Terror Island

What did we do?

What did we do to deserve this?

When I ask what it is that we did to deserve this, I am, of course, obviously talking about Terror Island in the context of what we did to deserve this.

What did we do to deserve this?

The sentence is a question. The subject is us, the action is do, and the direct object is this. I admit, it took me a while to figure that out, because deserve is also a verb. These things will slip up your average webcomic reviewer, and make him say things that are not true. But I am a modern-day oracle. You can trust what I have to say, because after all, I did research it.

Back to Terror Island though.

What did we do to deserve it?

Terror Island is clearly what we in the industry call a "gamer" comic. I'm sure you've seen them before, and you're probably chomping at the bit to tell me that you know what I'm talking about. You know, like Penny Arcade (yuck), Powerup Comics and That One Where The Guy Builds Tiny Buildings. This comic is all about games and gaming and what it means to play a game.

Terror Island belongs to a subgenre, though. It is not just only a gamer comic. Terror Island is a sprite comic. I'm sure you saw my friend's review of Eight Bit Darkling. That is the kind of thing. They take characters from games, and without even changing a thing or drawing them, they just use pictures of characters from the games. It's annoying, because the characters are from old games (something to do with copyright maybe?) and they always look super old and dated.

Well, Terror Island must have been the oldest and most dated of all, because the games in Terror Island are the oldest of all probably. They are not even from a computer or a nintendo. They are from games so old that they are played on boards. Games like chess and stratego and the one where you have to buy real estate (Monopoly). Who decided that this is appropriate for a modern comic strip? It feels like it is low-tech. It feels like it is a cassette tape player when all the other gamer comics are ipods. I feel like when I read it I am limited to only listening to one side of a single album, and I can't even choose which song I want to listen to first. I even have to rewind it sometimes.

What did we do to deserve this?

You would think that the main idea of the comic (there are two gamers who want each other to buy something from the store) would never get old and always be funny every time that you read about it, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty deets (details), you find out that it's actually much worse that anyone could imagine. The ideas for comics are actually really cliche. I think that most of these jokes were actually stolen from King of the Hill (remember that episode where Hank had to get women's pms stuff from a grocery store and didn't want to? Coincidence?)

This is just kind of my little joke. I thought it would be funny to have Hank Hill be sad. You don't need to take this part of the review seriously.

Can't you see it?
Oh, wow, I did not mean for Hank Hill to tell everyone that juicy piece of information! I think that you had all better ignore that, because as an award-winning blogger and critic, I really don't need to have the problem of women knowing that I am single. That would be too much for one man to deal with!

Let me talk a little bit about the characters of Terror Island. You can find pictures here to go with the names that I am giving out.

Sid is one of the characters, and it is frequently hinted at that he suffers from a heart condition, but we are never told what it is. Maybe the clues are buried too deep, but I don't feel like reading into it that much.

Stephen is a character who has changed a lot from the early strips for no reason. I don't know what he is supposed to even be like because he is very inconsistent (example: He is now a czar, but at first he was not)

York is basically the authors trying to be like other sprite comics, but they did not have the same games. He is obviously supposed to be the Sonic the Hedgehog character, but they couldn't afford to make him look like it I guess.

Ally Cs is actually pretty much an inserted character that represents the author.

Omicron was supposed to be the main character at first, but has been eclipsed by other characters who aren't very good. It's too bad, because this character could take the strip into new territory.

OK, so what can Terror Island do to become a good webcomic? Well, maybe it could actually try to be a decent sprite comic instead of a comic that uses sprites from games that are so old. It could even probably keep using the same characters, just with updated sprites.

Please note that when Sid calls Stephen an ugly sack it is not something dirty. It is like a gunnysack.

It was really hard for me to get these sprites, and they don't quite look right, but these are from actual computer games instead of old wooden games, so really, it's automatically better no matter how good the sprites came out. As you can see I also changed it to have some references to the games that it was inspired by. (chess)

So keep on trying, Terror Island. Keep my advice in mind and you might actually have something that I feel like we did something specific to deserve.

Until then, see you later and we'll meet again.

