A webcomic review
I ran into Penny & Aggie the other day. Normally I'm terrible about catching up on webcomics to the point where I can put them in my daily rotation, but this one was compelling enough to hold my interest through the 700-odd existing strips.
The genre is TV-style high school drama. It's over the top in all of the expected ways. Most of the characters are absurdly attractive and dress in designer clothing which costs more than my car. They concoct elaborate social plots and are all Machiavellian masters of psychological manipulation despite being sixteen years old. They seamlessly alternate between doing shockingly unethical stuff with no consequences and being wracked with guilt over minor infractions. Things like that.
The art quality is good for a black-and-white webcomic. The cheesecake factor is a little high but not too bad. Sometimes it can be a bit hard to tell characters apart; there are a ton of them, and it's probably tough to come up with twenty-plus distinct hairstyles and face shapes without using color. The writing quality is variable, like all webcomics, but I think the writer does a good job of pulling things together into interesting plots. He also seems to know where he wants to go well in advance.
It's not very geeky, and where it is geeky, it's lit-geeky. There's no stigma attached to being smart in this particular fantasy high school but, aside from everyone owning iphones, computers don't really exist. That's fine; there's no shortage of geekiness in other webcomics.
The genre is TV-style high school drama. It's over the top in all of the expected ways. Most of the characters are absurdly attractive and dress in designer clothing which costs more than my car. They concoct elaborate social plots and are all Machiavellian masters of psychological manipulation despite being sixteen years old. They seamlessly alternate between doing shockingly unethical stuff with no consequences and being wracked with guilt over minor infractions. Things like that.
The art quality is good for a black-and-white webcomic. The cheesecake factor is a little high but not too bad. Sometimes it can be a bit hard to tell characters apart; there are a ton of them, and it's probably tough to come up with twenty-plus distinct hairstyles and face shapes without using color. The writing quality is variable, like all webcomics, but I think the writer does a good job of pulling things together into interesting plots. He also seems to know where he wants to go well in advance.
It's not very geeky, and where it is geeky, it's lit-geeky. There's no stigma attached to being smart in this particular fantasy high school but, aside from everyone owning iphones, computers don't really exist. That's fine; there's no shortage of geekiness in other webcomics.