Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Webcomic Review: Wasted Talent, Weregeek, What Birds Know, Winters in Lavelle

I have no idea how I manage to follow four awesome webcomics that start with the letter "W" while I only follow one for a much more common letter like "L." Oh well, life is strange like that, onto the reviews!

Wasted Talent
Another journal comic I just found recently that, like Today Nothing Happened, started when the artist was in college so the comic covers from then until current day young adult life (which, as someone whose starting to get a little freak out by "life after college" is rather reassuring). Following the life of the Jam it's a fairly realistic comic with only a little embellishment so anyone who likes slice-of-life or journal comics would probably enjoy this. I think it's also fun to see life from an engineer's perspective instead of an artist's (also fun to see comics made by non-USians) and just a fun comic in general, go look at it!


Weregeek
I've mentioned before that I know a number of comics that switch between fluffy, slice-of-life stuff and then more plot centric arcs and that's really hard to balance. Weregeek pulls it off in a really interesting fashion by focusing mostly on the characters regular lives but having occasionally having snippets from their tabletop games. For, as the comic title suggests, this is a comic about nerds (young adults, not the high school/college crowd) who live their ordinary lives by day but have all sorts of fun after work. The more nerdy references you know the better you'll like the comment (and if you don't the comments should be able to tell you at least what series it's from) and everything is done in good fun so you'll usually end up laughing at the page anyway. There does seem to be some sort of conspiracy lurking in the background of the slice-of-life side of things but that plotline may have been abandoned by now, one problem is that the story moves pretty slow since it's a three or four panel strip most days. Oh well, I'll take well done gags over ill-paced ones every day.


What Birds Know
A fantasy webcomic that has taken a mindf*ck turn of late, the premise of this story is that Vandi, Dores, and Elia are on a school trip to collect mushrooms for a teacher which should only take a few days to complete. But in those few days we've learned the backstories for all of them (all with some unhappy parts), learned about their families, and watched them slowly go crazy. To be as spoiler-free as possible, the first part of the story starts with a mysterious story about a prince, which is later repeated at the beginning of the third chapter and, while almost nothing has been explained about that, there have been enough hints in the story to suggest that this is directly related to the other weird/creepyness of the story. The creepiest part of the story however (and done on purpose) is how such strange and disturbing things will happen to the girls and then a cut to how their families are still going about their normal lives, or how most of the girls just accept these things that are happening. I'd love to have this one in print so I could reread it easier (since the reread I did before this review was really enlightening) and I recommend this to fans of fantasy or deconstruction in general (it's not a full-on deconstruction but it's doing something interesting).


Winters in Lavelle
Another fantasy comic, just without the mindf*ck part. The story starts a little before the comic does with Aiden Winters discovering a magic globe at his house that allows him to travel to another world and one day his sister (Kari), who knows about it and doesn't like it, follows him to the world (Lavelle, title drop!) and now their a bit stuck since they don't know where the corresponding orb is to bring them back home (and, to make matters more interesting, their dad figured out what happened and seems to be freaking out, plus the fact that Aiden's grandmother told him about the orb in the first place, makes for an interesting subplot). Oh, and Aiden and Kari now have magical amber stuck in them, are being chased by mysterious deer people, and might be getting mixed up with some rebels (politics please?), sounds like a fantasy story to me! The comic still feels young to me, past the introductory stage but not by much, so I can't wait for more, is it Friday yet?




I've got yet another speaker to hear tomorrow (I think the photography department is trying to bore me to death) but since I only have one comic to review tomorrow everything should go up as normal! But, since I'm already talking about it, no reviews Monday since I have back to back club and speaker (and they're not even the last one! ;-; ) which means that I'll spend three straight hours knitting and that doesn't leave much room for reviewing, at least I like knitting....