My Best of 2016

Dang, this is quite a bit later than I wanted.

I needed that break, not so much because reviewing was burning me out but life was burning me out in general. Work is less crazy after the holidays, I've been accepted into grad school which will cool my job search for a while, and Katsucon is done so I have fewer pressing panel/cosplay deadlines to get to.

Plus, the zoloft is REALLY kicking in now and guys, in hindsight I was pretty dang depressed last year. I had so many different health problems (did you know stress can fuck up your eating AND give you hives? Not simultaneously but I only fixed my eating problems after a little bit of bronchitis and the hives did drive me to the emergency room) that there was just no respite for me at all, there was always something going wrong for basically a solid year.

Personally 2017 is going better so far, although yes we have possibly the last president of the United States currently in power so I'm real glad for the zoloft keeping the "hamster ball of anxiety" in the back of my mind, not constantly in the forefront. But before I fully stride into 2017 with this blog I want to look back at 2016 one last time here and talk about the things I did love last year.

Webcomic Review: Space Boy

This was a harder comic to review than I expected, it seems like such a simple story; sometime in a the future a girl moves to Earth from a deep space mining colony, must adjust to being in a new time as well as a new place, and it nails so many of the basic, oft-overlooked, parts of an adolescent story. Plus it's being hosted in an unusual place in a different-than-usual format and how about I just start with the review already? 

Space Boy by Stephen McCranie

Over three hundred years in the future, technology has greatly changed but people remain the same. Amy has spent her entire life living in an outer space mining colony, studying a blue planet called Earth and humanity's accomplishments, when her father loses his job and her entire family is sent back to Earth on a 30 year voyage. No time passes at all for Amy but once on Earth she has to deal with an entirely new world in more ways than one. Her new classmates are inscrutable but kind except for Oliver, this boy seems almost more lost than Amy and for that he might be the closest friend she can have. 

Webcomic Review: Check Please!

I started reading this comic between late July and early September, I believe I got this recommendation from one of the many "webcomic recommendation" links I posted, and then realized I had actually seen this comic earlier. I had actually seen a banner for this at Otakon but since it was an image of Bittle holding a pie I couldn’t tell if it was about hockey or about a waiter whose customers just never seemed to leave/pay. I mention this not because I think it’s a bad banner advertisement, just because I think this would be a hilarious AU and someone should get on that now please!

Check Please! by Ngozi Ukazu

Webcomic Review: O Human Star

I mentioned this comic recently in my A Boy and A Girl review, the human-robot relationships in a near future instantly reminded me of O Human Star, and found myself thinking about it again after I picked up a copy at SPX back in September. So, since it looks like the last time I did a review of it was a few years ago, allow me to convince you dear readers once again why you should give this very human story a shot.

O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti

Webcomic Review: Erstwhile

I may be a week off from my usual schedule now but I still wanted to take the time and highlight the just-ended Erstwhile before it holds the kickstarter for it's third and final volume next month. I have the first volume from the very first kickstarter and I'm still deciding if I want to pledge for another volume or not (it's a matter of "will I reread this?") but don't think that means I didn't like this anthology, on the contrary this is the most consistently well-drawn and well-told anthology I've ever come across.

Esrtwhile by Gina Biggs, Louisa Roy, and Elle Skinner

Webcomic Review: Strays

Normally I try to use Webcomic Wednesdays to focus on currently updating series but since this series literally ends in a few weeks and I have such a backlog of comics that I wouldn't be able to talk about it regularly until nearly October, I'm going to be flexible here and explain why I kept up with this series for nearly six out of it's eight years.

Strays by  Samantha Whitten and Stacey Pefferkorn

Webcomic Review: Kiwi Blitz

Sorry for the delay guys, ended up having a much more full work day than I expected yesterday and wanted to make sure this review was actually coherent before I posted (which I'm sure everyone will grudgingly admit they prefer)

While I don't regret trying to review a webcomic every month, since I'm not worried about running out of comics to talk about anytime soon, I am starting to realize just how delayed all of my regular comic reviews are becoming now. Partially since I alternate them with movies/tv shows every week anyway, since I usually don't consume enough of either of those to have a full review each week, I'm really wondering if I should come up with a new plan so I can talk about even more, wonderful comics here....

