Zero Punctuation: Webcomics

[The Legacy]

Heh, when I heard about webcomics being this weeks topic (there's actually a Yahtzee thread in the CAD forum for a while now that I use to keep track of updates every wednesday and the general opinion of them), I was like "oh boy, CAD's going to get hammered" since I've read Yahtzee's blog criticizing it.

I was right.

Now, I'd be lying if I said I didn't read it. I think CAD is an okay comic. Not a great comic, but not bad either. I still believe that making a more serious comic is a good idea, since there are very few dramatic/non-funny comics out there. That said, the topic matter is rather sensitive indeed, and changing focus from funny to serious is a very bad idea with over four years of funnies. Some get it, some don't. It's all to opinion.

I myself though found this video this week to be hilarious! Hate the comics or not, Yahtzee nailed it on the head. Good work, and no you didn't offend me. Not every CAD reader is an elitist fanboy, you know.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

I think Yahtzee should seriously consider evolving ZP beyond just video games but internet phenomena overall. So far whenever he takes a break for reviewing just game(console rundown, mailbag showdown and this) is comes out top notch. I realize he does that on his website but since ZP is more popular than fullyramblomatic he should give it a try.

This.

 

[lunchbox42]

Oh Good, I had started to feel that a couple of his recent vids had started to dip in comical-ranting, but this one really brought it back hard.

 

[Digikid]

Making stabs at Tim Buckleys Ctrl Alt Del series now are ya? Shame on you Yahtzee. If you do not like CAD then you are not to be trusted in this aspect.

Cad is the BEST webcomic ever.....way better than the cruddy Penny Arcade IMHO.

 

[Corbineau]

http://www.mighthavebeen.net/ = My favorite webcomic ever.

And yes, it's gaming related. Though it may take a minute.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

I click the comment section and see everyone talking about CAD. I go and check CAD. Wow, the baby dying thing Yahtzee spoke of was a real comic? What the hell?

As usual, thank you Yahztee for bringing this to my attention. Great video.

Yeah I thought the miscarriage thing was just Yahtzee trying to pick the "worst thing possible" that a transition would be...

I go to CAD, I type "miscarriage" in the search....and...I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I mean come on, we have to have empathy for the characters now or something? I remember that they would get stabbed by ninjas like every few panels, and now it goes from "CAD" to "Days of our Lives"?

 

[Kovash86]

Making stabs at Tim Buckleys Ctrl Alt Del series now are ya? Shame on you Yahtzee. If you do not like CAD then you are not to be trusted in this aspect.

Cad is the BEST webcomic ever.....way better than the cruddy Penny Arcade IMHO.

EVAR? I am inclined to believe you don't read that many webcomics. Enlighten me what of the intar-wubz big pile of comics do you partake in?

I myself have a fairly decent selection of Webcomics I pay attention to most of which don't involve making fun of games.
Applegeeks
Order of the Stick
Lackadaisy cats
Looking for group
Questionable Content
and Girl Genius, although I'm not sure why I read this one....I guess morbid curiosity.

 

[Maingunprimed]

I am surprised that Tim Buckley hasn't gotten wind of this yet and threaten to sue us all. His site has nothing so far.

 

[rebochan]

I wish you were dead

I wish you'd get better at trolling.

 

[The Existentialist]

Okay, in the interest of fairness I went and read through a shitload of Penny Arcade comics.


Anyone who slags of CAD without Slagging Penny Arcade is now a douchébag of the highest order.

Seriously, what the hell? How can you POSSIBLY like one and not the other to such a polarised extent?

Because, for the most part, PA is genuinely funny at least some of the time while CAD, from what I can tell, never has been. Krahulik and Holkins at least know the idea of how to correctly set up a joke (beat, beat, punch) instead of the horrifically poor way Buckley tends to set up his joke (punch, drag, drag, drag). There's also the fact that CAD has attempted to address "serious" issues (such as dating, religion, and the recent miscarriage fiasco) and failed on every single one. Buckley tends to shoot far higher than he can conceivably accomplish.

