Concession is a truly bizarre comic, loaded with a potent combination of hard-to-follow plots, awkward writing, often repellant characters, and angst out the wazoo. It is brutal, perverse, and mystifying, and by all rights I should really hate it. And yet, I find myself liking it a great deal for reasons that are difficult to explain. But why? It's not actually so bad as to have the type of entertainment value ascribed to watching a real "train wreck"; and, as I (and many others) have clearly stated, it is far from classic in any normal sense. So what is it, then?
The appeal of Concession is that, sometimes, letting one's sanity and sense of decency take a day off isn't actually a bad thing. For some of us, it's a necessary kind of leave-taking that must take place so that we might keep ourselves sane. And if you look at the history of Concession, this was exactly why it was written in the first place: As a kind of outlet for all of the author's unspoken thoughts, however silly or disturbing, conveyed in comic form. It pulls no punches and tells no lies; it has no shame, and is proud of it.
Granted, this lack of repression in the content tends to lead to some very uncomfortable places, regions of the mind that the writing is sometimes wont to hold the weight of. The resulting dramatic oscillations can fairly easily be broken down into three categories: The ridiculously overwrought; the utterly horrific; and the genuinely effective. No category is mutually exclusive, and what is which to whom will vary wildly.
The comedy, at times, is nearly as contentious, albeit generally more accomplished and easier to accept at first blush. While perhaps overly sexual, or violent, or depraved, it fits into the overall sense of unrepressed weirdness, and is often much funnier than it has any right to be. At times, one almost expects Pintsize from Questionable Content to leap headlong out of the woodwork and declare himself God. And considering some of the disconcerting fun-house mirror similarities between the two strips, who's to say that he'd be wrong?
In short, Concession is probably not the comic for you or me, but for those of the necessary constitution it is worth looking into. Love it or hate it, it is certainly something very unusual.
The Perks Of Being Shameless (A Counter-Argument)
Concession is a truly bizarre comic, loaded with a potent combination of hard-to-follow plots, awkward writing, often repellant characters, and angst out the wazoo. It is brutal, perverse, and mystifying, and by all rights I should really hate it. And yet, I find myself liking it a great deal for reasons that are difficult to explain. But why? It's not actually so bad as to have the type of entertainment value ascribed to watching a real "train wreck"; and, as I (and many others) have clearly stated, it is far from classic in any normal sense. So what is it, then?
The appeal of Concession is that, sometimes, letting one's sanity and sense of decency take a day off isn't actually a bad thing. For some of us, it's a necessary kind of leave-taking that must take place so that we might keep ourselves sane. And if you look at the history of Concession, this was exactly why it was written in the first place: As a kind of outlet for all of the author's unspoken thoughts, however silly or disturbing, conveyed in comic form. It pulls no punches and tells no lies; it has no shame, and is proud of it.
Granted, this lack of repression in the content tends to lead to some very uncomfortable places, regions of the mind that the writing is sometimes wont to hold the weight of. The resulting dramatic oscillations can fairly easily be broken down into three categories: The ridiculously overwrought; the utterly horrific; and the genuinely effective. No category is mutually exclusive, and what is which to whom will vary wildly.
The comedy, at times, is nearly as contentious, albeit generally more accomplished and easier to accept at first blush. While perhaps overly sexual, or violent, or depraved, it fits into the overall sense of unrepressed weirdness, and is often much funnier than it has any right to be. At times, one almost expects Pintsize from Questionable Content to leap headlong out of the woodwork and declare himself God. And considering some of the disconcerting fun-house mirror similarities between the two strips, who's to say that he'd be wrong?
In short, Concession is probably not the comic for you or me, but for those of the necessary constitution it is worth looking into. Love it or hate it, it is certainly something very unusual.