I’m just saying…

(From Kevin and Kell, by Bill Holbrook)

I definitely gave this strip a shot. It looked good, it was funny enough to invest a bit of interest in it, and a lot of other webcomic folks like it. So I thought, Hey. I’ll give it a shot.

And I’m sorry to say I don’t like it. I think I wanted to, but I didn’t. And I’m trying to wrap my brain around why that is, and frankly it’s mostly a matter of taste. But I can’t just go around going “Meh. I didn’t like it. Why? I uh, I just… don’t.”

One of the major things is that I can’t grasp the society they live in. It’s a world of furry, or anthropomorphic animals, whatever you wanna call it. In this world, the system of predator and prey is still in action, but regulated. And I can’t tell why some animals are fully erect with opposable thumbs and the like and some aren’t. Are they all sentient or not? And they EAT each other! And everyone’s OK with that. As I understand, there’s a regulation agency, Herd Thinners, Inc. which determines who gets eaten, or who gets to eat or something. And these creatures have to live with the fact that at any given day, they can be eaten. Killed, mauled, torn to shreds. That terrifies me, personally.

And then there was the Easter Bunny arc, which was my first bout of trying to understand the sociological workings in Kevin and Kell. Here, on Easter, Kevin is the Easter Bunny for his district. He hides the eggs all over the place. Hold on, EGGS? Those are the unfertilized children of other animals! Living people who you might know! Not to mention the fact that we’re not certain that there was a furry Jesus in order to give rise to the ceremony of Easter in the first place.

I took a stroll through the archives. Basically started at the beginning and read for a while. And honestly? The early stuff is good. Except it only causes to rise more questions in my mind. Like, when they had their baby, it came out a rabbit. But psychologically a predator. Which is funny enough, but I would never think that a wolf and a rabbit COULD mate. Being that they’re both an entirely different race from the other, it doesn’t seem possible.

I know I’m raising a lot of complaints here. This is why I don’t really dig the strip. It raises far too many questions in my mind. Not the good kind of questions, the intrigue and curiosity. But the bad kind of questions, the confusion variety. The art’s good, it’s generally funny from day to day, and a lot of people like, love, and understand what goes on in this strip. I just don’t get it, I guess.

But hey, I gave it a shot.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Webcomics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.