An unforeseen delay: I have a bad habit of only talking about negative things in these forewords. I was actually starting to enjoy El Goonish Shive, and was planning to write about it in this entry. Then the server went down. Hell of a cliff-hanger that. So I’ve had to talk about some of those gag-a-days that I was really trying to avoid talking about. Since my last attempt to write about a gag-a-day came up short (no pun intended), I’ve grouped two of them together and tried out an alternate way of describing them. Just for fun. Enjoy
Today I bring you Catena
[Trope Page] and Sodium Eyes [Trope Page], two gag-a-days which warrant the worst reaction possible:
Some might argue that thinking a work is mediocre is hardly the greatest insult imaginable. I would respectfully disagree. A least when something is complete crap, it’s memorable. Sure, by memorable I mean a year later I can say “... at least it’s not as bad as X” but at least I remember it. When my response to something is complete and total apathy? I’m sorry, but you’ve failed.
As to why they got this reaction, allow me to demonstrate via a mental Q&A session:
Now that you know what I think of them, what are they actually about? Well, Catena is a webcomic about a young, female snow leopard moving into a house full of anthropomorphic cats and wacky hijinks and hilarity (sometimes) ensue. Sodium Eyes (which I keep calling Sapphire Eyes for some reason) is a typical gag-a-day slice-of-life about a handful of girls as they go about their day to day lives.
The thing that lets both comics down is that even though there’s not actually anything wrong with either of them, there’s not an awful lot they do right. They’re mediocre. Run of the mill. As average as the arithmetic mean (the simile came to mind and it’s weird and punny so I’m gonna use it, sense and context be damned!). I don’t have a lot to say about gag-a-days to begin with, but when I honestly have nothing to criticise and nothing to praise (you know, other than the fact that I have nothing to criticise and nothing to praise) there’s not a lot to talk about.
Well, there is one thing which deserves praise: The Artwork.
I’m not going to deny that they improved a lot over time, but both of these webcomics have pretty darn good artwork. They stick to that quality consistently as well, with Sodium Eyes deserving a special mention for being in colour (never a bad thing) from beginning to end (sketches notwithstanding). Take the most recent page from both of them [1][2] as examples. They may not have much else going for them but damn are those well drawn. Catena’s clarity, definition and shading (in the later comics at least) are really impressive and I love the look of the later strips from Sodium Eyes. The facial expressions, the colours and, most noticeable of all (to me at least) the eyes. It may just because of the title, but the eyes in those strips (all the coloured ones) always grabbed my attention, and they’re just drawn so well, like everything else in that comic.
There are only a few criticisms I can come up with regarding the artwork. In Catena, at times it was difficult to tell the male characters apart. That could just be my own idiocy or blindness talking but there you go. It also flipped between colour and black and white, not necessarily a bad thing, but disappointing nonetheless. Sodium Eyes on the other hand, had only one problem with its artwork: sketches. This is only really a problem towards the end, and I realise that it is far, far easier and much, much quicker to make a sketch than it is to do a full colour image, but the difference between the two is so distinct that it’s jarring to go from one to the other and back every few strips. Don’t get me wrong, the sketches aren’t bad. Far from it. They just lack the brightness, the detail and the mood of the colour strips. The same image can convey so much more when you have colour to help carry the message. Going from full colour to the sketches, is like losing your peripheral vision. You still see the same things, you just don’t see as much.
I’ll stop complaining now, and there probably is some exaggeration in my criticism, but not a lot. If you’re looking for a time killer, something competent to fill the gap between more enjoyable works then go ahead (the links are in the first line, as always), but you’re not missing anything if you pass them up.
As always, thanks for reading.
