Bad webcomics

[Surfin Terf]

>hit a quarter-life crisis and feel a little insecure about her choices
>panics and immediately throws on some new pronouns
I don't understand these rules at all, if I made this joke I'd be hunted down for being transphobic.

To be fair, I think that it’s a callback to an earlier comic where trans Calvin says she has to change her pronouns if she wants to join GROSS and suggests he/they.

On the other hand, that’s still really stupid and she’s still being pushed into identifying as he/they for ridiculous reasons.

 

[Cnidarian]

There's also that if you talk to an imaginary friend when you're six years old, that's cute. If you're an adult who talks to an imaginary friend you're a schizo.

I was turning it around in my head to figure out how to keep Calvin and Hobbes around with each other as adults, and I've figured that it can only work if Hobbes is just a pen name for Calvin, because "they" are already the same person. Hobbes is just a mouthpiece for thoughts interesting to Calvin that he's too bratty to directly identify with, so he's a wiser alter ego. You don't have a thirty nine year old Calvin playing with Hobbes, there's a goofy family man named Calvin and then there's an author or columnist named Hobbes who's wise and witty. This also doesn't work well if he/they're the main characters so it has to be more of a reference than a fanfic.

 

[Cnidarian]

Looks like we have a new entry in the Shen troonout saga. Kinda reminds me of jeet "white women secretly want us!" memes.
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What is it about AGP that rots your ability to draw people?

 

[Mr. Delicious]

What is it about AGP that rots your ability to draw people?

Perhaps any realistic depiction of human beings would shatter the illusion?

 

[YouTube Autist]

More Panthera and Hobbes. I suspect we're going to get a block of three strips each week on reddit until the cartoonist loses interest.

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I hate this more than words can express. The scale is completely off for Hobbes (what, is Calvin now 9 feet tall?) and the idea of Calvin growing up to be a personality-disordered do-nothing loser who mooches off his parents is extremely depressing. Of course, the worst thing about it is it takes the pure joy, curiosity, wonder, and mischief of the actual Calvin and replaces it with a load of narrow, rigid ideology masquerading as the former. "I'm not male OR female! Wow, did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?? My pronouns are xeaoi/yxooie."

 

[YouTube Autist]

More Panthera and Hobbes. I suspect we're going to get a block of three strips each week on reddit until the cartoonist loses interest.

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I've often thought about this: the qualities that are the most comical in small kids are exactly the same qualities that are the most intolerable in adults. Small kids are clumsy, tactless, needy, manipulative, irresponsible, and impulsive. (Example: A small kid comes up to you and starts narrating to you whatever kind of trivial kid stuff is on his mind, without checking whether you're interested or not. From a kid, this lack of self-awareness is funny. From an adult, it's obnoxious.)

Children are like inchoate little blobs of potential. They are everything and nothing in particular at the same time. They're always trying things out and then putting them back on the shelf. If you retain a little of this quality as an adult, you're a dilettante. If you retain a lot of it, you have a personality disorder.

I think that part of the reason that every attempt to imagine "grown-up Calvin" (from the syrupy "Calvin marries Susie and they have a daughter who makes friends with Hobbes" type to the "Calvin becomes transgender" type -- and I've recently been displeased to discover that there's a lot of art based on the latter concept) fails is because Calvin's identity is not fully defined. No 6-year-old has a fully defined identity, and I don't think you can answer the question, "What will adult Calvin be like?" any more than you can look at an actual 6-year-old boy and say what he will be like in 20 years. Calvin might grow up as a restless outsider, or he might turn out more like his dad -- superficially conformist and type-A, but inwardly whimsical and mischievous. Who knows? Either way, Calvin will have changed a lot by the time he becomes an adult, so writing "adult Calvin" means inventing an almost entirely new character who happens to have the same name, shirt, and hair.

This horrible comic series (the name of which I can't bring myself to type) gets around this issue by imagining Calvin as a manchild who is more or less the same at 26 as he was at 6: irresponsible, self-involved, lacking all sense of proportion, and experimenting with a new identity every week. These qualities can be funny and endearing (or, at least, tolerable) in small kids, but they are almost the worst qualities you can have as an adult.

Nietzsche wrote, "The maturity of man -- that means, to have reacquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play." Many people regret having been deserted by the childlike virtues: innocence, curiosity, self-legislation, absorption in the world, and spontaneous profound creativity. The manchild uses this longing for a return to the childlike virtues to justify not freeing himself from the childlike vices: solipsism, emotional volatility, dependency, and so on. The audience of this horrible comic series has a manchild worldview, and sees adult "Calvin" as a hero because he remains solipsistic, volatile, dependent, etc., into adulthood. (The thought that Calvin's parents might be deeply disturbed by their son deciding to get breast implants seems not to have crossed the author's mind. Apparently both Mr. and Mrs. Calvin accepted this development in stride.)

