After seeing an entry for this comic on just about every page on this site, I thought I'd give it a look to see what all the fuss was about and read it from the beginning. This may have been a mistake. EGS left me with a horrible first impression - while some of the gags were amusing, the art was awful, the characters felt flat at best and unlikable at worst, and overall, it felt incredibly cheesy.
Then I saw the end of the Sister arc, and something clicked. I was suddenly getting some real emotion out of this comic, which was very preferable to everything that had come before. By the time I finished Painted Black, I was hooked. The characters got interesting enough that I started to care about what happened to them, the writing felt more consistent, and the work overall started to seem more solid. I also liked a fair amount of the much-reviled birthday party arc, mostly the part that explores the cast's issues and how they try to work through them. In my opinion, the high point of the story so far has been Sister II, a Nanase-centric arc that concludes with what may be the most powerful moment yet seen in the comic.
If you've read the comic, you may have noticed that my praise is mostly directed at the serious bits of the otherwise-wacky story. This is a good segue into my complaints, and there are a lot of them. First off, out of the three major pairings, two seem fairly forced. Elliott's and Sarah's relationship troubles are brought up at random and dropped suddenly, and Grace's attraction to Tedd strikes me as blatant wish fulfillment by Shive. Sarah in particular has barely received any kind of character development aside from her A Cup Angst. Many of the transformations seem tacked on, and a few are more than a little bit disturbing. On top of that, I just plain don't care for most of the humor. It got to the point where I tend to flat out skip most of the Q&A pages and try to get back to the plot. Unfortunately, there are so many running subplots that they begin to slow the pacing to a crawl, and there are no signs of answers to any of our major questions on the horizon.
Is EGS the best webcomic out there? No, far from it. Much of what it does simply fails on some level. But the things that it does right shine through clearly enough for me to recommend it.
Take the bad with the good
After seeing an entry for this comic on just about every page on this site, I thought I'd give it a look to see what all the fuss was about and read it from the beginning. This may have been a mistake. EGS left me with a horrible first impression - while some of the gags were amusing, the art was awful, the characters felt flat at best and unlikable at worst, and overall, it felt incredibly cheesy.
Then I saw the end of the Sister arc, and something clicked. I was suddenly getting some real emotion out of this comic, which was very preferable to everything that had come before. By the time I finished Painted Black, I was hooked. The characters got interesting enough that I started to care about what happened to them, the writing felt more consistent, and the work overall started to seem more solid. I also liked a fair amount of the much-reviled birthday party arc, mostly the part that explores the cast's issues and how they try to work through them. In my opinion, the high point of the story so far has been Sister II, a Nanase-centric arc that concludes with what may be the most powerful moment yet seen in the comic.
If you've read the comic, you may have noticed that my praise is mostly directed at the serious bits of the otherwise-wacky story. This is a good segue into my complaints, and there are a lot of them. First off, out of the three major pairings, two seem fairly forced. Elliott's and Sarah's relationship troubles are brought up at random and dropped suddenly, and Grace's attraction to Tedd strikes me as blatant wish fulfillment by Shive. Sarah in particular has barely received any kind of character development aside from her A Cup Angst. Many of the transformations seem tacked on, and a few are more than a little bit disturbing. On top of that, I just plain don't care for most of the humor. It got to the point where I tend to flat out skip most of the Q&A pages and try to get back to the plot. Unfortunately, there are so many running subplots that they begin to slow the pacing to a crawl, and there are no signs of answers to any of our major questions on the horizon.
Is EGS the best webcomic out there? No, far from it. Much of what it does simply fails on some level. But the things that it does right shine through clearly enough for me to recommend it.