thewebcomicsreview

[thewebcomicsreview]

Tonight, on a very special Saffron and Sage, bet you didn't think that sword was going to come up again. Or maybe you did. I don't get a lot of comments on my comics so I kind of assume you're all just sitting there silently basking at our greatness. Bask more at SaffronComic.com! 

#Saffron and Sage #Spider Forest #Webcomics

[thewebcomicsreview]

I'm not in this one, but it's still probably going to be good!

Happy launch day! 

SpiderForest Webcomic Collective is delighted to introduce to you Threads: Immortal, our new anthology filled with 16 tales of undying gifts and curses, gods and mortals and all those living in between and the beyond. 

Check us out at our Kickstarter and spread the word! We got all our previous anthology collections up for grabs and even a library of select members’ stories!

#SpiderForest #I do want to be in one of these again once I learn to draw

[thewebcomicsreview]

Breaking: John Allison's comic starring public domain character Conan The Barbarian has been shut down by copyright trolls with an ambiguous claim to the character in the US.

#Bad Machinery

[thewebcomicsreview]

oh my god the last S&S has absolutely slain me. you've spent so long carefully setting up this whole scenario, getting everything in place, building up all the details to make the dating show premise make sense. the reveal that there is actually someone else who is named Saffron and all of this was pointless is so abrupt, such a sudden halt to all this momentum, that it is HOWLINGLY funny. it would not be nearly as good if there was less setup for the game or more for the other Saffron.

Thanks!

#Saffron and Sage

[thewebcomicsreview]

We know Sinfest is dead, but I just thought it would be interesting to note that Ishida is endorsing esoteric/occult nazi shit in the strips now. Like, literally celebrating "hyperboreans" and a "thousand year reich".

Honestly, I don't think it's actually interesting. I said for a long time that the only place left for Tats to go was overt "The Jews are evil" racism and then he finally went there and everything else now is just different flavors of it. Nazi does nazi things isn't really news

#Sinfest

[thewebcomicsreview]

After the success I had with the HeroForge models, I decided to grab a Clip Studio Paint model in kind of a random pose to see how that went, and then my quick 10-minute curiosity just kind of kept going. Had I known I was going to keep going with this, I probably would picked a better pose, but c'est la vie.

63% of you said that tracing a HeroForge model counted as drawing, I think this would probably get a higher score on that poll since it's an artist model designed explicitly for this purpose and because I'm drawing all the clothes etc. I'm also realizing that the model is most useful when you use it more as a guide and that if I tried tracing all the individual fingers in the hands it'd look way worse. Anyway, things I learned

The brim of the hat has three lines. I keep forgetting this, and you can see in the timelapse that I fucked it up and had to fix it.

I think I'm worse at drawing feet than I am at drawing hands somehow. The tongues of Frog's shoes are assholes.

I need to get better at planning my layers in advance. I see the the lillypad cutout in her hat isn't angled right, but fixing it at this point would be a pain in the ass

Frog's hat never seems to be affixed to her head properly, and I'm not entirely sure why. I also keep drawing it way too small

Her design is full of details which take forever to draw, but I think that distracts from some of the mistakes I made

I'm only just noticing this right now, but Frog's giant hat doesn't cast a shadow on her face at all? I have two reference pictures of Frog from professional artists, and there's no hat shadow on either of them, so...I guess there shouldn't be? That doesn't seem right. Need to think about this more.

Procreate's timelapse will be in whatever orientation you start the drawing it, so the timelapse came out sidewise and I had to jump through some hoops to fix it. Need to check that earlier, since I like timelapses

Anyway, I think I'm going to keep using CSP Models and alternating between them and model-less studies. I don't want to become reliant on a crutch but also it helps me make a good picture and making good pictures makes me happy and being happy from drawing motivates me to draw more.

#My Art

[thewebcomicsreview]

I got to say, the resolution to the decade-long "Robot cult worshipping Kat" plotline being Shadow telling Robot to stop making a Robot Cult and Robot being like "Okay" feels a little underwhelming.

#Gunnerkrigg Court #Youtube

[thewebcomicsreview]

Happy 4/13!

