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Patron Review – Dresden Codak: Dark Science

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Dresden Codak is a comic by Aaron Diaz (possibly with the help of an uncredited assistant) who receives $4500 a month to update every other week. It updates once a month. It’s also one of the most mocked and criticized webcomics in existence, due to its barely-existent update schedule, its bad writing, its horrific page layout, and Aaron Diaz’s own penchant for being a huge douchebag with no defenders. At the time of this writing, its current arc, Dark Science, has been running for seven years. It’s 81 pages long. 

What else is there to say that hasn’t been said a million times? Probably nothing, but I’ve been paid fifteen bucks, so let’s go over the basics one more time.

Writing

Dark Science is almost too short to review, being in it’s entirety about the length of Household Slime Mold‘s first chapter. In that first chapter of Household Slime Mold

  • Mildew was introduced as the protagonist
  • Pen was introduced as a secondary character
  • Ramparts was introduced, and we learned a little about him
  • Chancel was introduced, and we learned about him.
  • We learned Mildew’s motivation (to become a which), and an obstacle to that goal (Chancel won’t teach her)
  • There was a little stand-alone adventure
  • Mildew impresses Chancel, and becomes his apprentice. 

I criticized HSM for being too slow paced, and stand by that, but there’s a progression of events here that I can recall from memory even though I read it all the way back in January.

Similar in length to HSM’s first chapter is the first four chapters of Comicide, in which the following things happen

  • Pandora is introduced, and has a stand-alone adventure establishing her
  • A storyline involving employees thinking Faustine is going to be fired, setting up the world of the comic and characterizing her by proxy.
  • Faustine is introduced
  • Drae is introduced, and his personality is established
  • A short standalone story establishing Oili as a character
  • Paradont is introduced
  • A big reveal about Paradont’s past is made. 
  • The first major change to the status quo of the series occurs

Now, let’s compare this to the plot of Dark Science, which for a webcomic this popular probably has a dedicated wiki recapping it.

*Googles*

Huh. Weird. 

Anyway:

  • Kimiko is introduced, and her motivation established: Get a job
  • Yvonne is introduced
  • Kim’s bag is stolen by The Shadowy League of Evil, who are introduced
  • Kim fails to get a job; some worldbuilding is done.
  • Melchior is introduced
  • Vonnie returns Kim’s bag
  • Balthazar is introduced
  • Alisa Caspar is introduced
  • Thomas Caspar is introduced
  • Vonnie is emotionally devestated that no one will be her friend
  • Prince Robot From Saga But A Cat is introduced 
  • Leviathan is introduced
  • Kim and Leviathan fight
  • The giantslayer is introduced
  • In a plot twist, Kimiko uses an amulet to shoot lasers out of her head
  • In a plot twist, Leviathan is revealed to be Thomas Caspar
  • Thomas Caspar explains that Dark Science is separate from real science, implying it’s some kind of magic.
  • Kim and Vonnie go to jail, but are busted out on the same page they’re thrown in. 
  • Asmodea is introduced
  • In a plot twist, Vonnie turns on Kim and rats her out
  • Belphegor is introduced as an individual character (as opposed to part of the league of villains)
  • In a plot twist, it’s revealed that the robots worship Kim as a goddess
  • Vonnie becomes the new Leviathan 
  • Kim becomes an Exode
  • In a plot twist, Asmodea is revealed to not actually be Asmodea
  • In a plot twist, Kim’s memories  are revealed to be fictional
  • Nod and Enoch are introduced
  • Melchior helps Thomas Caspar escape from the League of Evil’s prison
  • In a plot twist, Kaito Kusanagi is revealed to be a dude name Kim Young-Soo who was assigned the name by accident, and Kusanagi is revealed to be a PR stunt. 
  • Thomas Caspar attacks Kim, but it’s a hallucination
  • In a plot twist, Balthazar turns on Kim and Asmodea
  • Dark Science is revealed to actually be regular science that the Aligeri keeps from normal people, contradicting what Thomas Caspar said earlier 
  • In a plot twist, in turns out that the Caspar attack actually did happen
  • In a plot twist, Kim realizes that her memories are correct and everyone else is wrong. 
  • In a plot twist, the Aligeri save Kim from the city police, and it’s revealed that they’re opposed to the city
  • In a plot twist, Kim is revealed to be a Dark Scientist that Kusanagi freed and programmed to think was his daughter. 
  • In a plot twist, the Aligeri are revealed to have a vampire-like inability to cross running water
  • Kim and Melchior escape Nephilopolis. 
  • In a stinger end to the storyline, Kim realizes that her dad’s alive somewhere. 

