Ocular Trauma
Now… that’s what I call an impromptu sabbatical. Most refreshing. But god damn, was Eric ever right about Writer’s Momentum.
Moving on, we have the matter to resolve about the Auctioned Essay for Save ConnectiCon. Namely, writing it. The Winner, Wade Clarke, has requested his article be written as a formal criticism and review of his webcomic, Ocular Trauma. So here it is.
I think it’s been made evident in my writings up until this point that my standards for non-sequitorial gag-a-day webcomics have been soundly solidified by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (mournfully discontinued). Having said that, when I am introduced to new gag-a-day strip, I reflexively see a lot of SMBC elements in it (an example of SMBC style jokes).
However, my opinion of Ocular Trauma can be summed up in just a few words:
“Hit or Miss.”
Let me illustrate my point with a few choice examples. Out of the entire run of OT, there is a good deal of unfunny, a bunch of funny, and a few solid gems. And interestingly enough, my favorite jokes from the series are the simplest of all. The worst ones are ones that seem to rely on random screaming and cursing, or otherwise just plain tasteless jokes. And finally, this one just renders me awestruck.
The thing I find most intriguing about OT is that it’s from Australia, and we get to see some looks on how other countries might see us. It’s only fair, because we as Americans certainly do a lot of ragging on other countries (France). And I guess this might still just be payback for when The Simpsons went to Australia.
The art of the strip is very decent. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. I’d like to see it get its own hosting, as in not on LiveJournal.
I think what Wade needs to sit down and do is practice drawing, so he can have a visual look to his comic that is unique enough to stand out on its own, and to analyze his writing. I’ve said before that his comic is very hit or miss. It’s either really funny, or appallingly not. Obviously, we all know that humor is a very, very fragile thing.
Looking over the various strips he’s written it comes that the best ones are the simpler ones, the ones that make life observations, make use of clever puns, or effectively use sheer randomness.
Example for case 1, life observations, lies in the “Find X” strip I linked above. It’s funny because we’ve all thought that at one point or another, during our first introductions to geometry at a young age. Similar to this is a strip in his archives (can’t find it at the moment) featuring a children’s drawing of a girl in a lab with the scrawled caption “I want to be a molecular biologist.” Wade obviously knows how to make clever observations on life, so I’d like to see more of that.
Case 2, the clever puns, is beautifully illustrated in this strip. Personally, I’ve always hated the word “Metrosexual,” because it implies that fashion choice is inherently linked to sex. But thanks to Wade, we all now know what Metrosexual really means. I would enjoy seeing him tear apart more pop culture lingo with the use of wordplay.
Finally, we come to case 3, which is far and beyond the hardest to pull off of all. The nature of random is to not have anything to do with the previous topic in the slightest. So going off in a radical tangent can prove either hilarious or disastrous results. I think that where he’s stronger at lies in his absurdity over his absolute randomness, and by that I mean the situations that make no sense over the events that make no sense. Like his “Switched eyeballs while sleeping” strip over his “Axe in the back for using a leaf blower.”
To sum up, Ocular Trauma has a lot of potential for being very good. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good right now. But I think it can grow into something a lot cooler with a bit of work. At any rate, it’s a fun read. So I would recommend it to anyone who likes their daily dose of randomness.
(apologies for the brevity, Wade. I tried not to be so damned concise)
August 15th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
Even though Phil was concise, one of the things that is an advantage of being reviewed on a regularly-read snarksite is that other people see the site, read it, and make their own commentaries. So I guess I’ll add my review to the little review that’s been put up.
Personally, I agree with most of what was said above. In the area of art, I think that it would be best if the cartoonist simplified the art a bit. The colouring, in particular, seems over-wrought and heavy-handed.
The best coloured comics, in the cartoon style, don’t do such heavy-handed colouring. For example, the cartoon here has a shadow on the girl’s hair that detracts from the strip and makes it look a bit heavy-handed, colouring-wise. Many of the strips have this sort of colouring in them.
