Reviews WebComic / Suicide For Hire

Best Read all at Once, if at all

Rating: I used to enjoy the comic, and don't anymore.

The concept is vaguely satisfying, and even a little exciting in the SAW-esque slapstick sense (complicated death traps that are inevitably inescapable, and unlike recent SAW films, still manage to fit the "crimes" involved), but more than a few things ruin the comic in practice:

• Text is often small, covering a lot of the page, and (even more problematic) does not flow well. Yes, I know the author is aware of this, but if he's going to have walls of text he damn well can at least afford to put the word balloons in the right places so the reader doesn't have to guess what order it's in.
• Updates have slowed down tremendously, from a Sunday / Wednesday update schedule to just Sundays and then finally to its current update schedule, which seems to be "once a week, but we constantly change what day of the week it is", and then on top of THAT have random filler strips in the midst of a storyline.
  • With no RSS reader or another way to tell that the comic has updated save for checking the site, attempts to follow along become aggravating at best and infuriating at worst when discovering there IS an update... oh, look, it's a joke about town hall meetings. Ha ha, where's the plot?
• Some of the decisions within the plot, in spite of sometimes being the "correct" answers, are handled poorly. In the case of the recent spousal abuse arc, several folks were upset at Rosaline (the squirrel wife)'s death vs. that of her violent husband. Rather than pointing out the obvious difference between Rosaline and almost every other victim of the service — i.e. she committed suicide instead of needing an elaborate trap, without changing her mind — and thus all the two did was accelerate actions Rosaline herself would have eventually taken, the author's response is merely to point out that Rosaline was a lost cause and reminding us that these are supposed to be Villain Protagonists in an already Crapsack World anyway, so OH WELL...

The first two are bad enough from a user experience perspective; the third reinforces that the actual moral quandaries in the comic are roughly equivalent to the plot of a porno. Either way, read up to the end of whatever arc you like, then stop. It's easier that way.