Wew. 

That’s a lot of stuff, and it all has to stay in your head (unlike, say, the details of Oili’s story in Comicide, where you only need to remember the gist of her personality). The first storyline of Dresden Codak, at 80 pages, has twelve significant plot twists, several of which over-ride previous twists. The status changes constantly without ever settling into a quo. While most webcomics feel very slow live and read better in the archives, Dresden Codak reads better when you have a month between each page to get used to, but is such a rapid-fire series of plot reversals that reading the archive is a little mind-boggling. I’m having trouble keeping it all in my head, even though I just did a write-up. If you read at a normal pace, and aren’t too messed up by the slow-loading site, you can get through the first storyline in about 20 minutes, leading to a plot twist every ninety seconds or so. 

 And, really, thinking through the plot in to much detail is probably a fool’s errand. In ten pages it’ll be revealed that Kim is a dream of the Fayth or some shit, so nothing that happened up until now matters. Just like a whole lot of Dark Science doesn’t matter, because it keeps getting invalidated by later twists. 

Like how Thomas Caspar gave a speech about how Dark Science was “long before science”, which is invalidated by the reveal that Dark Science is just regular technology the Aligeri keep to themselves. 

 

Art

What order do the images on this page go in? Seriously. Stop, take a moment and look. You’ve got three rows of panels, with the middle one offset, that are each telling a bit of a story. The “normal” way to read a 3×4 grid of panels would be left to right, one row at a time, but you can’t do that here because the middle panels aren’t lined up, so you can’t follow the panel layout. The first time I read this page, since the panels didn’t line up, I followed the word balloons, and did this

Which is clearly wrong, because it makes no sense and I literally skip 8 panels. So, I read it again. 

Which caused me to read everything in a logical way, but it still felt wrong because my eyes were shooting all over the page with no rhyme or reason. So I stared at this page, thought about it for a minute or so, and came to the conclusion that this was the intended order.

Because we have Balthazar on one side, Kim on the other, and then they meet up again in the middle. (Well, actually, they meet up on Kim’s side of the page, even though it’s literally Kim coming to where Balthazar is, but let’s not get into visual storytelling right now or we’ll be here all week). The problem is that there are these posters between them and the posters are offset. This causes confusion, because there’s not a clear direction to go. Left-to-right is natural, but there’s not a panel that lines up, so I’m confused if I should follow the left-to-right order or follow the text and read it in columns. How can we fix this problem? The obvious way is to just make the top middle panel of the gates opening taller, and resize everything to fit in a 3×4 grid. Simple and clean (is the way that you’re making me feeeeel tonight). 

Or, since the point of the middle rows in worldbuiding and mood-setting, you could also just use a background image that doesn’t have text, like this Ghost in the Shell wallpaper I googled

Which could still be read left-right-left-right-left-right or down in two columns, but is much, much cleaner, simpler, and better conveys the idea that Kim and Balthazar are separate, so that them coming together at the end hits a little harder. Sure, you’re losing the poster jokes, and I’m generally a big fan of a more-the-merrier approach to jokes, but they actively detract from the page anyway by cluttering shit up. But if you think page density is worth sacrificing page clarity for, you’ve probably got at least one guy who agrees with you.

Anyway, you can always do the 3×4 grid if you absolutely must have the posters.