  Kiwi Blitz by Mary Cagel

Weekly Round-UP: July 26th-August 1st

Figuring out a schedule is hard, in fact I'd argue that you never really find one but rather you get to a point where you're making smaller and smaller adjustments. On that note, anime review is coming out Tuesday this week instead of Monday since I know I'll be too busy Monday for sure, hopefully with my new work schedule this won't happen as much but this Monday is special.

For those who missed it, I finally got this week's book review up earlier today (Prudence), I also pushed forward a radio drama review this week so that I could highlight a Sparkler Monthly title during their kickstarter (which ends in one day!, I choose to talk about Tokyo Demons) and for anime I wrote a lot about Sound! Euphonium. That show ended up being a show I could talk almost endlessly about, I'd love to compare it to Honey and Clover actually about how the characters are both real characters and fantastic representations of the people you find in creative fields in school although it's been years since I've seen H&C so I might need to rewatch/reread that first. Everything else below the cut~

Webcomic Review: Skin Deep

There are only a handful of webcomics that I tried out nearly six years ago when I got into the medium that I'm still following now, both due to me becoming bored of them and due to the comics actually finishing. Skin Deep is one of those rare titles although I remember that not because I had an immediate, deep connection with it (although the characters are also college freshman!) but because I remember getting a pop-up malware ad on the site and panicking quite throughly in my freshman dorm room (I think I went so far as to take the battery out of my laptop to make sure nothing was going in the background). Fortunately this didn't color my experience reading the comic or make me resentful, but I am glad that these days the majority of ads I see on webcomics are ads for other comics which are 100% less likely to give me malware.

Skin Deep by Kory Bing

Webcomic Review: Wasted Talent

Funny enough, this is a Webcomic Thursday instead of a Webcomic Wednesday because I finally got a new computer and spent an hour transferring over my webcomics! The bookmarks came over as part of Chrome but I didn't realize the RSS feeds for my add-on wouldn't, it wasn't the most tedious task ever but that's because I have done the most tedious tasks in the world recently so the bar is pretty high for me. 

Wasted Talent by Angela Melick

Webcomic Review: Widdershins

Well it's that time of the month again, it's a bit terrifying how fast this first part of the year goes by. I'm afraid that I've been focusing one fantasy/sci-fi webcomics here more than I meant to but after thinking about it I realized that most of my favorite "realistic" comics are real-world journal comics, many of which are still fairly new or on and off hiatus fairly regularly. I'd ask for people to recommend me more but I'm not even sure what I would want out of a "realistic fiction" comic, do those include mysteries? Since I am completely down with more mysteries, although nearly every plot-centric comic will have a mystery or two in it just like this one here does.

Widdershins by Kate Ashwin

Webcomic Review: Cucumber Quest

While Cucumber Quest has a fairly large following I'd imagine that Gigi D.G's first comic, the Hiimdaisy (her old pen name) Persona 4 fancomic probably has an even wider name recognition and that's how I first found her work. I really liked that series of comics and was sad that it's unfinished (for the uninitiated, I really like this fandub of the comics) and I'm still surprised by the notoriety of it, I believe that the English dub for the Persona 4 The Arena game even had a reference to one of her jokes in there. So it wasn't a surprise to me that this work is also influenced by classic RPGs, although it might be an even stronger connection than I first thought.

Cucumber Quest by Gigi D.G.

Webcomic Review: Girls With Slingshots

Well this wasn't the original plan but since the comic did end just last week it's perfect timing for me! If you follow the RSS feed the comic is now repeating with it's very earliest strips (but now in color) and holy cow I didn't even remember that the art was so different at first, so if anyone else is looking at the front page for the first time in a while and is confused that would be why, it's not your memory it's actually the comic!

Girls with Slingshots by Danielle Corsetto

Webcomic Review: As the Crow Flies

I had completely forgotten until I started writing this review but Gillman was another artist I met briefly at Small Press Expo last year (seriously, if you are in the District/Maryland/Northern Virginia area you need to go to this con) and they laughed a little bit when I said that I thought the story was wrapping up soon. To me it seemed as if the major reveals had been made and we were being set up for a climax with a quick downturn but Gillman said that there's a lot left to this story, I'm hoping now that I haven't jumped the gun and reviewed it too early.

