Reviews: Literally and Villains of the Snow Sea

 Fool me once... shame on you.

Fool me twice... it's time for a review. 

It is time for another Totally Biased comic book review and today I will tackle two titles I have bought digitally off of Comixology: LITERALLY by Ran'DeeSha Diaz and DeGlass and VILLAINS of the SNOW SEA by Ran'DeeSha Diaz and Arxelay.

I bought Literally originally after watching a YouTube video off of a channel called  Shi**Y Web Comics or SWC revived. I do not know these persons well but have often encountered their Tweets on Twitter and have seen them as guests on YouTube shows that I do like to follow, like Doug TenNapels' channel and on Tim and Marks' Channel 'The Bunderdome', so I assume it was one of those channels or from one of their Tweets from off of their Twitter account Thomas Roiloup that I became aware of them.

It is important for this review, and for the story of how I bought and infamously Tweeted about their first comic Literally , that I point out that my memory is bad and how I have a hard time remembering names, so much so that I had forgotten all this information about the SWC crew and where I had heard about their first comic book, by the time I innocently Tweeted about it in a thread that was supposed to be about people talking about the "worst comics they had ever given money for".

 I stress this point because I do not want it thought that I was seeking to cause drama or comic book war nonsense by doing so. I feel I have to point that out because of a YouTube Video by YouTuber The Comic Book Hut that brought the Tweet to a little infamous attention. 

The video's numbers are minuscule by YouTube standards, but in a community as small and tight-nit as Crowd Funded comic books can be, it made quite a bit of noise, especially in my Direct Messages inbox.

If you don't believe that is true, trust me I know because this blog (believe it or not) has been highly influential itself in the crowd funded community. Just look at the average backer numbers from mid-range or even on the larger crowd funding campaigns, and you will see that there are just a few hundred(s) of active backers and even a few hundred views on a YouTube video, or a few thousand hits on a Blog like here at GENERALGRUDGE.com can have big impact with such a small group of people. 

The night of the video my friends and myself were playing PUBG (the video game) and I was unaware that the video had been put up, but that didn't last very long after MY TWITTER messages inbox began to fill up from multiple people Tweeting me and asking if I had watched the video. I had not and did not get to watch it for many hours because I couldn't quit playing games on my friends to view it with audio.

When I finally did get to watch the video, I was a bit disappointed, fearing that my Tweet might be taken out of context; because, it seemed from the video that the video's creator (The Comic Book Hut) was having some ill defined feud with the SWC guys. I do not know why such a feud exists between these people, and I was unaware of it when I made the tweet, but I want people to know and understand that I now, and as I have always written, disavow any and all needless drama wars in our small and fragile community of crowd funded comic books. 

But the video was successful in reminding me where I had heard of the comic book "Literally" and why I had bought it. I had heard of it being labeled as "great" by the creators and also being on sale for just a dollar from randomly watching one of the videos from the SWC guys on their YouTube channel. 

Spoiler alert: The comic book was not great.

Literally is about a young female protagonist (named Helen) who is clearly a bit nerdy and somewhat of a social outcast at her school. She is short, overweight and wears a retainer and has a speech impediment. Perhaps it is because of her social status that inspires her to create a vivid fantasy world about her in which she is a competent fighter in an undefined struggle that involves her being part of an army of mechs that fights some unknown and also ill defined enemies. At least I assume the adventures that she participates in are imaginary, but I am not totally sure, because even tough I have read the book twice the story is not well written or very lucid. 

On my first reading I assumed that the reader would find out that Helen's adventures were real and not just imaginary like a reader would first commonly assume. But in the end there was no clearly written definition explaining if everything Helen experienced was going on "only in her head" or if perhaps there was in fact an actual war in some far away place going on and this young girl had miraculously and surprisingly somehow became involved. Still I think it is safe to assume that Helen either suffers from a delusion and or was just a character who possessed a rich imagination, but it would have been a better story if the writer had given the reader more decisive clues to the nature of Helen's story.  Instead the writer decided to end the whole story abruptly and without a proper conclusion or even a proper cliff hanger.

The art in the book looks to be in a Manga style and has many of the little flourishes and details inspired by such books that I do not understand or care for personally. Since that is just a matter of personal taste I will not disparage the book in that regard, but I will have to point out that the art is amateurish (at best) and very inconsistent. And I mean all of that very literally. No pun intended. 

If the comic book Literally were just a free web comic one could overlook the quality of the art and move on, but since this was a product that they raised funds via crowd funding for, and also charged real money on real market places like Amazon.com, one is forced to point out the arts many, many down falls.

When I say inconstant I am not just talking about how the artist is clearly an amateur who has not mastered their craft yet. I am talking about art that is LITERALLY unfinished in ways that are shown through unfinished thumbnail pencils and also unfinished colors. The book starts off in color and with somewhat more finished art work but eventually devolves into layouts and becomes black and white. While I did not follow this comic or its creators during it's development, and do not know how or why such a stark contrast came about in the quality of the art, I do know that such a thing is unacceptable for any "professional" product that an honest person would charge real money for. In the end, the sum of the books parts, sure seems to add up to nothing more than a a grift to the consumer, or at best a massive delusion about the quality of the finished product by the creators, who decided to charge money for it.