Most pages aren’t as bizarrely laid out as this one, but the art suffers from a similar lack of focus. Often times the story will try to draw our attention to one thing, while the art is more interested in a couple of other things. 

Cheesecake collage stolen from Magnolia Porter’s “An Open Letter to Aaron Diaz”

The point of this panel is to draw our attention to the symbol on the back of Kimiko’s black crop top thing, but it’s her boobs that get the center-frame treatment. As a consequence of this, we see  TWO symbols on her back, one on top of her shirt, and one peaking out from beneath it, and we don’t know which one the robot is referring to. 

Later, Kim develops a robot body, but forgets to develop pants. This isn’t a Dr. Manhattan thing where Kim has given up on her humanity and Zack Snyder will have to work out CGI dick physics, she just….doesn’t have pants, and is walking around in her underwear. 

Her underwear that has a zipper in the crotch, for robot reasons. 

I’m certainly not the first to point out that Aaron Diaz draws his female characters in heavily sexualized ways nigh-constantly, or that there’s a dissonance between his fetishy art and his claim that Dresden Codak is a feminist female empowerment masterpiece, but take a look at this image. What’s happening in the story is that Kim is staring at the stars and is overwhelmed by her own power, but none of that is conveyed. We just get an ass shot. This doesn’t tell us anything about what Kim’s seeing or how she’s reacting to it. It’s just a booty. And while I’m certainly not prudish at a little bit of gratuitous nudity in my own work-

The sheer amount of it is Dresden Codak is hard to put into words. But here’s a point of reference for you. The first storyline of Dark Science is 80 pages. The first chapter of infamous trashy 90s harem manga Love Hina is 77 pages. Love Hina is basically a long excuse for PG-13 female nudity to arouse and confuse young Japanese boys. Which series do you think have more objectifying shots of women in it’s first storyline?

Because Love Hina has five. 

 

 Dresden Codak has….a lot more

This one was eventually edited after Magnolia Porter put it in the collage above

This isn’t just me being a prudish SJW. This comic is 80 pages long, has serious issues with not giving its plot points time to breath before moving on to the next one, and devotes a LOT of panel space to T&A, in place of moving the story along. In fact, much of the T&A actively inhibits the story, because it doesn’t get its own Filler Beach Episode space, but instead distracts from the plot events that have to work around it. Just like they have to work around the constant barrage of twists

 

Dresden Codak is a mess of a comic, whose plot is buried under a pacing so fast that none of its many twists have time to leave an impression, and an artistic direction that devotes precious panel space to gratuitous fanservice shots when it could be letting the plot breathe. Any talent or ideas in this comic are buried under mountains and mountains of terrible decisions. I award it no stars, and may god have mercy on your soul. 

 

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Netlflix Note

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So, me and my roommates all watched Netflix Note together, and uh. 

<_<

>_>

I kind of like it.

As an adaption, it’s wildly inaccurate to the point where it’s just a cheesy B movie set in the Death Note universe. But once you just accept that White Yagami is a lovestruck quasisentient moron who couldn’t keikaku his way out of a paper bag and
screams like an 8-year-old girl getting stung by a bee, it’s pretty enjoyable on that front.

I wouldn’t call it “good’, as it had way too much slow-mo to pop music and Adam West dutch angles, but it’s fun in a dumb way. 

FWIW I liked the most of the first half of the OG death note, and thought Light Yagami giving himself amnesia and manipulating himself just as keikaku was when the series crossed into stupidville. 

The movie is really short! It’s only about 90 minutes, most which is in pointless slow-mo, but then it skips over plot details at warp speed. 

I thought Willem DaFoe would be the best part of the movie, but it’s actually Lakeith Stanfield, who plays L. L is also the least changed from the anime as a character, though he’s still changed quite a bit.

Ryuk is fine, but he’s almost entirely superfluous and could be cut without losing anything. The effects for him were also really bad. 

There’s a LOT of unnecessary gore in this movie. A dude gets hit by a ladder moving at 20 MPH and his fucking head a splode. That is not the only literal head explosion in the movie. 