Happy 4/13 to you as well!

And, as I think everyone was predicting, there's new Homestuck Content today. I'm hoping this is going to be the big update where they get to the point and have the long-teased [S] page, but we're not looking good if we're opening with Dirk, whose primary character trade is long rambling speeches. This is the first we've seen of Dirk since the new team took over, though.

Ready to take the floaties off and dive back into the depths of the churning, primal ocean from which everything that matters in this story evolved, and to which it must inevitably return?

The idea that Dirk's CANON plan is ironically consisting of him sitting around idly discussing The Lore is a decent meta joke, but it got old after a page or two. Please do literally anything, Dirk.

I do like this page, though, with the art busting out of the frame. And, given what I literally just said (I write these liveblogs as I read them), Dirk's opening by repeatedly insisting things are happening in his story is meant to be ironic. He's also claiming he became a god in order to do this HS2 stuff, which is flatly untrue. Presumably he means be became Ultimate to do narrative stuff, which is an interesting order of events if that's the case, and it's not that becoming Ultimate made him evil. Also, let me put some appropriate background music on.

Rose dipped pretty early on in that visual montage to spend some quality time trading barbs and bumping uglies with the supposedly impartial proctor of said Contest, next to the vacant meat-sack that once housed her consciousness. Irresponsible, sure, but to give credit where due, it was irresponsible in a poignant and symbolically weighty sort of way. Classic Rose shit

It does feel weird for the new team to be directly commenting on the quality of the writing of the old team like this, but to be fair, it is classic Rose shit.

New Guardian Mode artstyle, which we were starting to see in Candy as well, since these characters aren't kids any more. But in Candy, everyone keeps their faces, whereas Dirk is just his hair and glasses, like Bro.

TEREZI: YOU H4V3 1NST34D CHOS3N TO W4T3RBO4RD TH3 R4W N3UR4L T1SSU3 OF MY TH1NKP4N W1TH 4N 4CR1D 4ND SUP3RFLUOUSLY OV3RC4RBON4T3D N4RR4T1V3 R3C4P DUMP DIRK: Well, it's a recap for *you*. DIRK: But for those who haven't checked in on us in a while, it's more of a stage-setting thing. TEREZI: 1TS B4S1C4LLY 4 R3C4P FOR TH3M TOO, 1D1OT TEREZI: YOUR 1N4B1L1TY TO SHUT UP 3V3N 4S YOU 4CT1V3LY CH4MP1ON TH3 N33D TO G3T TH1NGS MOV1NG WOULD B3 4LMOST 4W3-1NSP1R1NG 1F 1T W4SNT SO 4STOUND1NGLY OBNOX1OUS

Oh good, I turned quirks back on. There's a lot of meta complaining about the writing this update.

I do like that the humans are looking more like Guardians and the Trolls are looking more like Ancestors. It's odd to have them standing next to each in different art styles like that, but it kind of works.

DIRK: Or was all that hand-wringing about how worried you were that Rose and I were becoming big bad cosmic tyrants with no regard for the poor little mortals buffeted to and fro by the vicious momentum of our designs just virtue signaling?

Dirk's use of the term "Virtue Signalling" is probably worth making a note of here. HS2 has sort of flirted with the idea of Dirk as right-wing, and that appears to be continuing here.

TEREZI: 4NYON3 WOULD B3 GR4T3FUL TO H4V3 4 B3N3VOL3NT CR34TOR L1K3 YOU TEREZI: ON3 TH4TLL ULT1M4T3LY 3NSUR3 TH31R 3NT1R3 PL4N3T 1S ORB1T4LLY BOMB4RD3D 4ND TH31R SP3C13S 4LL BUT DR1V3N 3XT1NCT S4V3 FOR 4 F3W "LUCKY" JUV3N1L3S DIRK: That's just how this shit goes down for species *lucky* enough to fucking *matter*, Terezi.