(({}==----Sonty Mick----=={}))

Dresden Codak

Just what is crap?

What does it take for a comic to not be good enough anymore? So that we call it a bad comic? How does it have to go wrong? What kind of problems need to arise that make it so bad that we call it crap? It's a question that most people answer without ever being asked. It's a question that takes a mind like that of Sonty Mick (me, for my new readers) to ask and answer.

I can tell you one thing right off the bat: If the comic that is so bad is on the web, then it is called a bad webcomic. That seems like a thing that you would know without even needing to ask, but you'll notice that if I hadn't pointed it out, you probably wouldn't have noticed. Also, it is called crap if it isn't any good.

Dresden Codak is crap.

Now I know what you're all thinking. "But Sonty! Isn't Dresden Codak actually an OK webcomic?

No.

No.

No.

I can see what would make you start out along that line of thinking, but to say that Dresden Codak is actually OK is like saying that if you go out at sunrise, you will automatically catch a fish. You still need a fishing pole, a tackle box, a hook, bait/lures, and some water. It doesn't matter how good the sunrise is. It doesn't even matter if it's the best sunrise in history.

No sunrise can make it so you can catch fish without doing anything. Anybody who tells you something other than that is probably pulling your leg.

Dresden Codak has several problems. One of them is that when you read it, you remember certain tunes that you do not like, and then you get them stuck in your head. This is a problem that I try to avoid. In fact, I will often avoid going to grocery and convenience stores if there is a hit radio single that I hate and do not want to hear. Dresden Codak makes all of that pointless. From reading this comic I am now thinking about that song about beautiful girls where someone is suicidal.

What am I supposed to do with this?

The artwork in this comic reminds me A LOT of back when I used to go to my grandma's house, and I would not want to listen to the grown-up conversations, so I would have to go into the other room and watch stuff on the TV. Often, I would watch blooper and home video shows, and this molded me into who I am today.

Dresden Codak is like those shows, but where are all the bloopers? Where are the guys getting hit in the groin with objects that are moving toward their groins? Where are the dogs who bark too much and pee in the wrong places? Where are the babies who ask their mothers questions about bras in front of company?

They're nowhere to be seen. Dresden Codak just isn't about that kind of thing. The main point of it seems to be to set up your expectations and then not have something funny happen to a person's head. (for instance: hitting the street when a bike falls down)

I have honestly gone through the whole archive and not seen anything that even seemed hostable by Bob Saget.

This installment is the biggest monument I have seen yet to the failure of Dresden Codak. The bear steals the girl's idea, but it does not fall off of a ladder. It does not scream because it is on an amusement park ride that goes upside-down. It doesn't even do a karate kick and split its pants. These things seem like small objections, but if there's one thing that my webcomic reviewing career has taught me, it's that the little things add up. They add up fast, to the point where I don't even want to deal with this anymore.

I will never read this comic again.

OK, so I guess I should probably do something constructive, and tell you all how Dresden Codak could be improved. It is a greatly painful thing for me to do, because every time I see this comic it strikes a hurtful nerve, and I sweat a lot. It's not the kind of thing that I like to admit, especially when my readers put me on a pedestal.

I'm going to try to fix it. It'll be hard...

OK, that was way, way too hard. This comic is clearly definitely beyond repair. I tried. You saw me try to save it, but it could not be done. There was nothing that I could do. Dresden Codak is just too bad. It is just too far from funny. It's just so bad.

It's like if you were on an airplane, and you felt kind of uncomfortable, and you kind of wished that you could get off the plane because you thought that in an hour or two you might feel sick, but you already payed for the ticket and are on the plane, so you really can't. It's like if you were trying to play some miniature golf using your neighbor's window wells as makeshift hazards, and then you broke one of his windows, so you put a ten dollar bill in the window through the hole, and then went inside so that nobody would see you, and then you looked out the window every now and then to see if he was doing any kind of reaction.

That's Dresden Codak for you. Just too disappointing. Just so bad that you can't do anything to fix it.

That's why I don't recommend it. Not even if you are stuck on an island and it is the only part of the internet that you can get to.

The End

(((##)*^*^*^Sonty Mick^*^*^*(##)))