I find it bullshit that “Watari” counts as a name for the Death Note but “L” doesn’t, and it makes L look like a fucking asshole for not having Watari wear a mask (Not that it would’ve helped, since Light never even fucking saw Watari’s face that entire subplot was dumb dumb dumb), makes Light look like a moron for having Watari call his fucking cell phone, and makes L look like a moron again for not tapping his own phones. 

“It sort of means killer in Japanese” was offensively stupid, and stupidly offensive. We had to take a break to really digest that line.

Likewise, the idea that Kira was trying to trick people into thinking he was Japanese was….meta. 

It still baffles me that a white kid in Seattle is named Light and no one finds that odd, but I guess no one finds it odd in the Japanese version either. So much else is changed, and the character is almost literally the opposite of the Japanese version, that they should have
just called him Lenny or something. Would make it less confusing to compare them. 

Light saying “Rye-uck” and having it be corrected a minute later seems like it was there just to troll fans of the anime. 

I like that the movie made a bigger deal of the “mind control” aspect than the anime did. Light having Mia throw his page into a fire while falling out of the ferris wheel seems a little convenient, but we were told the limit of the Note was that “it had to be physically possible”, so I’ll guess I’ll allow it. 

I also liked Light Turner/Mia Stutton’s relationship more than I liked Light Yagami/Misa Amane’s Joker/Harley setup where she was madly in love with him and he thought she was an incompetent minion. I always wanted Japanese Light’s dismissal of Misa to get him in more trouble, so I’m glad to see it happen here. Mia is simply more interesting than Misa was, in part because she stole most of Light’s intelligence on the way to Netflix. 

Although that intelligence disappears while trying to blackmail Light with the Death Note while he has it and could have just burned the page himself and killed her without the whole ferris wheel rigamarole. 

When the “you can only burn one name per book” rule was introduced, I immediately assumed Light would have to choose between saving himself orWatari, so props to the movie for not going the obvious direction

L chasing Light through 400 different buildings got increasingly hilarious with every minute it lasted. 

The film gains 200 intelligence points in the literal last minute, though, as White Yagami suddenly turns into the anime version and explains a convoluted keikaku that was still something he could have reasonably come up with in a pinch. I also liked that the movie was subtle enough to not call attention to Light actually forcing Mia to take the book by writing it that way despite what he said at the time about it being conditional. It’s a great way to get at anime pedants who
point out that you explicitly couldn’t use the Death Note on someone like that in the anime. He didn’t! 

I also like that the movie doesn’t feel the need to explain why Light randomly decides to confess everything, just showing us that L got the book and letting us realize ourselves what Ryuk was laughing about. 

And I really liked that Light Turner finally turns a into Light Yagami-like intelligence right at the end, and is immediately defeated because of something Mia did that he forgot about. Cross-adaption karma! 

Allin all, this is a 6/10 movie that I surely wouldn’t have liked if I hadn’t seen it with friends, but it might be worth it just for seeing the american Light meeting Ryuk holy shit that was hilarious. 

 

 

Patron Review: Backlash

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This comic is brought to you by our patrons! Want a specific comic reviewed? Sign up at our patreon, and also receive early access to our comics!

Wait no

There we go

Planets have gone missing, and Leadfoot is on a mission to find them! But things get a little complicated when she joins up with a group of people who are on the blacklist of a terribly powerful Space Monster, known as The Queen (of the whole world, no less!)

https://tapas.io/series/BACKLASH

So, Tapastic. It really doesn’t like me saving images for use in reviews, so this’ll be a bit more image-light than normal. Probably shorter, too. It also won’t have a liveblog-type section, since I had to read it during my lunch break at work to meet the deadline. Anyway, that out of the way.

Backlash is a pretty neat comic about a group of misfits in a bar who have to save the world from an evil queen. There’s quite a bit of demons and celestials and comets, but that feels more like a way to stand out and justify more varied character designs than this being a deep science fiction exploration of the concept of a sentient black hole. You’d think the above page, where Laura declares she’s in fact a comet in human form, would be a big spoiler, but…enh. It’s just some set dressing to make the ride look nice.