As the Crow Flies by Melanie Gillman

Webcomic Review: Galaxion

This has not been a good week for my review writing but the delay on this post does mean that I heard a very apt quote for it. I was listening to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast (one of their more recent episodes, a short take on the Scott McCloud Sculptor book and other comics they currently recommend) and they had a great line "but this isn't a place where we dump on things, this is where we recommend things that we like". I've been getting a lot of webcomic review requests lately and haven't taken any of them up yet since that's exactly what it would be, me dumping on an amateur's comic when I'd rather just recommend stuff I like!

Galaxion by Tara Tallan

Webcomic Review: The End

As I mentioned in my State of the Blog, I'm going to make an effort to talk about more webcomics including ones I reviewed several years back since my writing has gotten stronger since then. I read quite a few webcomics these days (it's probably around 80 total but closer to 60 of them are currently updating regularly/on hiatus with regular author check-ins) and when considering which ones to review I'm looking for comics that are in a specific stage of their story. Many of the comics I read are at least partially action oriented so I think of them as having a slightly different break-down than the one I was taught in school; an introduction, explanation period, rise to and then climax (I include any mini-climaxes in this big section), and then a falling down to the closure. The End is a good example of why I think of the introduction and the explanation parts of the story as separate ones, The End has a large cast with many factions and while there are some explanations given in the very beginning (to both the characters and the readers), the story really needs all of the important players to have been introduced before it can start explaining why there are conflicts and letting the cast start reacting to them.

So expect most of the comics I choose to review to be in a similar place, still early on in the story but not in the beginning anymore. There are a few comics I would like to review that are more in that climax stage which makes it tricker (since whatever I say can be completely changed within a few pages) but I don't plan to let a conquerable problem like that keep me from telling others just how great these works are.

The End by Ran and Cory Brown

Webcomic Review: Take-Off!

Sorry for the delay here guys, between the fact that my Pyscho Pass 2 review ended up being nearly 2000 words (oy vey) and that I needed to start writing up my winter 2015 anime post (with nearly 10 shows) this one got neglected more than I should have. And really I should have had this post up months ago, this comic and The Littlest Elle both wrapped up around the same time which was back when I was debating about changing my webcomic reviewing format and I dithered. When I finally did decide that yes, I should do a proper write-up on both of these concluded series I realized that I wanted to push this one back a little bit until Carter's new comic had also started up so I could mention that as well. That webcomic, God Slave, launched in early December and now has enough pages that I can safely recommend it as well but I'm getting ahead of myself, I need to talk about races and mythical creatures first before I mention the crazy world of Egyptian mythology.

Take-Off by Meaghan Carter

Webcomic Review: The Littlest Elle

Initially I was going to hold off on changing how I did webcomic reviews until the new year but what the heck, I'll talk about it more in my end of year round-up post in about a month but I've decided that I'm going to start doing reviews of completed webcomics I follow as if they were a comic or manga series (even if I reviewed them while they were still on-going since I've done that for manga as well). Of course, this series actually ended months back and I was waffling on whether or not to start doing these reviews now but I have a bit of a lull in my schedule and this artist does have a few other active projects so I'd like to highlight one that she's done to help get people interested in the ones she's still working on (I'm also impressed at anyone who manages to work on three separate webcomics at once, no matter what the update schedule is!)

The Littlest Elle by Elle Skinner

Webcomic Review: Strong Female Protagonist

Strong Femal Protagonist by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag

Allison Green used to be a superhero, she's retired now but she still has all of her biodynamic super-abilities. Too bad you can't solve most problems in the world by punching something but she's willing to learn how to deal with problems in other ways.

When I first saw the title for this comic I got nervous and put off reading it for quite a while, while the phrase "strong female protagonist" started out with good intentions these days it's a phrase that usually means "a female character who is physically strong and NEEDS NO MAN, YEAH, well okay that's a lie since she's emotionally weak/has no emotions to speak of at all." So, a very flat character, I've seen people describe it as "writing a male character in a female shape", which in and of itself comes wit a whole slew of weird connotations, and let me say that Mulligan and Ostertag are very clearly familiar with what the phrase means and that it was a very deliberate choice for a title. SFP takes a route that you don't see as often in superhero stories (I've seen so many different superhero stories that I'm not even sure if it's a straight retelling, a deconstuction, or reconstruction) where has Allison willingly "outed" herself as Megagirl live on national television and now works to try and help save the world as a more ordinary citizen instead of simply punching people through walls (and, while the story isn't completely clear about this, she seems to be the only masked/only American superhero to have done this). One thing I really like about her character is just how honest she is, not as in she's always telling the truth but how she's very upfront that even though she's helped save the world seven times she doesn't really know that much about how it works ("I've been in the Pentagon four times and I'm not sure what they really do") and really shouldn't have gotten as much media attention as she did. I think one of the best moments of the series so far was when she has not quite a rant but a piece where she said yes, she's a violent person and it's just so easy for her to let loose and really hurt people and both how hard it's been to break those habits and how it scares her. I'm rather surprised that I haven't seen that speech in more superhero stories actually, since wrestling with yours powers and responsibility is a classic part of the superhero story, and it's part of the reason why I think both long time superhero fans and newcomers would enjoy this story.

