Gotta give them credit…
So, recently,Gabe made a post about wanting to really dig into his art some more, feeling he’d stagnated for the last couple of years (for better or worse, in a place I’ve really disliked a lot, but that’s neither here nor there).
I really feel like today’s strip is the first one (featuring the lead characters) where his efforts have hit on all cylinders for me. The facial expressions have the loose, animated quality he’s been hanging on the last few years, but finally, by some miracle, the expressions actually convey an emotion, and moreover, it actually fits the dialog! The new poses/“camera angles” are also a nice touch, and are adding something to the composition of the drawings rather than just being done as a goofy gimmick. Sadly, the bizarro red noses are still there for who-knows what reason, but everything else feels much improved. Me like!
I had much the same reaction when reading it this morning. The weird freckles kind of put me off a little, and it seems to me that Tycho’s head is too small in the final frame, but the “camera angles” add a lot of dynamic motion to an otherwise largely static situation. I’m looking forward to seeing where he takes this.
I’m not fond of the shading on the noses or the eyeshadow in frame 2, and the freckles look like smallpox scars or Archie (or both), but he does seem to be moving away from Stimpy faces to convey emotion.
I like seeing him experiment, but I know he said he was going to. Without that context, judging this strip on its own merit, the changing perspectives make it feel overwrought.
The colored noses have still never bothered me in Penny-Arcade (but The Trenches was weird).
I think overwrought is what they were going for, given the script.
Yeah, during the Stimpy-phase (thanks for the term, Gus) (second parenthetical: no guarantee that it’s actually over yet), it usually felt like the art and writing were wholly disconnected; just characters posing and making wacky faces while bubbles of Tycho-log were squeezed into the margins to convey whatever the joke of the day was. There’s a little more cohesion to this piece. Still not a perfect strip by any means, but it feels like the two of them are working together in service of a common joke, which I missed.
I was honestly struck by the art in today’s comic - something about it is really impressing me this morning.
Judging Wood Part Five
Yeah, the art’s been really astonishing for this whole run. I’m a little less thrilled by the writing, but then again, I don’t actually like the Lookouts/Daughters-verse very much at all, so there’s that.
It’s poor storytelling regardless, it doesn’t answer any of the questions it asks. Primarily, why is she choosing to help him instead of letting the forest and its denizens destroy him? Felt like it was 4 strips of the same thing.
Oh, yeah, I’m not following the thread of whatever tale they are trying to tell at all any more. Originally I think I had it, something about the girl being resistant to hurting the boy for trespassing, despite the Owl’s insistence, but then this fifth panel (the one I linked) sort of skipped like a few frames of much needed exposition. PA doesn’t do a great job with long-form stories, I think it’s party due to limitations on the medium but also their inexperience story-boarding actual comics (is my theory).
IIRC they used to grumble and complain about the beast “continuity”. Any time that they did a series of two or three strips it was always, “And this horror that is continuity will come to an end in the next strip”.
Joke or serious issue? Maybe both?
Probably both. I always thought “continuity” was fun when it was a Gabe & Tycho thing stretching over a few days of strips. And it was still pretty interesting when they experimented with something else (like Automata, or whatever else they’ve done that I can’t remember).
Everything Lookouts related just sort of slides off my brain though. It started with an idea that I vaguely understood as something like the Boy Scouts of a fantasy world, but it quickly spiraled beyond my comprehension. I think there was an adjacent mythology for the Lookouts who went bad or didn’t cut it as Lookouts, and then there were the daughters of something—aka the girl scouts, and then there were probably the girl scouts that went bad and were raised by trees or something, and then spirits that were guiding them, and the fund raisers where they sold cookies, and now I’m hungry and I don’t know if I bought enough Thin Mints to last the summer and what were we talking about?
Anyway, yeah, not a clue what the latest strip or any of the recent Lookouts stuff has been about. But yeah, the art’s nice.
Everything Wholly Schmidt just said.
I assume it’s their “We’re parents now dawwww” outlet, because it’s all execrable shit about kids no one could possibly care about being in the woods for some goddamn reason.
Sorry, rough day at work. But I really hate these damn Lookouts comics.
They are using an outside artist to do the colors for this series. Steve Hamaker is his name, I think.
I had to check to see if I’d missed a day or something. I mean, I can infer what happened, but it seems like they left out the most important scene.
The lines themselves are really good, too, but I will agree this Steve guy’s work is incredible. It all came together really, really, well in my opinion.
Yeah, exactly! What the hell, right?
I definitely agree; these last few strips made me take note of an increase in quality that has actually been there for a while.
Steve Hamaker does do great colors. He’s also doing the coloring on Table Titans (with Scott Kurtz) and produces his own webcomic, PLOX.
I can understand if you don’t like the Lookouts stories, but I think you’re completely overreacting about the purpose of the comic, or its appeal only to parents. Really, you can’t relate to any stories about kids? I’m sure you were birthed fully-grown out of the head of Zeus or something, but you must know a few people who were actually kids at some point.