Hey there

First of all, I want to tell you that I really enjoy being here and while I already have a blog where I do some reviews of bad webcomics (Very Bad Things), I was wondering if I should also post them is blog, too. If anyone is interested, here's a sample...

Webcomic: Masters of the Art

Maybe in reality I’m just a big snob. I don’t get the zany fun of random humor (unless it’s done by Robot Chicken) nor do I want to shell out seven dollars to see a movie that I know is going to be utter shit just to make fun of it (when I can wait for it to come out in the local library for free.) My sense of taste must have it’s nose so high in the air that it’s up God’s ass that I could not appreciate Masters of the Art for the quality webcomic my friend says it is.
You see, I’m doing this review as a favor for a friend of mine and he assured me that while it doesn't look like much at first, the story gets better and that there was some great character development. To be fair I read through the entire comic, all 350 pages of it, and I’m still as bored off my ass as I was when I began. While it doesn’t have the soullessness of Shredded Moose nor the self-righteous banter of Hathor the Cowgoddess, MotA is bad because it is so cliché and poorly written that you can just tell the writer’s literary diet is mostly composed of bad animes and other crappy webcomics.

MotA is a tale of a small group of teenagers with slightly geeky overtones, but not enough to warrant it as a Penny Arcade clone. It’s more like Ranma ½ (without all the transformations and nudity) both are full of wacky adventures, martial arts, romantic rivalries and crazy characters. Except that where Ranma ½ is one of the few harem animes that I actually like and could be pretty entertaining, MotA is boring and unfunny. I’ll start out with the characters. Fellow bad webcomic reviewer, Shmeckie, made a wonderful point about that if you can pretty much describe a character in one sentence, you’ve got a problem. Let’s see if we can do that. There’s Dirk (The straight man who was sneaker in the early strips, but eventually died.), Jackson (A “cool” self-proclaimed perv-extrodinare and inventor who wants to take over the world.), Marie (A martial artist who secretly likes Dirk, but will never admit it.), Reed (the dim-witted wacky guy), Elliot (A chubby boy whose…damn, there’s not much to say about him except that he's good at fighting.), Kim (Reed’s nymphomaniac girlfriend), Tiffany (A silly girl with a naughty sense of humor.), and Sandy (Marie’s rival who tried to steal Dirk, but felt bad about it later.)

Yep, it’s pretty much like that. But what about the character development? After trudging through the comic, I’ve only come across two instances. One which involved a homeless Santa Claus getting his groove back after saving two kids froma burning building and when Marie decided to be more committed by asking Dirk out and then immediately swore that he wasn’t her boyfriend the second Sandy tried to apologize during the evil clone saga and thus we’re stuck with more sexual innuendo with no results. God, even the cast of Miss Management went through more character development than this and it was one of those casual games you can get off the net for twenty bucks.

Now for the story, as I mentioned before MotA is a comedy that has the characters getting involved in a series of wacky adventures from Reed becoming a superhero chef and fighting Emril, 15-feet fall Amazon lawyers, evil robot clones that spew medieval gibberish when you shout the right phrase, and going to the prom in a pimp suit. Yet somehow, I was still bored. Might be my snobbiness kicking in or that’s all the plots are, a series of wacky events without much going on to build upon it. Let the characters learn and grow from their experiences every now and then. Not to mention that the humor and most everything else often falls flat, especially in the parody (which they thankfully stopped doing) and Justin's Journal entries (where the author shows exerts from his life). Could be my sense of humor, but I only found myself chuckling at a rare number of them.

Thankfully the art does get better as the series goes on as it starts moving away from the wanna-be Japanese style where the anatomy was seriously off and the bodies looked stiff, to something that is still very mediocre with Reed’s hair looking like a leaf of poison oak. In a way, this was a bit of a tricky review to write because I had plenty of fodder for the sheer awfulness and insanity of the previous two, but at least they were quick reads and easy to backtrack. This one is just plain dull (that I had to fight the urge to skip parts so I wouldn’t go insane) and backtracking to find a certain link I needed, is quite painful in its own way. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this bashing.