"One Small Step," by Joe Kandra, tells the story of a man thrust into space via a modified Minivan. After crash-landing on an alien planet and being befriended by its inhabitants, the main character, Doug, is off to explore the galaxy.

The honest and simple art style, reminiscent of "Absurd Notions" with a hint of Peanuts, does a great job executing the absent-minded plotline. There’s not too much thought in the plot as it's more "just for fun" than anything else. OSS is almost the opposite of the similarly-themed "Freefall," which takes great labor in constructing a fully-functioning and logical universe of space-travel and alien worlds, interwoven with a matching sense of humor.

However, OSS's biggest shortcoming is that it builds its founding moments from more homages/references than originality. The minivan blasted into space and time due to a Flux Capacitor, from Back to the Future, in the engine. Doug, once on the alien planet, is outfitted with Nano-Translators, which are essentially the BabelFish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Later, Doug's minvan is modified to include a "Dimensional Portal [...] built into the door," which makes the minivan "bigger on the inside than the outside," ala Doctor Who's TARDIS. Following that, the aliens give Doug a guide to help him, with the cover "Don't Panic"; the book is not "the Hitchhiker's Guide" (as Doug mentions the cover is a "nice touch"), but is simply another reference. In fact, the comic seems to buddy up to Douglas Adams (most likely for whom the main character is named for) altogether, with the aliens expressing their admiration for the man.

Most of these references were accompanied with an admittance of the reference ("Just like Dr. Who"), which is acceptable, but with so much of the story relying on references to other, more famous people's, stories, what can Kandra call his own? Rather than being original and coming up with his own ideas to achieve his own story, Kandra instead relied on plot devices to get the character from point A to B as quickly as possible through more familiar source ideas. An occasional reference isn't anything bad, but the whole beginning is derived from others' work.

For example, was giving the engine specifically a "Flux Capacitor" necessary? Plenty of science fiction franchises include time travel as part of their plot. However, they think of their own ways to achieve the same effect. The Flux Capacitor is there in name only... why not explain it away by saying something like, "The engine transverses the Space/Time membrane as a means of reaching faster-than light travel. Therefore, the vehicle has access to Space and Time travel."

It's all sci-fi throwaway mumbo-jumbo, but at least you'd be able to call it your own.

As the old story goes, a guy goes to a doctor. He says to the Doctor, “Doc, it hurts when I do *this*”

The doctor replies, “Well, don’t do it.”

Jin Wicked, author of autobiographical comic “Crap I Drew on My Lunch Break,”, seems to have had nothing but trouble since she quit her job in December 2004 to focus on Crap as a means to support herself. Here’s a small part of a longer newspost from a few months ago in which she explains a brief hiatus:

“[…] this past year has also been extremely hard on me. I've had animals get sick and lots of vet bills, numerous recurring computer problems, lost a lot of work time due to events outside of my control, had to deal with health problems, bank problems, you name it. I've also had a lot of necessary expenses incurred as my business and websites have grown. So right now I am in a fair amount of debt, and I'm trying to realistically decide whether this comic is worth the frustration and amount of work I put into it vs. my situation. I am just slowly sinking. Adding to that fact a very vocal minority of readers who seem intent on ruining the enjoyment I get out of this, and I'm seriously having to evaluate the future of this comic. I want to keep working on it, but if the main thing I'm getting out of it is a few jerkish readers continually pissing me off, and owing my soul to credit card companies, there isn't much point.”

That was posted as part of an explanation as to why she wasn’t updating with new comics. The hiatus came to pass and she started updating once again for a brief period of time. However, several weeks ago, she removed everything… comics, website, and all. In its place was an explanation of why, including these reasons:

1. I need a break from everything involved with comics, including the website and all that comes with it.
2. I am working on private commissions, I have a sick pet, and am trying to get ahead on many upcoming bills.
3. This website has affected me to the point that my heart (palpitations) is acting up all the time. I am not well.
4. I want to quit. Shutting down the site for a month is a compromise because I know many people enjoy it.
5. If this does become permanent, the books will be available for your archive-reading needs.

You should make comics because you want to make comics. If doing something you don’t want to do is causing you pain, especially physical pain…

Well, don’t do it.

Just like last week there was a comic with a Penny-Arcade art-style and a Ctrl-Alt-Del humor, this week there’s a comic with a CAD art-style and a humor that can’t be enjoyed by anyone.