There's a lot of speculation that the Candy kids are going to end up in the game as well, and that this is even something that the original cast over there is working towards. This would require, as Terezi points out here, literal genocide. And I think that is where the Candy story is going, with Rose/Jade/Jane all being in on it and Kanaya/Karkat being cut out, so it's nice of Terezi to remind us that Sburb is evil and that sacrificing an entire planet to help your kids become immortal is kind of a dick move.

DIRK: But hey, you say you aren't feeling it? DIRK: Fine. DIRK: I can make concessions. DIRK: I've got other agents in play, and as I've said, I know you aren't going to risk fucking your end of the work up.

This is the kind of thing HS2 really need more of, stuff to speculate on. Terezi, Rose, and Dirk are literally the only three people on the entire fucking planet. What "other agents" could Dirk possibly have?

DIRK: You need this session to happen. DIRK: You need a chance to fix the mistake you've got in that wallet, burning a hole through your pocket. DIRK: You've made a lot of those, Terezi, but you know that besides being important, what we're doing here is a chance to rectify one of them. DIRK: And you aren't going to let that chance slip. TEREZI: ... DIRK: I know what it's like to make hard choices for the people you care about. DIRK: To run your brain raw thinking about how to make things right. DIRK: I've been doing it my whole damn life. DIRK: The choice you're presented with here is pretty fucking easy, and you're a very smart person, so I trust you to make the right decision.

Also, it's nice to have a little fucking narrative tension on this planet for once. Dirk and Rose are each creating an entire sentient race for the purpose of sacrificing them. Terezi is in a position to save the world, but doing so means giving up her chance to save John. Wow! Stakes! It's nice when stories have those, instead of just idly fucking around doing nothing for the sake of a meta-joke! Also it means the bad guy is being evil instead of merely boring, which is also a nice thing to do now and again.

There's not much to analyze in this art, but it's stylin'. The guardian mode look is great. Is Rose wearing lipstick on her robot face?

ROSEBOT: I've been very bad and I need to be punished

There's been a very subtle incest-y vibe with Dirk/Rose in Meat, and apparently we're keeping that too. Being sexually depraved is becoming like Rose's defining trait.

Localized time travel, while technically possible, tends to get pretty fucked even in the most ideal of circumstances, to say nothing of the fact that it's way outside my wheelhouse as a Heart player. The concept works pretty well for my purposes, though, and as a burgeoning omnipotent narrative god, I can mimic it in a way that's functionally identical. The move here is that I'm going to envelop the local galaxy group in a pocket of my influence and narratively accelerate it via Bullshit so that whatever's going on in here goes on faster, so we can get to the good shit faster, so we can get on with our jobs, and so you gawking voyeurs have more of our lives to guzzle greedily down.

Oh, that's kind of a cool ability, but also what can't an Ultimate do?

A while back, it became apparent that while my Deltritan offspring were to be terrestrial, Rose's were going to be aquatic.

Rose's team is going to win, and it's going to be the 48-player Squiddle session that creates the troll universe, making all of Homestuck canon an inescapable time loop through which no new ideas can emerge, except for the influence of Candy.

ROSE: For all my temporary discomfort with the prospect of settling down on Deltritus and starting what could very loosely be considered a family with you,

Rose he is your dad.

DIRK: I'm doing this for all of us.

Hm. No big [S] page and we still haven't gotten to the point, but we've made the Dirk half this story significantly less fucking boring, so I guess that's a win. This is an update the story desperately needed, giving Dirk some characterization and leaning in to how fucked everything here is.

Also, spending the entire update teasing a timeskip to the start of the game and then ending without doing it is a good meta joke, provided we don't keep doing it for ten more updates.

#Homestuck 2 #Homestuck 2 liveblog #Homestuck

[thewebcomicsreview]

I've been reading a new comic called Kattabolt, which is too new for me to review yet. It's a'ight so far, though. The art is very cute, the story is moving quickly, and it tags all the characters who appear on a page for easier searching, which is surprisingly rare in webcomics, so it's one of those comics I'm keeping an optimistic eye on. (wouldn't mind some keyboard navigation, though).

