Reviews Webcomic / El Goonish Shive

Flawed, but enjoyable

The most important thing to realize, I think, is that El Goonish Shive is an old webcomic. It started out humble, amateurish (some might say, poor) art, little story at all. Where other artists might have moved on to new, more ambitious projects as they learned their trade, Dan Shive chose to stick around and continually develop the world that he created nine years ago, trying to fit new idea after new idea together with it all. The result of this struggle with a flawed approach is a proper shambles.

And yet, it is a pretty unique and enjoyable shambles to read. Starting with goo simply coming to life during chemistry class and the cast consisting of aliens, wizards, ki-using martial artists, pretty much everything can happen here, and does. The characters themselves manage to come out believable and sympathetic, despite the confusing story-network that has been building up around them in these nine years of a constantly growing storyteller. And it does try to have everything: Humor, relationship drama, and fighting action with scum and villainy and the occasional tragedy. If you like that kind of thing, you might enjoy El Goonish Shive.

Of course, not everything clicks just fine. We are talking about an evolving hobby storyteller working without an editor, mostly writing for his own enjoyment rather than critical approval. So there will be a good amount of misses. Points at which you go "...Yeah." and, if you're smart about it, click the "Next" button and see where it will continue to go, which you can be pretty sure is "somewhere else entirely". I tend to not read the comic for half a year at a time and go back to it to take in the recent plot all at once instead of at page-per-page, which is a good way to read most any MWF updating comic that are made up of chapters, like Gunnerkrigg Court or The Meek.

Final rating: I enjoyed this. I should have given you some sort of idea of my basis in enjoying it by now. (If you go ahead and read El Goonish Shive and find yourself violently disagreeing with my assessment, it's a good bet that you should not rely on my opinions about other works either (handily, I have not given any yet). After all, reviews are about helping others make their decision on whether to invest their time in a particular work, and if our tastes are too different, I won't be capable of helping.)