Luckily, the ride feels nice as well. The pacing, a common problem for webcomics, is quite good here. The first chapter establishes all the major players, the premise, Laura’s goals, and the weird “Fuck it here’s a tengu” nature of the world while also clocking in at a brisk ~30 pages (displayed as one long page).

The characters are quirky and have fun interactions, but never veer too far into “wacky”. And while the plot has a lot of weird-ass elements, I never felt lost or confused by them (in part because they don’t seem to matter much. Why is Eduardo a demon? Looks cool). And while I can’t say there’s any part of this comic that blew my fucking mind, everything is consistently executed at a level a bit north of complicated. Plus I like this style of semi-surrealism. I do have some nitpicks, though.

Some nitpicks, though

Alias totally forgets he’s carrying Laura in the second panel here, even though he’s still doing it in subsequent panels. WAY TO FUCK UP VISUAL CONTINUITY, BITEGHOST, JESUS.

And I’m not particularly fond of how the Queen’s Goons dress in such an obviously Nazi-ish way, especially when they’re not even Nazi analogues and are just bad guys with goals not at all comparable to nazi-ism. It seems a little edgelordy to me.

Otherwise, it’s just a good comic. Not a comic I’m going to shake you and tell you to drop everything and start reading now now now, but one I read through all 200ish pages off pretty quickly without my mind wandering. I actually am going to give this comic a numerical review score: It’s a solid 8/10. If you think it sounds interesting, you’ll probably like it. If not, you’ll probably give it a miss.

Patreon Review: Closer to Home

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A webcomic. In 2017, the crew of the interstellar ship ‘Odysseus’ went into deep sleep for their mission of finding other life in the galaxy. Three years later, Earth made first contact. 14 years later, the Odysseus wakes up. Updates Tuesdays and Thursdays.

http://closertohomecomic.com

A’ight, let’s take a look!

Live Blog

We start with page sizes of the Homestuck/Prequel/Dear Children variety. Although this page has five panels (with very thin borders and similar subject matter), I suspect we’re in for one of those one-panel-page type comics. Here, we’re introduced to Samira, who I hope is an important character since she’s getting a big introduction and all. The backgrounds are nice, but Samira kind of jars with them, but I don’t want to get too deep into the art yet. Oh hey now, panels! In a logical order and everything! I guess I was wrong to assume we’d be a Homestuck type. This actually looks really nice.

“We got captured by aliens!” “I….I know, dude. I was there.” “Quiet you, I’m trying to exposit”
“Did I hear someone expositing? I love expositing! Wanna hear the backstory of my planet , which is called Mason?”

These women have been kidnapped by aliens, and sold as slaves and/or pets to an alien identifying as a “blatterby”, which is decent foreshadowing, since “blatter” means “to talk fast”, and the alien is fast-talking them. He’s then revealed to be…a human, rescuing them! Which is a decent twist, but since he was so openly trying to help them before this, it’s not really much of a twist at all. The helpful alien was a helpful human doesn’t actually change much of anything.

They’re found out, and a gunfight ensues, but no one really seems too concerned about it. I’m not that deep into the comic yet, but I’m already noticing kind of a tonal flatness. The alien isn’t presented as scary or mysterious, so the reveal that he’s a helpful human in disguise doesn’t change much, and thus doesn’t really matter much.

So, Samira shows up and name-drops herself to casually resolve the problem. This is supposed to establish her as a cool notorious bad-ass, but she doesn’t actually do anything cool. She scares these fluffy things, but they look like wimps and act like geeks. Even before they know who she is, they’re shrugging at the demand to surrender like they’re actually considering it.  I don’t know enough about Samira’s character yet to know if she could’ve been introduced shooting a bug, or firing a warning shot, or standing on stop of a spaceship with a gatling gun, or anything that would scare the bugs. And if her name alone is supposed to be scary, this wouldn’t worked a lot better if the bugs had been physically intimidating. Like, if they’d been 10 feet tall and covered in armor and ran off scared of her name anyway, or even if there’d just been more than three of them. Samira doesn’t come off as impressive here because I think I could beat these bugs up, and she doesn’t even succeed her first time but also doesn’t fail in a funny or interesting way. This is telling us she’s cool, now showing us.