I notice that the author of this horrible comic has spent a lot of time studying Bill Watterson's artwork, and carefully mimics a lot of his signature flourishes. They're not always well integrated -- often, faces appear pasted onto heads -- but they do show hours of close study of the original "Calvin & Hobbes." Even the pacing of each strip skillfully mimics that of the original comics. I think this makes the comic even worse. Like the Grand Inquisitor in "The Brothers Karamazov," the author of this comic has spent hours poring over a text while remaining blind to its central message. It is sad and absurd.

(Apologies for the double post. It was too late for me to edit my previous post.)

 

[Snake of Diamond]

I've often thought about this: the qualities are the most comical in small kids are exactly the same qualities that are the most intolerable in adults. Small kids are clumsy, tactless, needy, manipulative, irresponsible, and impulsive. (Example: A small kid comes up to you and starts narrating to you whatever kind of trivial kid stuff is on his mind, without checking whether you're interested or not. From a kid, this lack of self-awareness is funny. From an adult, it's obnoxious.)

Children are like inchoate little blobs of potential. They are everything and nothing in particular at the same time. They're always trying things out and then putting them back on the shelf. If you retain a little of this quality as an adult, you're a dilettante. If you retain a lot of it, you have a personality disorder.

This is interesting to me because the comedy of something like Dexter from Dexter's Lab as an example is that he still acts like a kid despite being a genius so there's some naivety on how to act in social environments around other people including his peers. It extends to teens who are learning more about the world but there's that awkward stage of still being kid like but trying to understand things on a more mature level like what they think adults do.

This second part of what you said is the most intriguing since i feel a lot of of creators especially now in these art circles often don't get that the interests of kids.

 

[Mr. Delicious]

I think that part of the reason that every attempt to imagine "grown-up Calvin" (from the syrupy "Calvin marries Susie and they have a daughter who makes friends with Hobbes" type to the "Calvin becomes transgender" type -- and I've recently been displeased to discover that there's a lot of art based on the latter concept) fails is because Calvin's identity is not fully defined.

This is a magnificent analysis, far above what the work deserves. In response, I will expose you to yet more of this crap. Normally I'd wait until there were multiple strips, but this is a Sunday!

I actually didn't understand this one at first. I don't know if I'm just retarded or if it's not very clear. For anyone else who doesn't get it, Hobbes is injecting Calvin with estrogen. A couple other notes: Calvin has changed his name again, this time to "Power," which is somehow stupider than Panthera. Also, this is Hobbes' first line in the past ten strips.

 

[Big Nasty]

Calvin has changed his name again, this time to "Power," which is somehow stupider than Panthera.

Accurate depiction of troon behavior.

 

[Arthur Morgan]

I've often thought about this: the qualities that are the most comical in small kids are exactly the same qualities that are the most intolerable in adults. Small kids are clumsy, tactless, needy, manipulative, irresponsible, and impulsive. (Example: A small kid comes up to you and starts narrating to you whatever kind of trivial kid stuff is on his mind, without checking whether you're interested or not. From a kid, this lack of self-awareness is funny. From an adult, it's obnoxious.)

Children are like inchoate little blobs of potential. They are everything and nothing in particular at the same time. They're always trying things out and then putting them back on the shelf. If you retain a little of this quality as an adult, you're a dilettante. If you retain a lot of it, you have a personality disorder.

Reminds me of that Caliou short where they show how fucking weird it'd be if he still acted that way at 40. It's also why I hate that Millennials try to reason with their kids instead of disciplining them. Children are not reasonable. They don't have the experience or development to be reasonable. They still don't understand why they can't have ice cream for dinner. And the kids who are 'wise beyond their years' usually get that way because they're traumatized.

The sad thing is, there are enough of those people who never grew up that they also find the behaviors to be cute or at least validating. Like that one where the girl admitted to needing to psyche herself up to make a phone call, something normal people can do easily.

 

[NoonmanR]

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[power panthera and hobbs]

The amount of effort they put into a comic about hobbes giving lillith calvin an estrogen shot is truly, truly depressing.

