A good while ago , Erik Shoenek returned from a hiatus from Loserz, and in the process forcefully injected his comic with a heavy dosage of anime/manga (or whatever the hell the term is for the situation) influence, which you can see from before the hiatus, and after the hiatus. He’s removed noses, enlarged the eyes, and further unbalanced the head/body ratio. While rough in the beginning, the strip has, for the most part, maintained a steady style to it. However, in the most recent strip, the awkwardness of the forced changes show themselves. Shoenek simply hasn’t figure out how to work mouths in. Oh, I know what he’s trying to do. Repository of Dangerous Things worked with a similar style of mouths for a single panel of a strip, afterwards never using it again.



From that, I can only gather it’s hard. All the same, when I see the mouths Shoenek uses, all I see is a girl with the bottom of her face missing, and another girl with a beak.



And in the last panel, where he definitely tries to inject the chibi-style of “peg arms” anime enthusiasts seem to love, I see this:

OnlineComics.net Quickies!

City of Roses
When you have to scroll past a banner half the size of a typical comic to even read the comic, it’s not even worth going through the archives. Pass.

Johnny Crucifix
Although visually loud and hard to follow, Johnny Crucifix definitely has a plan to it. However, with so few comics, I’m not quite sure what that plan is.

Rachel the Great
This comic classifies its art as Manga/American, but it is lying through its teeth. It’s only one of the two, and I’ll let you figure out which. I’ll give you a hint: It’s manga. That being said, I can’t make heads or tails of what the hell's going on in it.

Finity
I could bear this comic much more if it weren’t for the ever-present pop up ads and talking advertisements. I read its entire archive of 11 comics, and I have no idea what happened, but that may be the point. If you can make sense of it all, I don’t envy you.

Basic Wage Kids
If Archie and the gang formed a band, they'd be the Basic Wage Kids. Really, the comic should be called "Basic Joke Kids." Reading this comic makes me really wish Nothing Nice were making comics again. Jesus.

Chronicles of Salterre
Damned furry comics. That aside, the comic’s poor art is counterbalanced with a successful execution of an interesting story in an anthro comic. No yapping talking anthro heads here. Yet.

Polo Sur
¿Que?

It's a sad day when the furry comic is the most interesting of the bunch.

Old news by now, certainly, but Scary Go Round has once again switched to hand-drawn art (the first switch having happened in August '05, and the eventual return to vector art taking place in November '05).

When this, the second switch, occured, I was disappointed, as the current storyline revolved around a return to the "Land of the Dead", which is the SGR version of the spirit realm, and was first introduced while Allison was using Illustrator to make comics. Because of the vector art, Allison pulled off some pretty amazing effects and visuals. Knowing that because he'd be using traditional pen and ink to illustrate the same "trippy" Land of the Dead this time around, he wouldn't be able to use the same finesse.

Of course, that's probably the exact reason he's switched to pen and ink. At first I thought it to be John Allison growing sick of vector art once more, which was the reason for the first switch (he further describes the reason for the first switch in its corresponding August '05 SGR Blog post. Considering the second switch occured after a week of guest comics, a typical sign of webcomic artist/creator burnout, it seemed as though Allison was simply sick of creating comics by computer, and wanted to return to drawing the art by hand out of sheer desperation to keep the desire for making comics going. However, in looking at the storyline, the second switch takes place when the character planning to visit the Land of the Dead "dies," and Allison is using the difference in art to illustrate the transition between realms, just like how the Green Avenger used nonpolished pencils to illustrate the separation between consciousness and dreaming. Not only that, but Allison's most likely using hand-drawn art to do new things, as to use Illustrator would be retreading the same territory; by using pen and ink, he's essentially forcing himself to innovate.