Though her immediate bragging about how cool she looked is a decent character beat.

The big twist at the end of the chapter is a strong one!

But let’s break this down in a bit more detail

Thoughts

So, to be, the big issue with the comic is that it’s supposed to be a big exciting space adventure, but it kind of feels flat the whole way, and I think a lot of this is to do with everything being presented in a matter-of-fact kind of way.

So, the humans are slaves, and are bought by an alien. But that alien is actually a helpful human! Vat a tweest! But look at how Vee’s introduced

The comic opens with him very casually hanging out.

When he meets the humans, there’s no reason to thing he’s scary or threatening.

And even after that, he’s so helpful and nonthreatening, that him being there to help feels like the obvious conclusion that I already made well before the reveal.

So, what’s an example of how we could better do this “Evil threatening alien is revealed to actually be a helpful alien in disguise” twist?

Well, there’s a bit of a Star Warsy vibe to Closer To Home’s first chapter, so let’s look at Star Wars! Boushh here is (spoiler!) revealed to be Princess Leia in disguise. It’s not super hard to guess this, and “Leia pretending to capture Chewie to rescue Han” is pretty much just “Han/Luke pretend to capture Chewie to rescue Leia” in the first movie  (it’s like pottery, it rhymes), but the film still makes an effort to make Boushh out to be a scary and threatening villain, with that whole “He’s holding a thermal detonator!” scene. And even when she’s revealed to be working for the rebels, she still uses the voice changer and slightly stilted language (“Your eyesight will return in time”).

But maybe it’s out of character for Vee to stand up to and haggle with the bugs, even when being watched and playing a part. There’s still quite a lot you can do just with the presentation.

You could introduce Vee from a low angle, making him initially look more threatening, for instance, or you could have the captives not understand him talking to the bugs (either because they’re talking in bug-ese, or just because they can’t hear him well). That makes him mysterious! You think he’s a villain who’s up to no good, but in fact he’s a good guy!

The introduction of Samira is similarly flat. That’s clearly supposed to be a big epic cool moment, but she doesn’t actually do anything to show she’s cool, or any of her skills, or why we should be impressed by her. No clever trap. No show of force. No bluff. No threats. I legitimately have no idea what Samira would’ve done if the bugs hadn’t been scared of her. And the character introduction falls flat.

And I feel like an arrogant jerk for pointing to my own comics as counterexamples, but compare:

Some say there's another Doink Burger across the street, but the official explanation is that we just all collectively imagined it.

A lathe?! Get off the line, Guy!

You can get a decent sense of who Jill Leverett is by the end of the first page of LotH. Saffron, being a more active character, comes across even more strongly. She’s a no-nonsense ass-kicker who doesn’t have time for plans.

But hey, maybe you think my comics suck. That’s fair. Here’s a great character introduction, that carried an entire film franchise.

You know everything you need to know about this character before he has a line of dialogue. Majestically and heroically standing atop the mast of a ship only for it to be revealed that the rest of the ship is underwater is a sight gag that gets a character across more strongly than some whole books, which is why this movie got a million sequels of rapidly diminishing quality. And it’s done through clever use of camera angles (and inappropriately heroic music)

Beyond these criticisms, I think the comic has a fine premise, and decent art. I think there’s still a lot of potential here, and that tightening up the cinematography to give things more impact would go a long way towards improving it.

Score: 3 burritos out of a watermelon

Site Launch

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Our new website is finally up. We’ve worked hard to get a beautiful new site ready and we’re proud to show it off. Thanks for reading our blog. We have lots of great blog posts in the works. Please check back or contact us now to find out how we can help you.