But I can't decide how I feel about "Your advantage over me is null" from firey teenage street thug Ray in panel 4 there. On the one hand, it seems kind of an odd phrasing, both in general and for the character of a street thug (though if we learn Ray is some kind of nerdy street thug than this is great foreshadowing).

On the other hand, it's fairly elegant exposition, where Ray is completely justified in saying something he and Nathan (the purple guy) both know, that trusts the reader to make some satisfying conclusions of their own. From those six words, we know that it's not just that Ray has fire powers and Nathan and Leigh (wait, the gang duo has rhyming names? That's cute) have water powers. There's this whole system of elemental powers, that have Pokemon-style type matchups, and that was the main reason Ray didn't jump to beating Nathan's ass until he had backup (as opposed to, say, Nathan being a kewl action hero). We can also deduce that if Ray, a bully, was nervous at a type disadvantage and didn't learn anti-Nathan lightning magic to deal with this recurring nuisance, then he probably can't do it, and this is an Avatar-style world where people can use exactly one (1) element, only unlike Avatar there's elemental weaknesses. That's really a lot of information to be able to glean from six words!

It's also a good use of genre convention. The magic system in Kattabolt is "Avatar with type advantage", which is a system that's very easy to understand. Kattabolt takes advantage of this tropey magic system to be able to explain the entire thing in a single throw-away line and get to the interesting part of the comic.

Y'know what, I think I've talked myself into it. "Your advantage over me is null" is a bit of a clunky line, but it carries a ton of expository weight and lets me catch on to the magic system myself instead of treating me like an idiot or pretending "kung-fu with elemental magic" is some kind of novel idea worth spending six pages explaining. And that's more than worth a single somewhat awkward sentence.

#Kattabolt

[thewebcomicsreview]

Tonight, on a very special Saffron and Sage, the most shocking, left-field, borderline-nonsensical twist so far! Read more at SaffronComic.com!

#Webcomics #SpiderForest

[thewebcomicsreview]

I was chatting with a friend when they brought up an interesting point (imo at least). Basically none of the "own the SJWs" culture war comics from the mid 2010s maintained their relevance despite being ostensibly based around flavor of the month e-drama. What's your take?

None of the people who made them or read them cared about comics. Comicsgate was an astroturfed grift to try and force Gamergate 2.0 to happen so that people would buy their stupid shitty right-wing comic books, so once the fad died they all left.

#Casualgate

[thewebcomicsreview]

A player in a Pathfinder game I run, who is also a huge Utena fan, purchased a commission of Yuri art of her ancestor from an NPC last week. I sort of forgot about it until last night, but it was her birthday so I set out to actually make it. Normally I draw stuff, like that Aradia piece earlier, by having a reference pic in a little window and looking at it an trying to copy it. But since I was in a hurry, I took the NPC's Heroforge models and messed with them a bunch and traced them.

And it worked, I got a picture I liked and a birthday present that was well-received. But I'm not sure if I can really say I "drew" this. I know posing 3D models and tracing them is increasingly accepted practice nowadays, but I didn't make the models myself. So I thought I'd throw it to the crowd

#My Art #Allegedly #I've been thinking 3D models for Frog #But I wouldn't use HeroForge for it

[thewebcomicsreview]

I sub to the Patreon already, but since it's @jamesroach's birthday and I had some time to kill I drew an Aradia, referencing an Ikimaru image.

I've been feeling down on my art lately, but I'm actually relatively happy with how this came out, so it's a James Roach's Birthday Miracle for everyone, and to all a good night.

its my birthday if you want to get me anything subscribe to the homestuck patreon so i can pay the team :)

or if you're broke just draw aradia and tag me

#Homestuck #Third Favorite Frog Girl #aradia megido

[thewebcomicsreview]

I don't know if you've seen this but Sinfest guy has gone full-on Nazi even more. He's outright pushing explicit anti-semitic messages and white genocide conspiracy theories. He's gone full "Billy The Heretic"

I have been following Sinfest, even though I've stopped posting it. And, yeah, he's full 100% mask-off "Jews are Satanic and were behind the communist revolution and World War 2" now, even compared to where he was a few months ago, but what's there to say about it any more? I don't really want to post blatant hate speech just to go "look at this loser!". No one need to look at the loser, let him die unobserved.