There's also the fact that, despite Gabe and Tycho being used mainly as a means to get the jokes across, they're far more likeable characters than any of the CAD cast. Hell, they're DEEPER than any of the CAD cast, because despite mainly being gag movers, they still possess small human traits people can identify with. The characters in CAD, meanwhile, either have no human character traits and are cardboard cutouts (Lilah, for the most part) meant to further Buckley's self-insertion ego, are characters who are meant to be "wacky" but, in a realistic sense, would be viewed as sociopaths and be detested by just about everyone around them (Ethan, Zeke), or are straight men who ultimately are simply yes men for everything the man character does (Lucas). Now, while PAs Gabe and Tycho are certainly portrayed as possessing sociopathic tendencies, we're never asked to sympathize with them. Buckley, however, does ask us to sympathize with his characters, which is ridiculous, since there's nothing to sympathize WITH, and if any of the characters existed, they'd be fairly horrible, bland, and worthless people.

At the same time, I like how you're judging people based on whether or not they slag a webcomic, just like the earlier moron who said the same about CAD. On all the things to judge a person by, I suppose their taste in webcomics is the best.

I like CAD, but PA doesn't do anything for me. I don't hate it, I don't even dislike it, I just wouldn't actively read it. Why? Because it feels very much like CAD, except it is annoying in small ways that spoil it too much for me to like it.

You're free to your opinion, as what webcomic you like really doesn't make you any more or less of a person, despite the way some people act about it. I would point out, however, that I feel your point is backwards, and it's CAD that feels more like PA. A shoddy, shoddy ripoff of PA.

Making stabs at Tim Buckleys Ctrl Alt Del series now are ya? Shame on you Yahtzee. If you do not like CAD then you are not to be trusted in this aspect.

Cad is the BEST webcomic ever.....way better than the cruddy Penny Arcade IMHO.

I sincerely hope you're joking, as NO gaming webcomic deserves the title of best webcomic ever. CAD even less than most.

 

[Friendly_Neighborhood_Misanthrope]

I find it annoying that some people say that, no matter how funny some people may find it, CAD is not, in fact, done well. What annoys me about this is, again, its a personal point of view, an opinion and nothing more. Webcomics aren't cars, there's no base standard for what makes it "good" beyond what YOU feel makes a webcomic good. I like CAD, its not the best webcomic I've ever read, but its ok, and I think the miscarriage arc was done well, if not completely tastefully. Some people will say I'm wrong and there is no way to believe its good, even if people like it, but to that I say this: Fuck You.

 

[Caliostro]

The root of the problem with CaD is that Tim has always been a lousy writter. (or as Yahtzee would put it "IMA RITER!")

There's no way around it, Tim is a poor writter, he even manages to often ruin pages by giving the punchline too soon... BUT, he does have a fair sense of humour, and personally I enjoyed Cad when it was a sort of episodic strip. Each strip was fairly unrelated, or the few "storylines" that poped up every so often were short and whacky. At that point Tim never asked us to take him seriously as a writter, he just did short simple "stories" that ultimately suited him.

But I suppose that fame got to him, and at some point Tim decided he wanted to do a real story... And it's from that point on that everything got fucked. First because as aforementioned tim is a lousy writter that can barely carry a 4-panel-joke effectively let alone a full story, and second because Cad was never created to be the base of a real, serious, story... The characters are completely unlikable, shallow and just plain inapropriate in a "realistic world" environment and only really fit the previous "whacky silly world" where cad was located.

Not to say that before thing Tim's strips were perfect and after horrible... He still managed to screw up a fair share of jokes before and he can still deliver some good strips now... But overall Cad just took a wrong turn several "chapters" ago and headed down a very very wrong way... To me it still has the eventual strip worth reading, but it's just not worth following anymore, if it ever was.

Oh yeah, and Tim being an arrogant and unlikable **** doesn't do much to support his webcomic.

 

[Lord_Seth]

Okay, in the interest of fairness I went and read through a shitload of Penny Arcade comics.