It's sad that people just can't leave something alone. The original Calvin and Hobbes ended neatly. It did not need a continuation, the creator did not want it to be continued, in fact he objected intensely to most forms of franchising, as it was a very personal project. We did not need to see calvin grown up with the same trappings he had as a child(because much like how garfield is shoved into places he realistically would never be in, hobbes is shoved in because the artist cannot realistically fathom a comic without him). So this comic almost feels like, despite the amount of reverence they have in attempting to replicate the art style, that they ultimately just want to spit in bill watterson's face with a crude immidation.

I wonder if these people get off on that fact specifically, or if they even think about such things as integrity at all and just wanted to deface a universally beloved classic for basically no reason(attention, nobody would care if they made an original character with the same artstyle).

 

[YouTube Autist]

In response, I will expose you to yet more of this crap.

Thanks! I hate it.

Another problem with this horrible comic series is that it dislocates the characters to the current day, 2026. There are no smartphones and no one is talking about Covid or Trump (yet), but only in the 2020s would a normal person like Susie Derkins have any notion what "fae/faer" or "he/they" are. In other words, the strip takes place at a moment when ideas of nonbinary gender identities and bespoke pronouns have reached the mainstream, and that can only be this moment. This means that, in this series's continuity, Calvin would have been born around the year 2000, and the events of the Watterson strip would have taken place around 2006. Meanwhile, the Watterson strip ran from 1985 to 1995.

I'm not bringing this up just to be pedantic. I recognize that floating timelines and vaguely defined continuity can sometimes work fine even when they introduce logical difficulties (like in the 2011 "Beavis and Butthead" revival). But Calvin's childhood is definitely not an online, post-9/11 childhood. (Of course, part of what makes "Calvin and Hobbes" so wonderful is its timeless themes, but it's not completely unmoored from history.) Take Calvin's parents for example. They are pretty clearly presented as Baby Boomers: they look the right age, and they express conventional suburban Baby Boomer values. Calvin's dad has a stable white-collar job as a patent attorney and, while he criticizes the absurdities of work and consumerism, he lives in acceptance of them (peanut butter excepted). Calvin's mom is a housewife who gave up her career to be a full-time parent and (mostly) unprotestingly does household jobs like cooking, cleaning, washing dishes, and darning socks. This is a typical household for 1990, but not for 2006.

(I think it would be easy to analyze Calvin as expressing nascent Gen-X values, but I love the character too much to take him apart so unsentimentally, so I won't go down that avenue.)

The most obvious problem with all this is that the comic series asks you to accept that a pair of conventional-living suburban Baby Boomers would shrug off their son taking hormone injections and getting breast implants. Conventional urban Millennial parents might, but that's not what Calvin's parents are or have ever been. Throughout the comic, Calvin's parents work to set boundaries, to teach him responsibility (and "character"), and to prevent him from hurting himself or anyone else, often using "tough love." In all, it's a very pre-Millennial approach to parenting. There is nothing suggesting that they could possibly be indifferent to Calvin getting breast implants or taking cancer-causing hormone injections. It is absolutely impossible to imagine either Mr. or Mrs. Calvin saying, "Well, he's living his truth." "He's honoring his authentic self." "It's not my place to judge."

I think that the author of this comic series may not appreciate how extremely marginal such practices were until recently. Of course, an individual character may be an outlier, but Calvin's parents are never presented as extreme freewheelers. Perhaps it comes down to this: Calvin, Hobbes, and Calvin's parents are "good." It is just too uncomfortable to contemplate the possibility that a "good" person might not be wholly accepting of transgender people. Ergo, Calvin's parents just have to be pro-trans.

It seems to me that the author of this comic series has made a deliberate attempt not to date it to the present (note that we haven't seen any post-1995 digital devices) but that he doesn't recognize that the spread of ideas like that of nonbinary gender relies on that technology, and that these ideas date the work just as much as a smartphone would. Imagine a comic showing a pair of farmers in ancient Mesopotamia. The first farmer turns to the other and says, "So, have you been following current events? What do you think of the Ashurnasirpal administration, will it grow the GDP?" and the other replies, "Nah, politics depresses me. I've just been following tech news. Like did you hear about those cool new composite bows the Babylonians are making?" Even if you don't show them watching TV or using a computer, everything about their way of speaking and thinking reflects the influence of those devices. In the same way, even though this horrible comic series doesn't actually show anyone using a smartphone, the influence of that kind of digital technology can be felt in every strip, ripping the characters out of their original context and jamming them into the present day, the only historical moment the author can imagine.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

Hello again Bad Webcomics thread! I come to you with a special update. That gay ass cat is no longer sitting on the rock!!!


I have no evidence however, because the webcomic creator broke his entire fucking website and hasn't backed it up in 10 fucking years



Because of his incompetence, that gay ass cat has been cast back into the abyss of sitting on the fucking rock.