Some variation in line-thickness (ie. thinner lines in most places with heavier back lines) would do the trick perfectly. I know the artist is capable of it because the same cartoon includes an artfully-shadowed shirt on the girl.
Secondly, the facial expressions of many of the characters could be toned-down to make the comic a bit more “sly”. The comic I pointed out, called “tasteless” by the reviewer, is a bit tasteless, but could have been more effective, i think, if the character holding the book didn’t look so over-hyped.
Even the “I Visit Mum Every Weekend” joke, which is plain WRONG, could have been more effective if the guy with the shovel had a scary-looking creepy face on instead of a big smile plastered across his face. Rendered with cross-hatching and foreboding, it could have been the sort of comic to give one shivers and make you shake your head in bemusement. Instead if feels like a cheap attempt at tasteless humour and makes one shake his head in tasteless bemusement.
One thing I do urge: CONSISTENCY.
Although you’ve got a gag-a-day strip goin’, the best gag-a-day strips have really really consistent drawing. Even though there are no central characters, we KNOW Farson’s strip is drawn by Farson, just by looking at it. We KNOW Bizarro is drawn by the same artist every day.
The drawings in Ocular Trauma are, um, “hit or miss”. There’s no sense that you’ll get quality everytime. One day we get stick men. The next we have a 3D train that looks like it’s from a Super Nintendo video game with a guy humping it and weird blurred brush effects from Photoshop signifying the motion. Then we get an artfully designed “DO you lIke mY BeaUTifFUL voIce” comic with neat writing on it and jaggedy edged people sharing a “quiet” moment, and the next day we get a guy blowing up from a cell-phone ring.
Consistency in jokes you do not necessarily need — I don’t “get” every Far Side comic… but consistency in ART is important — I enjoy looking at Far Side comics… I stay and try to figure out the joke because my eyes linger on the drawings. Here… I don’t bother wanting to look again, because my eyes wander as soon as I see an odd drawing.
Like Phil said, you seem to be good at exploring “little” moments. So make your drawings reflect that. Some suggestions (if I may)
1) Tone it down. Establish some consistency. Make the linework a bit easier to deal with, visually (pick a brush setting or two and stick to them… consider picking a thinner brush than your using).
2) Draw your characters in more “soft” poses. The yelling granny in this comic isn’t that effective as a character… she looks a bit un-artistic. But the DVD palace girl! She’s beautiful. Soft. Nicely suggestive and understated at the same time. She’s almost got a a lesson is learned feel to her.
3) Maybe even go Monotone, Duotone or Greyscale. These will give your strips and instant visual change and allow your drawings to be “quiet” even when the action is a bit louder”. As a matter of fact, I think black and white would probably improve your art 10x in the first day you used it.
4) Oh… also> regarding the font. Arial Narrow… not really the best choice for a comic font. You might consider something a bit more distinctive. (don’t go to comic sans though… i’ve only seen one comic that that worked for).
5) A comic size! You need to pick a format and stick to it. Draw a box. And use the same size box every day. Make it a standard size, if you ever plan going print. This will make the comic, once again, simply easier for the reader to deal with.
6) A comic archive system that makes sense. Livejournal makes it annoying because I get a “there are no events for this day” quite often. Use comicgenesis if you don’t want to pay. You might even get more readership that way. And hey, if you want to keep the whole LJ readership, you can always update it both ways.
Yeah, so that’s my assessment. PS: I liked this one. For some reason.
6)
August 15th, 2005 at 12:57 pm
edits:
*(thinner brush size than “you’re” using)
and I’m sure a couple other spelling things that I haven’t noticed.
One other thing… one of the reasons I urge a standard size (preferably surrounded by a box) is because some of your comics don’t feel like comics at all.
The one posted today, for instance, feels really unnatural and is way too long for me to want to read thoroughly.