That's not to say that every part of the story has been smoothly written, I found the story involving Allison's teacher to be so blunt and obvious with it's themes that any meaningful message it could have provided was just killed by it's execution. Sadly, yet perhaps unsurprisingly, that's one of the earlier stories in the series so I advise people to keep going if they find the details in the other, concurrent subplots interesting even if this particular subplot doesn't quite work the way it should. But by and large the story's writing is strong and fresh. I find it interesting that a large part of the reason behind Allison outing herself was from encountering the super-villain Menace since usually when a hero actually listens to a villain's schemes it's a sign that they were rather weak-willed and easily manipulated all along, in other words not a hero after all. Here it doesn't feel like the case, it does seem a little odd that Allison actually took his words to heart but here it's a sign that she's incredibly strong-willed, she very much wants to save and protect the world and once she realizes that there's a better way to do it she switches tacks (although if it turns out that this was a long-term plan by Menace I'd only be half surprised, rather interested to see how the story continues to develop his character as well).

To talk about the look of the comic, I get the impression that the art strives to be a bit more realistic than it actually is but superhero comics are one of the genres that look equally good both super-cartoony and super-realistic. The comic itself is in black and white but the cover for the latest chapter has me intrigued since instead of following the series usual predominate colors (yellow, blue, and a bit of orange) it's in magenta and cyan, it's a sign that just like everything else in the comic the art is constantly changing and evoling and, again like the rest of the story, I can't wait to see where it ends up.

And as a heads up, while you can get the first issue or two of SFP right now I believe they're going to be running a KS for the first four chapters (issues) to be collected into one tradeback sometime in April or May so if you like the comic remember to put aside a bit of your money for that if you can!

Webcomic Review: Phandomland

Phantomland by Maarie

Santa Lusion is a rather ordinary series but ever since she came there Chie's life has been strange. Brought there not by choice she wakes up one morning to say that she suffered from a terrible diease that left her with no memories of her previous life and was declared dead by official records. And now she's in the employ of Cypress, an organization that trains these "ghosts" to fight crime and she's been given the meanest, toughest ghost to train her, crap. 

Cops, "light" superpowers, people with unreliable memories about their pasts, none of these ideas are new and I'm sure I've come across at least one story before with all three of these tropes in it, there's a lot of fiction out there guys. However there is something to the rawness of these tropes which makes me think that they won't play out the usual way. M isn't just the usual "bad cop to the rookies good cop," he's an antihero for sure and I expect getting him to change will be one of the ongoing conflicts. Likewise, Chie doesn't seem like she'll just settle into being the new girl, I can also see her fight to figure out her past being not only a driving force but an even bigger conflict than m's attitude problem. And there I've just explained why this series, despite it's rather ordinary summary, there's a spark, a fight to it which I think will help develop it very nicely. 

Besides how the story is structured, I like how spunky Chie is. She's a likable newbie whose curious and ignorant but not dumb, although I expect she'll be the "audience stand in" character for a while in order to get all the exposition across. I do wonder where the story will go though, there's a short blub on the comic's front page that the story has been printed before yet I've gotten the impression that the current updates are all new. In the end that part won't matter although the art does actually feel a little dated as well. I don't mean that in a bad way, rather that it seemed like four or five years ago, perhaps a bit longer, it was "in style" to go aping manga by drawing a comic in just black and white with some tones, in some ways a very stark style that contrasted a lot with the character designs and setting details, and I just don't see that style used quite as much (heck, I think webcomics are actually leaning more towards being in color these days which is rather cool). Regardless, I hope that isn't a sign that something behind the scenes isn't going well for the comic and that it develops into being as interesting as I think it will be!