"The Lotro Files," by JJ Maitland, is a comic that sets out to satire the gaming community around the Lord of the Rings Online game, as well as the game itself. One thing I was interested in seeing was how much humor they could pull from the franchise… they call themselves “The LOTRO Files,” and have thusly dedicated themselves solely to Lord of the Rings. Because of their name, they can’t have access to the otherwise wealth of information that non-specific gaming comics have. If they make a joke about another game besides LOTRO, they’re no longer the “The LOTRO Files”… they’re “The LOTRO Files… and some other comics that don’t have anything to do with LOTRO.”

Every time one of the LOTR movies came out, the webcomic community would be flooded with Golum/Precious/”the One Ring” jokes… and that’d be it. Since that was all a casual observer would be interested in and understand, I wanted to see what kind of LOTR-specific jokes TLF could pull off, since their intended audience would most certainly more fanatic about the series.

Before I start off, let me point out that one of the worst things a comic can do starting out is to draw a woman, poorly, and then draw attention to it. This comic has that woman as the banner atop every page. Yes, that’s a woman. Supposedly. When I first saw it I thought it was a Rob Liefeld MS Paint rendition of some sort of LOTR troll, or orc, or whatever the hell it is.

It’s hard to sell “sexy” when you can’t draw.

Anyway, onto the comics. Since there were only eight in the archive, it was a rather short read and easy enough to include them all in the critique.

1: “And So It Begins”
With an ending line like, “Oh crap, here we go again,” it’s actually a fair way to start a comic. And even though the first comic has a “the One Ring” punchline, it could either be a ploy to pull in readers with a familiar joke, or an unintentional foreshadowing of the quality of jokes to come.

2: “Patience My Pet”
Who is Patience? Why would kidnapping it be a threat? Or more than that, why is the line funny? The “Kidnap Patience” threat in the middle is entirely nonsensical until you get to Comic 7, and even then it doesn’t make much sense.

After that, the comic ends in another “precious joke.” Is it because the author is trying to break readers into the LOTR franchise with another (well, the same) familiar joke? Well, since the “Patience” reference isn’t explained until Comic 7 (unintentionally, no less), probably not.

3: “The Hunter”
Of all the comics that make no sense… this is another one of them. There are three panels and I cannot grasp what the joke is. The first panel really tries to push the idea that the character needs to be quiet, with words like “silently,” “stalking,” and the phrase “not making a single sound.” The second panel is a glowing-green arrow flying away. The third panel is the character remarking on that the arrow is glowing green and how he is going to stay calm about it. What the fuck.

I don’t get it. The joke he’s setting up would be that the second panel would be something to ruin the silence the character is trying to maintain, followed by a remark of dismay as the third panel. Normally, I’d applaud Maitland on not being predictable, but I’d like to think that for every red-herring setup there’s some line of logic behind it. It’s more like he lost track of what the joke was along the way and just wrote about what he was doing.

4: “The Regiment Calls”
Another golum/precious reference. That is all.

5: “The Voice of… Reason?!”
Aside from the main character redrawn in a robe (with his hands still in his fucking pockets… in a robe), the entire comic consists of paragraphs of “dialogue,” and may as well have been a forum post and not adapted to a comic. The comic attempts to justify itself with a humorous turn of events in which the main character speaking these paragraphs of text is beaten to a pulp by those he was just insulting. But, when the “pulp” looks like a pile of red Play-Doh protruding with pipe-cleaners like some half-assed third grader “free-time” project, it’s hard to find the end result congruous with the main character the pulp was supposedly “beaten from.”

6: “Please Do Not Feed the Trolls”
LOTRO players travel into a dark cave, where the lights go out and they’re violently murdered because the lights are out. Now, are the lights out because it’s a reference to a quest in the game, or are they off while the characters are attacked because the artist knows he can’t draw the attack sequence?

What’s even more frustrating about this comic is the first and last panel. What does either a Donut or Earl, from “My Name is Earl,” have to do with anything? Are they thrown in because they each have something to do with the game? Or is it because the author was eating a donut and had just caught a rather engaging episode of “My Name is Earl” and did a darling little tribute because of it?

To his credit, though, he did draw this red… orange… armor-wearing monster-thing. I actually can’t make heads or tails of what it is but I do know there’s a mouth in the middle.

7: “That’s Not Patience”
Another mysterious “Patience” comic. From what I can deduce, “Patience” is the goldfish in the last panel, and received its name from the phrase “Patience, my pet, ” which was the title of comic 2. In itself, it’s actually a somewhat-clever pet’s name. However, the characters make jokes saying they’re going to “do” things to Patience, like “kidnap” or “tickle” it. Are these phrases on their own? Are they puns? Can you tickle or kidnap other virtues, like “honesty” or “creativity”? Does that make sense to anyone?

