cryptic sentence with meaning and what’s just dialog we’re reading mid thought.

However, I think the dreamlike atmosphere and lack of concrete details may work for some readers. Re-reading chapters allows one the chance to scour over details and pick up on what one may have missed the first time around. It’s a comic that rewards careful reading, and with such a slow paced story we’re already primed to take things slowly. I still think it could have done with more establishing information about the world and the main characters but I can see how that may have changed the contours of the comic. For a project that looks and feels so unique, I would rather struggle for an incomplete picture than be handed a full one with too much ease.