There are other ones like that… the existential fish (which could have been rendered as a funny drawing, with the fisherman telling another fisherman the intro, instead of a newspaper headline with an article underneath that just reads BLAH BLAH [sort of lame and lazy, blah blah’s are])… the eBay comic (which I can’t find the link to at the moment) is also sort of like that… it doesn’t FEEL like a joke. My brain isn’t sure how to process it.
It seems stupid, but if it was a certain size, and surrounded by a box, I’d be more inclined to go “AH! That’s a cartoon!” and laugh. The way it is now, I’m more inclined to go “What is this? I don’t get it? Is it like THE ONION? Is it a comic? Aah!” and be turned off.
Also, I must say… THIS is some impressive-looking blood.
August 15th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
Looks like you got two criticisms for the price of one there, Wade.
August 15th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
^ Yours was written with more, um, grammatical clarity though.
I sort of rambled on and on.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
Thanks Lucas!
I’ve got a ton of discussion for you, probably more than you wrote - but don’t complain, because my preciseness is at the microscopic level. On the macroscopic, I don’t care how long people go on for, so long as what they say is good :)
I think the consistency is the most important issue you raised, as it’s one I was already thinking about.
You’re reading 200 comics all at once, but remember these have been developed over a year. Ocular Trauma was kicked off quite specifically by my desire to produce an long term comic but not get bogged down in my own perfectionism, which just slowed my previous comic, Plan 10, to a halt. I am prolific in generating material but a very slow illustrator.
So in the beginning I deliberately never cleaned the lines, everyone was a stick figure or a simple cartoon figure, etc. It was more overtly a punk style. As time goes on however, my un-overcomeable desire to make things look nicer starts to come back, and basically I wage something of a war between that and the original mission of passion over delivery. And on some days the joke seems much better suited to the original style.
Later on, if I use stick figures, it’s actually become consistent in when I do it. The tampon tea comic - the way it is, it needs to be in a world of silliness that only stick figures can do.
But I totally acknowledge your point that the people still look too different overall. There’s a few modes, and sometimes the cartoon people look a lot simpler than on other days. I think your suggestions are a definite motivator for me to get them all the same.
Ditto with the line thickness - I have a lot of trouble with that. I start drawing the comic and then depending on the scale of what begins to happen, the lines may be thick or thin. Lately, the images are becoming more consistent in scale, but there are still bloops. I scaled the ‘Metrosexual’ comic up to get in the train detail, but to me it looks huge when placed beside any of the other illustrated comics. And the ‘javelin through the head’ comic’ you liked is unfortunately thick in the line and font department.
I don’t know about the colour though. If I was hand-drawing these (the lined comics), they’d look a lot more detailed. But I don’t, and I often think they look quite unexciting. The colour really brings them to life and creates the mood. When I’m colouring them is when I get that feeling of ‘Oh wow!’. So I’d always felt this was one of the better parts of the comic, as I genuinely had a feeling my method was distinct, and I didn’t see too many other comics coloured this way. I figure that’s because most continue in the comic tradition where things are done with flat colours and line.
Lately I’ve been ripping some new colouring methods off Questionable Content, a comic whose writing and content utterly nauseate me, but whose artwork I think is BEEYOOODIFULL!!!!! I think the shadow on the ‘I cut myself’ girl’s shirt was the very first time I did that, thanks to Questionable Content. So it saddened me that you thought that was good, but that the lustre of her hair was heavy-handed :P
Separation of the types of comics is another thing you’ve got me properly thinking about now. For instance, you said the ebay one ‘doesn’t FEEL like a joke.’ If a joke is a thing with a punchline, then it’s not a joke. However it is an overall satiric piece with what you might call plenty of jokes. So maybe it is like THE ONION? I don’t know — Bizarrely, I’ve never read THE ONION, or maybe only when referred to individual pages.