#Sinfest

[thewebcomicsreview]

I kind of want to try my hand at editing/doctoring/rewriting webcomics scripts, providing feedback, etc. Is that the kind of thing anyone would be interested in? I'm not looking to charge for it, it's something I want to see if I'm actually any good at.

#Hit me up on the discord

[thewebcomicsreview]

hey, just wanted to say thanks for the rec for Cat Girl. it is the best kind of extremely uncomfortable! but it's got me musing on your note about the relevance of the cat girl element itself. I agree that it is depicting an abusive relationship, but it's clear that Peter is completely incapable of perceiving that that's what it is, because he's so far down a deeply screwed hole of ideology. (continued in a sec, hang on-)

- so Peter is the way he is because he has accepted a series of small explanations for the things in his life as seeming accurate, that has stacked up into a deeply dysfunctional worldview that he's too deep into to question at all. so I think the Literal Government Issued Cat Girl is very much a metaphor for a society-level case of "you don't question your own idea of normal". rather than address the root of the problem, a wildly unethical bandaid has been slapped on it. in other words; Peter doesn't question that his ideas are correct, when they're obviously very skewed. but the society that gave him Andi doesn't question that it is normal for people to get this twisted up in an effort to make sense of the world. of COURSE there are internet chuds, people like Peter existing is "normal". and in the process of just accepting that some people are unsalvageable, innocent people like Andi get hurt, and that's just "normal" too. Peter isn't unfixable. it's clear he could be better, WANTS to be better, because he is straight up miserable. but he doesn't consciously know that, or how to start. the decision that some people are just fundamentally screwed up and there's nothing anyone can do about it doesn't just hurt him, it lets him hurt the people around him. Andi is, metaphorically, everyone else being tossed under the bus alongside Peter by the simple act of treating him like he's just inherently a shitty person.

Man, this is a long ask! If I were the author of Cat Girl, I'd be honored to see someone spend so much time thinking about it. But I don't think I agree, exactly.

Peter wants to "be a good person", yes, but his understanding of what a "good person" is is completely self-centered. Him calling Andi "Yua" while talking over her trying to explain that she does in fact have a name is obviously establishing him as a douche, but it's also worth noting that "Yua" is a Japanese name. He's thinking of her as an anime waifu and not a person (or, given the first results when I google "Yua", a porn star, but maybe it's a Breath of Fire 2 reference)

And while he falls into depressive self-loathing after she complains about not having a change of clothes, his internal monologue is entirely about himself. At no point, ever, does Peter even consider that Andi has feelings or is anything other than a reflection on him.

When he locks her in a closet, his most overtly abusive act, he starts crying because he feels bad about what a bad person he is, but even while he's crying he's simultaneously blocking the door, which is a very literal depiction of their relationship. His angsting about being a good person is not his way out of the problem, it is the problem. He never even once considers being nice to Andi because she'll like it, it's entirely "I don't want to force her to have sex with me (because that would make me feel bad), but maybe if I'm nice to her she'll initiate the sex". And he doesn't even care about the sex itself, just the implicit validation of being Confirmed Good By A Girl.

Peter is the way he is because his morality is entirely self-centered. Andi is a way for him to prove his morality to himself (well, try to and fail), not an actual person whose feelings he's ever considered except for if she hates him or not. That's what makes him such an interesting villain, he keeps concocting a story in his head where he's the poor sweet babu trying his best and never stops doing that to let his girlfriend out of the closet.

#Cat Girl

[thewebcomicsreview]

you know what i don't see much of these days that i swear was super common in the old webcomic days? filler and guest comics.

People are just more accepting of a comic “missing updates” than they used to be, so there’s less need for it.

Hell, SaffSage has been effectively biweekly for months and no one’s complained, though that's in part because no one reads it (;_;). People used to be super aggro about that shit.

Least I Could Do literally put out a strip saying webcomic artists who miss updates should be shot. You don't really see that from readers anymore, and certainly not from prominent webcomic creators themselves.

#Least I Could Do