Since I can’t figure out why this joke keeps popping up, I can only gather that it’s an inside joke amongst the author and his friends, and that perhaps Patience is a real pet of theirs. But the strip makes no effort to present the joke in a way that the average reader (even if they’re the central LOTR community they’re shooting for) could somewhat understand and possibly find funny, instead leaving the audience stranded and confused.

8: "Races of ME Part1: the Dwarves"
There’s really not a lot of humor in this comic. The bulleted jokes don't have that much "punch" to them, especially since they aren't very well represented. A "stupidly" large axe looks rather, well, stupidly small. The "beer gut" looks more like the rotated half of an end-parenthesis.

Even though it's supposed to be the main character as a Dwarf, It would’ve been nice if the creator drew the main character as a Dwarf entirely from scratch, instead of “dressing up” the character's template in an attempt to achieve the same effect. Doing so would've certainly taken more time, but it really would have brought out the characteristics the bulleted points remark upon. However, since his artistic abilities haven’t exactly been the most remarkable, it's not especially surprising.

***

Of course, it’s clear that “the LOTRO files,” as a comic, was made as a lark. Being that it’s hosted on a “LOTR Roleplayers” website, there’s a very good chance it was created by one of their forum-goers, and upon completion was hosted by the server. Since I found this comic three months ago, and it hasn’t updated since then, there’s three possible explanations:

1) The “webcomic fever” ran its course after the 8th comic.

2) His ideas overshot his ability to draw. Since his style is directly copied from CAD, and because all the characters were dressed-up from a single template, he’s probably lucky he was able to draw anything at all. Hell, the “orc-woman” at the top’s face was probably copied from stock art, which would explain why her breasts, by comparison to her visage, were so lackluster.

3) Maitland ran out of material, realizing there’s not much more to be said about Lord of the Rings Online.

Random Moments, by Kristian Correa, provides exactly that: disjointed comics ending in one unseen event after another. Yet, for all the “didn’t see that coming’s,” not one comic out of over 120 did I find appealing in the slightest.

Initially, I didn’t understand why I didn’t find this comic funny. Then I figured it out.

Random Moments is the bastard child of Penny Arcade and Control-Alt-Delete. Their art is unmistakably influenced by Penny-Arcade, and their humor, whether they know it or not, smacks with CAD-level “punchlines” (and by that, I mean the lack of). Rather than craft a joke, Random Moments instead resorts to none-too-clever insults, uninspired violence (or threats of), or an abstract sentence to stamp a conclusive “The End” onto the strip.

RM prides itself on the “random moments” it’s named for, but after so many “hilarious” non-sequitors, you start realizing that there’s no real humor behind them. Hell, the “random moments” ruin most of themselves out of their sheer inanity.

The comic takes a lot of art cues from Penny-Arcade. However, whether or not RM realizes it is unknown. They make references to PA, but not on the subject of the similarity of the art. All the same, after seeing Gabe’s art transition and improve over the years, to read what is essentially a PA art-clone is to let yourself down after every strip. “Hey, this looks pretty good… except that I’ve already seen it improve in Penny-Arcade.”

Random Moments simply has no idea how to execute a good strip. Here are examples of RM comics (bad), and other comics with similar jokes, but with better executions (good):

Old game jokes
RM: "Goodwill Goodness"
PA: "Call Upon Holy Might"

The Unemployed
RM (panel 3): "Monkeys Love Ben"
Medium Large: "(untitled)"

Random creature attacks
RM (panel 4):"Monkeys Love Ben"
PA: "Arthropodal Adventures"

To get into more detail, here are some specific entries that caught my attention:

"A Daily Shower, an Effective Spermicide"
I don’t understand this comic. Three characters are all doing their own thing. Character A is using the toilet. Character B, 20 miles away in another shower, is wanking. Character C is supposedly made to resemble Alex Guiness in his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Then, Character A flushes the toilet, Character B orgasms, and Character C yells out Guiness’s famous line, “it’s as if a million voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced,” all the while blocking the water coming from the showerhead, insinuating the water has suddenly spiked in temperature.

I don’t have any clue what happened. The comic is relying on the idea that all the events are “Coincidence? I think not.” But how are the first and last panels are connected? Is Character C in Character A’s restroom? That’s the only way Character A’s toilet flush would impact Character C’s shower temperature. And yet, there’s no mention of Character A’s and C’s interpersonal housing relationship, nor could there be within a singular stand-alone 5 panel strip. All the same, there’s no connection between Panels 1 and 5, rendering the whole comic confusing on such a basic level.