You’re harping on me to pull this into line with a gag a day. Have a frame size, get all the artwork consistent, etc. I do think the different modes are very consistent within themselves - except for the previously discussed artwork issues in the comicky ones :) - but for instance, the restaurant menu from today + the ebay comic + the virtual will all feel entirely at home next to each other. So you’ve raised the point of whether they should all go together. On a different website, maybe I could separate the strands, and that would remove the conceptual problems for someone in your chair. I put lots of different comedic material into Oc Trauma, and maybe it’d be better off broken up.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:45 pm
…And now to my two points of major disagreement, one which I regard as extremely important for all critics!
I am alarmed by both of you going around with that word ‘tasteless’. I believe critics should never use it. You can use specific adjectives like, ‘This is gross, I find this totally sick’, which also alert us to your subjectivity, possess quality meaning and are fine! But never the nebulous and assumptive ‘tasteless’.
Taste is really just what one person likes. But when it’s evoked for assessment, it seeks to divide things into two completely unproven categories - the tasteful and the tasteless - and pretends they’re objectively defined, and acts all hoity-toity about things while it’s at it! If I say something is tasteful, I’m saying I approve of it and so do all of these other smart and refined people who share my viewpoint about what is tasteful and what isn’t, because we all know. And correspondingly for the negative in the case of ‘tasteless’.
That’s why in conversation, people with no critical skills use ‘you have good taste’ or you ‘have no taste’ to pass off their ‘I agree’ or ‘I disagree’ as something bigger than they are.
As a critic myself, I seek and destroy the tasteful/tasteless thing wherever I see it.
So, I certainly reject all assessments along those lines concerning Ocular Trauma. You can say it’s gross, sick, gory, violent, queasy and ‘just plain WRONG’ becasue it proudly is. But ‘tasteless’ doesn’t mean anything and is dismissive.
In the case of the guy who dug up his mother, I gotta disagree hugely, and not just because of two back-to-back tastelesses :) I never sought shivers or bemusement. I simply drew the guy exhibiting the great joy he feels upon seeing his mum right after he’s pulled her corpse out.
August 15th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
Oh yeah, sorry to make a third post, but I just wanted to say I’ve never used Photoshop in my life :) I have a weird history of always having tools attributed to me that I’ve never used whenever I make stuff online - for instance midi files when I used a tracker, in music. But now I’m straying off course and probably no-one cares!
August 15th, 2005 at 11:35 pm
I think reviewers can call things tasteless. You see it all the time in the world of fashion… clothes that are tasteless. Reviewers say so. A review doesn’t need to be qualified with “I think”. It’s pretty much the person’s opinion and the reader should know that.
Anyways, to respond. Completely in random order:
I’m glad you appreciated me pointing out the line consistency issue etc.
The issue with the “Onion” type comics, I think, could be resolved by simply putting them in a box that was the same size as the other comics. It would make me “get” the fact that it is a comic. The restaurant menu is funny, but for a comic-reader, it’s also REALLY REALLY wordy. So it doesn’t feel like a comic. If that makes sense. Perhaps there could be a comic section and a “general humour” section or something. *shrug*
WADE Says: “You’re harping on me to pull this into line with a gag a day. Have a frame size, get all the artwork consistent, etc. I do think the different modes are very consistent within themselves - except for the previously discussed artwork issues in the comicky ones :) - but for instance, the restaurant menu from today + the ebay comic + the virtual will all feel entirely at home next to each other.”
^ I agree. But at the same time, if you want regular readers, you’ll have to decide “What sort” of artwork your producing. What sort of site you want to be. Because if you keep changing it around you’ll lose readers faster than Megatokyo.
As for the stick figure issue, I do understand how the tampon joke can only exist in the world of silliness, but at the same time, it does devalue your comic to have beautiful artwork one day and stick figures the next. there *are* ways of doing a joke like that within the realm of *higher* art, I think.