One would have thought that a group of creators who called themselves "Shitty Web Comics" would have understood the need to differentiate between a product that you should give away free as a web comic and one that you should charge money for on a professional level but with Literally they did not. 

With all that said, I had learned my lesson and felt lucky I bought the book for only a dollar (when a physical edition of it costs 10 bucks! and the digital regally costs 2.99$ on comixology!) and I decided that I would never make the same mistake and buy any comic book from those creators again, until...

One of the commentators in my original Twitter thread seemed to be a friend or fan of the SWC crew and defended Literally and especially their new comic book Villains of the Snow Sea. This person seemed to think I was too harsh in my opinion about Literally and made a point to claim their newest comic book was of much higher quality. I din't think much of this comment at the time, but after seeing the YouTube video by the Comic Book Hut guy, I decided to buy their second comic book on ComiXology and see if the creators were indeed just grifters as their first comic book seemed to suggest or if they had upped their game and learned from the experience.

Spoiler alert, like many things in life, the answer was YES... and No. 

The most immediately noticeable thing about Villains of the Snow Sea over Literally was the big step up in the quality of the art work. The artist is credited by the name "Arxelay" (I believe this to be their Twitter account) and this artist usually excels in beauty and atmosphere with their work.

While there were times the artist seemed to struggle telling the story visually with their art, for most of the book the reader is blessed with some striking and amazing visuals with beautiful line work and stunning scenery. 

Arxelay does an excellent job of drawing the female lead of the book (who as best as I can make out is able to morph herself into some spirit with the powers of some kind of female wolf-like creature) but the book was not very lucid on this point. The artist also does a fine job showcasing action and backgrounds and becomes the only reason to enjoy or buy this book. But sadly, the artists work is held back by the absence of color and by the writing, or in actuality, the lack of writing visibly in this comic book.

Villains of the Snow Sea makes the same mistake in appearing unfinished that Literally made but did so in an all new and unexpected way. The writer decided to leave the pages blank of Text for most of the book.

The comic book starts out strong enough story wise with a nice opening page the artist drew in the stylized form of an old history or story book. I really appreciated what they were going for and I think the artist did a nice job of showing it but it would have been nice if they had went all in and actually showed an "old timey" book open and shown the panels as pseudo book pages but I digress...

The biggest problem with the writing on the book was the choice for the writer to literally not add any script or text at all after page six. Pages seven through thirty literally have zero dialog or narrator boxes to this book's great disservice. I can imagine the thought process that went through the minds of the creators that brought about such a massive mistake and it appears to currently be a common one among many creators in the indie and crowd funded community. "I don't want to ruin the beautiful art with needless lettering.", I can almost here them saying in my mind as I write this. Of course such a sentiment is based on a truth. Sometimes it is indeed best to leave the artwork to show the story and to not clutter the page up with needless dialog.

One seems to often see countless and current examples of modern comics being littered with walls of text on their pages seemingly for no real reason. 

Some writers, who probably think too much of themselves and their impact on the creation of a comic book, are well known for being masturbatory in the amount of pointless text they pile on the artwork and the reader alike. So it is easy to understand why an amateur writer and novice creator my react to such a trend, and also because of such detailed and pretty artwork that a book like Villains of the Snow Sea has inside of it, and think it is a good idea to go to the other extreme. But of course one extreme does not justify an extreme in another way. One can have too much text in an visual art form like comic books and one can have too little and Villains of the Snow Sea definitely suffers a lot from too little. 

The trick isn't to choose one philosophy of the extremes over another but to better identify the situation and need of the page and book individually. There are times when the writer can sit back and let the pictures do the work (and that is more often than not the right choice in the comic book medium) but there are also times when it is necessary for the writer to explain things about the character, the situation and the mood that the artwork cannot do by its self. The writer seemed to abandon any responsibility in helping out the artist and the book as a whole by not adding anything to the book after page six other than conceivably the plot alone, and this mistake really ruined the whole experience and regulated this book as well to the amateurish trash heap with their first outing Literally. 

Between the lack of writing and backstory and narration to explain some of the more confusing aspects of the story, and the sad lack of color to help out the artist's line work, the editorial powers behind this book really let the work of such a promising artist go to waste and that is such a shame because this artist, and this character had such potential, they deserved much better. 

In the end I was just as disappointed in Villains of the Snow Sea as I was in Literally, but for very different reasons. I was disappointed in Literally because it was such a bad and unfinished comic book it felt like a grift on the buyer, and I was disappointed in Villains of the Snow Sea because it had such potential but was ruined by bad business decisions and editorial choices.

That said Villains was such a vast improvement over the quality of Literally I cannot help but feel that the creators must at least mean well and are indeed not grifters but instead just amateur creators that are just making common amateur mistakes and I am actually inspired enough to give a book they create in the future another shot if it improves in quality as much as Villains did over the disappointing Literally.