/ Comic Crit - +EV /
And the trio comes to a close.
The reason I criticize anything resembling Copy & Paste is because a lot of comickers do it out-of-their-genre (read: being lazy). When the oft-maligned Photo-genre (my shit), true Cut & Paste (Dinosaur Comics), or sprite comics (8-bit Theatre, Best Friends 4-Ever) do it, that’s because we only have one-to-five models per character. A hand-drawn comic owes some effort to the project because hand-drawn implies diversity in expression and body placement. They should be held accountable to the derision that comics who embrace the style receive.
Read: Don’t be lazy! We can tell!
This is when the awaiting review pile gets me into shit. Fuck it. I seem to torch the mainstream comics and enjoy the quirky ones. That’s my taste. The quirky ones seem to try harder.
Here we go: +EV
I’ll start this off with my sample.
Yes, there really are 10k webcomics. Yes, a lot of them suck (the ones on my review list just happen to be top-tier). I’ll give him brownie points for self-effacement, but I’ve already seen this “LOL I shot webcomix” 10 times. At least it wasn’t the first strip, but shuttled into continuity. His wife is consistently awesome.
Anyway, +EV (some kind of poker/gambling term) is the world’s best poker webcomic. I’ll give Bobby that since I don’t know of any others. 90+ strips old, it recently rose to interweb notability though solid advertising, unique subject, and all-round decent art and writing.
As I said, the art is solid, though nothing catchy. The artist copy and pastes poses and frames, probably because he’s seen other people do it, which is better than me calling him lazy. The colors aren’t jarring, nothing stands out.
As a vehicle for the dialogue and lolz, the art is competent enough, as most of the comic is 4-panel snarking on gambling, poker, children, and preggers wives. The main subtlety of the ha-ha’s are directed through the poker humor, which we can understand through context (understanding we’re supposed to laugh) but half the punch lines fall flat. The only bits I really like are the family aspect, which is a deviation from the main point of the project.
It’s one of those things that is hard to criticize but impossible to laud. Bobby has three choices in writing this comic:
A. Write intelligent, specific jokes to the poker/online-poker fanbase exclusively and cut the bullshit.
B. Dumb-down and tutorialize the punch lines in an appeal to the mass-market.
C. Find a middle ground where the jokes aren’t too specific, so poker fans and non-fans can both enjoy the content.
I believe Bobby went for C, which is nearly impossible in any genre specific parody. By going half-way you’ll always have the hardcore saying, “That was obvious, lame” and the uninitiated saying, “I don’t get it, lame.” +EV’s saving grace is that it’s a unique subject with little competition in it’s subgenre. It will always have casual fans who get enough of the humor and aren’t hardcore about poker. But I still don’t see this being an interweb blockbuster with its current content.
At its heart, +EV is a special interest comic, and I encourage its writer to embrace one subject or the other. The more slice-of-life it becomes, the more it can alienate the poker fanbase. The more poker it is, the more it alienates casual fans like me. It’s a tough sell and a quality humdrum to me, as a reader. I think the execution is more muddled than the premise. Maybe you like it, maybe you don’t. If anything, it’s good for smirks and the aforementioned wife/family dynamic. There’s no reason not to try this one, but half the content might always be dry, whichever side of fandom you are.
Uhg. I should have reviewed his horror/zombie comic, Last Blood. I’ll keep it on the list.
I do love this:
5 Comments so far
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I love poker, and I like EV+… but I don’t quite like it enough to put it on my ‘must check every update’ list.
By Marko on 03.29.07 1:54 am
I don’t use a ranking system, but Panelled does. I gave +EV a pretty positive score because of its general quality, but it didn’t make me a fan.
I’m sure a lot of people do/will like it for what it is. I wish Bobby the best of luck.
By Aarin on 03.30.07 12:14 am
Thanks for the good review.
“. . . rose to interweb notability though solid advertising . . .”
Not sure what that means. I’ve done almost zero advertising for the strip.
About your A, B, and C, I did none of the above. I did a combination of writing “intelligent, specific jokes to the poker/online-poker fanbase” and doing strips where the jokes aren’t too poker-centric for the average person to get them. I’d say about 25% of the strips can only be fully understood by a regular poker player and about 5% of the comics can only be understood by a hardcore poker player. A non-player, though, wouldn’t understand many of the references (in the 25% of strips that are very poker-related) and also wouldn’t realize that there’s something they’re not understanding most of the time. They’ll just think it’s bad/weird writing and that the jokes are falling flat, but it actually refers to something poker related.
Overall, the comic is for poker players, but most good, funny situations about poker don’t involve complicated poker terminology. In my opinion at least. So that makes most strips accessible to everyone.
“At its heart, +EV is a special interest comic, and I encourage its writer to embrace one subject or the other.”
That’s basically impossible and doesn’t make any sense to me. If I embraced just “slice of life,” it wouldn’t be a poker comic anymore. If I embraced just “extremely poker specific strips that only players could understand,” I’d probably have to switch it to weekly instead of MWF because of a lack of material and it would piss off all the non-poker player readers. It would also essentially eliminate Violet and Scarlett from the strip, or at least Violet. It’s best as a combination of both, and it’s the only feasible option.
“I should have reviewed his horror/zombie comic, Last Blood.”
Do “Marry Me” instead.
By Bobby Crosby on 03.30.07 8:58 am
Re: [”At its heart, +EV is a special interest comic, and I encourage its writer to embrace one subject or the other.”
That’s basically impossible and doesn’t make any sense to me]
Exactly. Thus the dilemma and why I felt it was a ‘tough sell.’ It’s a perfectly good poker comic, but as a readily accessible webcomic for casual fans like me, it’s hard to recommend outright.
I didn’t mean for my encouragement/suggestion to be taken farther than its words, I simply used that as a microcosm of why I had issues relating to your project. I followed that statement with examples (that you graciously echoed) about why changing-it-up wouldn’t work.
It would be like a reviewer telling me, “Aarin’s Desk is a photo comic, and I encourage its artist to learn how to fucking draw instead.” Impossible, yet telling of the issues of mainstream compatibility. That’s all I meant.
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. You do yourself good credit and I look forward to becoming familiar with either Last Blood or Marry Me, whichever interests me more (leaning towards the horror, since I enjoy horror).
By Aarin on 03.30.07 6:09 pm
“Impossible, yet telling of the issues of mainstream compatibility. That’s all I meant.”
And that’s perfectly fine, yeah. I just felt like going into a little more detail about it.
“Thanks for stopping by and commenting.”
No problem. Thanks for the review.
About “Last Blood” and “Marry Me”: I think “Marry Me” has been a better comic so far, mostly because the writing has been better. I’ve had some troubles with “Last Blood” and I’m not pleased with it at all.
By Bobby Crosby on 03.30.07 9:34 pm
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