—–
WADE SAYS:
But I totally acknowledge your point that the people still look too different overall. There’s a few modes, and sometimes the cartoon people look a lot simpler than on other days. I think your suggestions are a definite motivator for me to get them all the same.
RESPONSE: i don’t necessarily mean that they must all look the same or whatnot, but to establish a similar mood is important. The same overall look and feel. They can all exist within their own mood or whatever, but to have some strand holding them together would be nice.
As with the clothing… I could totally tell you stole that from Questionable Content. ;)
And Photoshop: I only called what I saw. I was more commenting on the fact that some lines were blurry and others strong than on the materials you use.
That’s all.
PS: I’m not really a reviewer, just a random cartoonist stopping by and checking it out. Hopefully some stuff I said made sense. Disregard the rest, of course.
August 15th, 2005 at 11:36 pm
EDIT: once again, the “you’re”=”your” thing. I apologize. No edit feature on these things. Misspelling occurs when I ramble.
August 16th, 2005 at 1:52 am
Ack! People in the world of fashion are just the kind of no-critical-skills folks I was talking about. They could descibe something specifically and then say ‘this sucks’. Instead, they happily choose ‘tasteless’, becausein fashion it is actively encouraged to put down particular ideas at particular times, no matter what merits someone might argue up for them. And these are ideas which just one season later may be considered ‘in’ again. That’s how silly it is. So I don’t think a visit to the world of fashion supplies any defense for people analysing stuff that has intellectual content but who go with the word. Nor is it to do with prefacing with ‘I think’. ‘Tasteless’ is simply an adjective that offers maximum unqualified judgement in the smallest amount of time. That’s why I think it should be stamped out. I can’t stamp it out of fashion because they love and need their silliness, but we sure don’t need it in reviewing books, films, comics, etc. Nobody would say ‘it sure was tasteless when Ed Gein dug up his mum.’ But somehow then my decision to relate that piece of information to someone then becomes tasteless. How can a particular story be tasteless? The more you think about it, the less it means.
So, my anti-mania on ‘tasteless’ aside <_< your commentary was very enlightening and interesting to me, and I am seriously considering a lot of the ideas.
August 16th, 2005 at 5:12 am
“Tasteless” is a value judgement much like “good” or “bad”. To be consistant, you’d have to demand the removal of all value-oriented adjectives from the English language.
August 17th, 2005 at 2:18 am
Exactly. William said it perfectly. Saying that I think something in a strip is tasteless for some reason gets shot down by the cartoonist. But if I said, “Your strip is awesome,” he wouldn’t have had an argument. And yet both are equally value judgements of my opinion.
The critic’s job is to say “good” “bad” “meh”. In this case, I think Phil did both. Weighing and qualifying is what’s important, and once again I think he did that.
August 18th, 2005 at 11:27 pm
I don’t think you paid attention to any of my examples. If you’d said it was gross, sick or wrong (the last you did), I wouldn’t have a problem. I only have a problem with tasteless because as I have specifically illustrated it offers maximum unqualified judgement and the ultimate value call-in in the smallest available space and with the minimum qualification of itself. No, I would not have to demand the removal of all value-based judgements from the English language because language is not a binary black and white thing. That’s why sometimes someone says ‘bad’, sometimes someone says ‘crap’, sometimes someone says ‘abysmal’, because they’re all different. I attack only ‘tasteless’ for the reasons previously explained.
Overall, Phil did weigh and qualify. So did you (Lucas). I didn’t say anyone didn’t nor have I complained about any of that. I attack only the blunt and broken instrument that is ‘tasteless’, which was only 1% of both reviews, but it’s a particular 1% I will never let go of anywhere when I see it, applied to anything. It didn’t get shot down ‘for some reason’, it got shot down because of what it is in particular.
November 6th, 2005 at 9:46 pm
Quick technical note about this post: I’m devouring your archives (Websnark sent me here) and the link between this post and the next [8/15?/05] is missing.
November 6th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
Things should be working now, Mali. Thanks for reading.