Hi. My month-long hiatus was fun and useless. Back to work.

There’s a growing trend in webcomics: print-ready projects. By marketing design or by financial/distribution necessity, would-be independent comic-book artists have embraced the medium in hopes of their big break, outside of formal publishers. This is nothing new for the aspiring newspaper crowd, or the derivative mangu crowd, but I’ve seen far less of the traditional comic book projects.

All the same, they’re multiplying at an ever-increasing rate, at least in visibility. They’ve also attained some vestige of semi-professional quality, so are finally becoming worthy of notation and/or critique. That’s the only reason they’re starting to build any intranet-mainstream steam, as before they were relegated to lonely corners where they toiled hunchbacked over their inking and scans, reveling in their obscurity as much as they suffered for it, scoffing at the limelight-hogging gamer-comics, doujins, and Bill Watterson wannabes, all the while biding their time, praying against their pride, and shouting to the heavens, ‘My masterpiece is destined to grant me great monies and lulz.”

And the webcomic gods looked upon the face of indie-webcomic-comic-books and said, “WTF.”

I quit collecting comics back in the 90’s, and even then I wasn’t interested in indie-type stories, settings, and art. Tastes change, but some things don’t, namely, my absolute disinterest in melodrama, thus categorized above.

Really. I think I found a new genre to hate.

Now far be it for me to shit on any artist brave enough to showcase their billion hours and tablet-strokes, especially when they’re half-way capable. However there are things we can do here. There is progress to be made.

Here we go: The End

The End is a quasi-post-apocalyptic story written, illustrated, colored, webdesigned, and promoted by Tommie Kelly. Where Arkaina details a dystopian apocalypse in progress, The End is after the fact, having involved bird flu and decades of missing time. The common link between the two is the presence of angels/demons and should be noted as a common premise these days. Both have oppressive governments, freedom fighters/cults, full-color art, slow pacing, and skew towards being over-written. I’ll focus on The End here, but I really do get a sense of déjà vu. Funny part is, there’s a 98% probability that these comikers aren’t even aware each other.

So back to the bird-flu-ridden future.

The story is set in 2119, Nadir City, USA, a walled-off safe-area where survivors live semi-normal lives. There’s an abundance of world-building narration, especially early on, which characterizes the setting well enough until we finally meet the cast: Joshua, a prison guard, and his girlfriend Casey, a reporter. In a hotel hallway, Josh engages some Crazy MotherFucker with superpowers in a gunfight, after CMF offers him a hitman-for-satan job. Fast forward a bit and he’s neck-deep in a four-sided conflict far bigger than him that may involve the *gasp* very fate of humanity. There’s a lot of time-skipping and flashbacks, and that’s fine, but the overall presentation might be too ambitious for its own good. It certainly made more sense when marathoned in total, than in its chapter-by-chapter blocks.

There’re some serials you can just ‘jump into.’ The End isn’t one of them.

Tommie is a fantastic colorist by webcomic standards (not sure about pro, but I’m sure it’s mid-to-high tier digital coloring). If there’s one big positive for this project and its creator, it’s an exceptional talent at color selection, light sources, gradients and backgrounds, and the melding of all elements. That’s not easy, nor is it expected. Maginfying any random panel often blows my mind with the amount of time and attention given to the coloring, and skill involved therein.

Sadly, the lineart is fucking bizarre. His women are attractive enough, as are the clothing and other objects (backgrounds, architecture), but the men look pretty shitty. It’s stylized art, so it fits that indie-look, but I don’t like the faces or hands. It seems a simple wire-frame template or some life studies would fix the awkwardness, so does that mean Tommie intends for his cast to look like gaunt, disproportioned cheeseballs with cock-stiff expressions? I’m not sure.

The dialogue isn’t any better. Can it be possible this is another non-native English comic? If I threw at a fucking dartboard, how many of these on my list would I hit? 10? 30?

All the dialogue is needlessly formal, overstates the obvious, and uses far too many goddamn exclamation points! Why is everyone shouting! Replacing every period doesn’t make stiff prose dynamic! It’s redundant and totally kills the impact for those moments that truly require the emphasis! As an artist, if you can’t show this level of impact/stress without repeating the same punctuation cue, you’re doing something wrong! Let the art be the art, and let the dialogue read off the paper as a script! If your script resembles like this paragraph, please, please, please, find a different way to show emphasis than exclamation points and bolding random words!

I get the impression that The End was built for, or in lieu of, eventual print publication, PoD or pipe-dream-pro. The project and the artist aren’t there yet, nor do I have any expectation they will be in the next year. Time to scrap it? Naw, but this isn’t going to be Tommie’s masterpiece, nor his calling card.

I don’t know how old Tommie is: 16, 26, 36, but in any case, that’s a lot of learning and career left to go. Continue working on the lineart. Hire/enlist an writer for proofreading the scripts until you get the eye to do it yourself. The content can be the same, but the actual wording is an eyesore as it is. After all that’s done, and The End reaches its namesake, you’ll have another project.

And the webcomic gods may look upon its face, and say: “It is good.”