So, welcome to the first day of webcomic palooza review month!* As I mentioned earlier, the basic idea is to review a different letter of the alphabet each day and then a couple of odd categories at the end, but it won't be nearly so neat. Also, for the series that I really love to pieces I'll provide a full review on them (that is, a paragraph on the good, the bad, and the art, like a regular review) but for the series I read but feel less enthusiastic about I'll just write up a blurb (also, journal comics are really hard to give a full review on, like bibliographies, so they'll probably get shorter ones too). I really want to give coverage to as many series as possible, hence why I'm doing it this way, so hopefully no one feels slighted if their favorite series doesn't get enough attention from me.
Now, onto the reviews!
2 Gamerz
Currently the story has undergone cerebus syndrome but this webcomic starts out as a series of unconnected pages of gaming humor. It's been done plenty of times but I still usually found something to giggle at on most pages. Recently however the story is trying to have an actual plotline going and I'm not enjoying it. It's a pretty standard and cliche ridden story (heavily anime and manga inspired) and if it's trying to be a parody it's failing, if it's trying to be a good original story it's failing as well. Your mileage may vary of course but I hope they go back to the gag a page idea soon.
2 Masters
I'm not quite sure what to make of this story after I re-read it before reviewing it. When I first tried it out it seemed like an interesting set-up (a world with two very different, and not inherently good vs evil, gods who granted different powers to their followers) and I was interested in seeing what impact these characters would make on the world and how they would change it. Now it seems to be more of a always-chaotic-evil god's followers vs the always-lawful-good god's followers (who aren't terribly sympathetic either) and the conflict and characters come off as much more flat now. I'll keep reading it for a little longer (as soon as I figure out some way to predict the irregular updates) but I'm really hoping the characters become more rounded out soon.
Hmmm, not the most positive reviews to start off on but I don't follow any other comics that start with numbers or symbols. Also, in 2 Masters' defense, it suffers from a problem that a lot of webcomics do. For a proper manga/comic, usually most of the background/reason for the plot/basic characters are introduced within the first volume which is between 120 to 200 pages long or about five month's worth of updates. For a webcomic however, one that updates five days a week can put out that much work in seven or eight months, for ones that update only once or twice a week that amount of material can take a few years to put out (the most recent page of 2 Masters even states that the first volume of the work is finished after 10 years of work, 8 years of revising the story and then two of actually posting). A lot of the comics I follow (manga and web-based) are also very plot heavy so those take even longer to set everything up so that's why I might sound more critical of younger stories, I can see that they have real potential to do something clever but I honestly can't tell if the talent to pull it off.
Tomorrow will be brought to you by the letter A and three or four mini reviews, anyone care to hazard a guess which ones they might be?
*name subject to change