Also I should mention, she got off the rock to go back to Sigrid or whatever her name was again, so it's more of a step backwards than forwards. I anticipate she'll be back on the rock by the 3rd year of me posting about the rock.

 

[Lone Star]

Hello again Bad Webcomics thread! I come to you with a special update. That gay ass cat is no longer sitting on the rock!!!


I have no evidence however, because the webcomic creator broke his entire fucking website and hasn't backed it up in 10 fucking years

View attachment 9610703

Because of his incompetence, that gay ass cat has been cast back into the abyss of sitting on the fucking rock.

Also I should mention, she got off the rock to go back to Sigrid or whatever her name was again, so it's more of a step backwards than forwards. I anticipate she'll be back on the rock by the 3rd year of me posting about the rock.

Holy shit, that really never finished? I remember first hearing of that over a decade ago.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

Holy shit, that really never finished? I remember first hearing of that over a decade ago.

My theory is that the comic really didn't have a plot beyond delivering the letter or whatever so literally all she has to do is walk back to Quill iirc and the plot is solved, but that means an end to the merch grift so the webcomic author is dragging his feet as much as possible. Katia has just been sitting around doing absolutely fucking nothing on a rock for 6 years and counting.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

merch grift

Baffling. Who is still reading this shit, let alone buying merch? There can't be any new readers coming along, right? No-one is thinking "I'm going to start this 15 year old webcomic based on a game that came out 20 years ago," right?

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

Baffling. Who is still reading this shit, let alone buying merch? There can't be any new readers coming along, right? No-one is thinking "I'm going to start this 15 year old webcomic based on a game that came out 20 years ago," right?

Very active furry porn community

 

[Cave Fisher]

There are no smartphones and no one is talking about Covid or Trump

I mean thank god, I never wanna hear Calvin talking about Twitter.

Hello again Bad Webcomics thread! I come to you with a special update. That gay ass cat is no longer sitting on the rock!!!


I have no evidence however, because the webcomic creator broke his entire fucking website and hasn't backed it up in 10 fucking years

View attachment 9610703

Because of his incompetence, that gay ass cat has been cast back into the abyss of sitting on the fucking rock.

Also I should mention, she got off the rock to go back to Sigrid or whatever her name was again, so it's more of a step backwards than forwards. I anticipate she'll be back on the rock by the 3rd year of me posting about the rock.

Most people only even first learn about this character because they wanna see who that yellow cat who appears in so much porn is, I'm pretty sure that's the only reason the comic is still pretending to be ongoing. I just can't imagine any other artist being able to stop and do this this for like six years and their comic being anything other than a laughingstock online.

 

[YouTube Autist]

Good news! Crime and urban disorder are illusions invented by the news media. Now, that is a real relief.


(Source)

Reminds me of that Caliou short where they show how fucking weird it'd be if he still acted that way at 40.

Thank you for alerting me to this. I don't know that I'd say I enjoyed it, but it was certainly absorbing.

 

[RSLUG30]

My theory is that the comic really didn't have a plot beyond delivering the letter or whatever so literally all she has to do is walk back to Quill iirc and the plot is solved, but that means an end to the merch grift so the webcomic author is dragging his feet as much as possible. Katia has just been sitting around doing absolutely fucking nothing on a rock for 6 years and counting.

There is the whole thing of daedric shenanigans with Katia's dream plot, and I feel like he's trying to start that arc after basically reaching the end of the letter delivery one.
Before the sites database crashed, the most recent updates were starting to introduce characters and plot elements related to whatever was haunting Katia's dreams, we'll probably see the resolution to that in 2038 as an optimistic prediction.

The problem is that Kazerad (author of prequel) is the worst kind of procrastinator - overachieving and distractable. He'll try to compensate for a long delay with a bigger update, such as a big animation or minigame, but that means it takes more time for the plot to start moving even an inch with his already glacial speed of writing and drawing pages.
And then he tries to compensate for that self-inflicted longer delay with a merch drop, perhaps even an making an entire game for a merch drop?

One thing with webcomics is that you really should not be in perpetual hiatus and that isn't difficult if the passion is there - I've seen other webcomics with a similar or even better level of visual quality than prequel be able to update twice or even thrice a week, with or without a livable income from patreon.
I completely understand that making a webcomic isn't an easy job that pays well, but when your updates regularly have several month or even year gaps between them I really have to wonder if the passion is still there to continue the comic. Say what you want about cucumber quest, but at least the author was able to admit that they were creatively burnt out and stepped away from it, instead of leaving their fans hanging for years with merch drops and side games that don't progress the main plot.