"Voted Out of Reality"
Out of 6 panels, 1-4 are spent with a miscellaneous “extra’ character listening through headphones to a Beyoncé song in the library. I don’t exactly know what the “click” sound is supposed to mean, but I think it’s that the extra character is rewinding the song to hear to the same chorus over and over. In the 5th panel, a random African-American woman runs into the frame and snaps the extra character’s neck, while one of the strip’s main characters, present all along, watches in horror. Ignoring the 6th panel punchline, which is dull enough, the strip fails for two reasons. One of which is that the random African-American character that ran in to snap the girl’s neck was Beyoncé herself, supposedly. However, because the Author’s artwork is crude, the famous Beyoncé was indiscernible from any other character. Besides, why would Beyoncé be upset with a character listening to her song? I don’t understand it. Honestly, if it had been a random character running in the comic would have be much more comprehendible, as a random character carries with it far less dependencies on logic. Hell, it could’ve been anyone but Beyoncé for the strip to make sense.

The second reason it doesn’t work is because music doesn’t work in comic strips. Songs in strips don't work for the simple reason that the average reader can only go on text and lyrics, making it that much harder for the average reader to understand a joke heavily dependent on sound, which for its obvious reasons cannot be rendered in text alone.

"Mind Wanderings"
When I first read this comic, I thought it was funny. Of course, that was before I read the last speech bubble. In the comic, Character A is interviewing a man. The man’s words become phased out as the strip progresses, as Character A’s imagination is running wild, and the end result is that the man turns into Raphael, from the Ninja Turtles. What sparked this? Was this another pure "random moment," or was there something I had missed? Indeed, when I went back to the beginning of the comic, the man’s name was “Raphael.” Having to go back to figure out the comic might sound laborious, but instead, it was a refreshing change of pace. This was one of the few comics that didn’t try to hammer itself into your head for you to get the joke. Instead, I had to decipher a joke, making the effort enhance the comics humor.

But like I said, I hadn’t read the last speech bubble. Reading that last bubble, I realized the joke doesn’t hammer itself into your head… it kicks you in the fucking face to make sure you understand why it’s supposed to be funny.

Featuring Never Before Seen Characters!"
How is the second panel character a ghost? Because he has small splashes of purple goo around his hat? How does that make him a ghost? Then, the 3rd panel consists solely of a closeup shot of the female characters breasts.

What.

There is no point to this strip. It starts off as a parody/takeoff/whatever of VH1s “I Love the 80s” series, almost in a direction of “Please stop making these series VH1,” but then the strip loses track of its own thoughts and ends with breasts.

Why.

Is it because the author’s proud of his own art skills for him to render bosoms in a digital cartoon strip? Is it because the character of Kris is based off of a friend and this is same vague inside joke between them? The strip doesn’t explain a damned thing and is better off not existing.

"How Every Porn Starts"
If the last panel of the previous VH1 was a celebration of his artistic ability to draw female breasts, he may want to hold off on that.

"A Night Out With the Fruit of the Loom Gang"
Can’t think of a funny way to end the strip? Use the Family Guy method and end with a character expressing a desire for mind-altering substances!

"Family Friendly"
So much set-up, so little result. The strip is ruined by how the final panel is clearly a blown-up gif, which clashes entirely with the cartoony style the author’s working in. The clash between the two removes the reader from the strip entirely with the realization that the strip is only a strip.

"Special Bonus Comic"
Likewise the same case for the next strip. Hey! No need to put effort into drawing something… just use an image from the internet and save yourself the precious time it would take to run a decent comic!

It’s especially worse for this strip since even the arrows in the 4th panel have a pixellated quality to them.

"People Watching"
Second panel. Stolen line from Futurama, or Futurama homage? You decide the fine line.

"Golfing Buddies"
… the fuck? Two comics in one archive slot, the second of which being a diced-up and re-pasted version of the first. And isn’t it great how the cyborg character’s head plate switches from his right to his left side? Yeah, it’s not obvious you took the last panel of the first comic and reversed it to become the first panel of the second comic. Oh no, not at all.

***

To be fair, after the "Golfing Buddies" strip, it seemed as though RM reached a point where it wanted to be. The art was certainly improving (although still too PA-heavy to really be something to remark upon), and the jokes progressed logically from “setup” to “punchline” (unlike "A Daily Shower, an Effective Spermicide")… however, no strip really caught my attention nor would I call any of them actually “funny.”

If you like CAD, you’ll probably enjoy this comic. That’s not an insult nor an attempted witticism, it’s merely truth. Their humor styles are very similar, and it’s probably for that very reason I don’t find it appealing in the least.