Anyone who slags of CAD without Slagging Penny Arcade is now a douchébag of the highest order.


Seriously, what the hell? How can you POSSIBLY like one and not the other to such a polarised extent? I like CAD, but PA doesn't do anything for me. I don't hate it, I don't even dislike it, I just wouldn't actively read it. Why? Because it feels very much like CAD, except it is annoying in small ways that spoil it too much for me to like it.

Wrong. There are key differences between Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del:
1) Penny Arcade was the original. When it came out, it was something new, original. When Ctrl+Alt+Del came out, it was just another of many, many webcomics that were trying to duplicate Penny Arcade's success. If nothing else, Penny Arcade wins just because it was original.
2) Better joke structure. Yahtzee gives a good analysis of this on his site [ttp://www.fullyramblomatic.com/] (scroll down to the "You Cad" article). Simply put, Penny Arcade structures its jokes better and thus has better jokes.
3) Penny Arcade has not tried to unexpectedly and suddenly shift gears and try for melodrama for no particular reason. They know that the reason people read it is for the jokes. That's not to say they haven't done a few kind of arcs, but even then that was mainly for the purpose of the jokes. Ctrl+Alt+Del, on the other hand, has tried to awkwardly put in melodrama. I didn't think the earlier examples (i.e. the pregnancy) were bad, but the miscarriage was just a terrible idea. It doesn't fit the strip and it was pulled off terribly anyway. I'd go in more detail but I think the flaws of the miscarriage have been mentioned so many times in this topic it would be redundant to explain why it was bad any further.

Saying that something that had a good, original idea is far better than something that took that idea and did a worse job of it than the original is not hypocrisy at all.

 

[eggdog14]

The best part is that one of his main criticisms, the fact that the main character is an unlikable fuckwad who people fawn over for NO REASON, is stated almost verbatim in a CTRL+ALT+DEL comic.

ITEM 1: http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20060220

That is a completely RANDOM selection, and it epitomizes the whole review.

That's maybe one of three Ctrl+Alt+Del's i've ever seen, so far, not a good impression.

Harrrr.

 

[LackingSaint]

CAD is for people who want obvious gaming jokes (SPORE HAS PENIS CREATURES XDD).

PA is for people who would prefer slightly less blatant jokes which are still funny (Evolution of programmed character AI in a videogame, for instance).

 

[Lord_Seth]

4) A quick plug for one of my favorite webcomics, Dresden Codak [http://dresdencodak.com/index.html]. The artwork is beautiful and the comic manages to do both serious and funny relatively well.

I've been holding in this rant for a while, so apologies in advance:
Dresden Codak doesn't do serious and funny well. It does funny quite well, but so far it's failed at serious.

In the early strips, it just just a silly, rather pointless comic. It worked. Sure, it made little sense, but it still managed to be funny. A silly, wacky comic that was funny worked. I feel I should draw a comparison to the comic Minus [http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus.html], which had a similar shtick.

But then came the DRAMA?, which so far has failed miserably. There are several reasons for this, but by far the biggest is the following:
The characters have no real personality. None. I'd actually say that Ctrl+Alt+Del has better characterization than Dresden Codak. Now, this was okay earlier on. Again, the purpose of the comic was to be silly and wacky; it didn't matter if the characters had no personality, they were just vehicles for the silliness. However, you can't suddenly take these personality-less characters and somehow expect us to care about them in the DRAMA?. The "plot" arc hasn't added any more characterization to them except for some parts of Kimiko's past, which is hardly characterization at all. Throwing in some kind of angsty past for a character CAN work if their personality has been established and the author thinks that giving them a REASON for why they're like that might be a good idea. Example: Batman. Yes, his parents died before his eyes. That does not characterization make. The fact that he decided to try to prevent it from happening to anyone else by becoming Batman is EXCELLENT characterization. The bottom line: There is less characterization in Dresden Codak than there is in Ctrl+Alt+Del. It's simply impossible to care about the characters when they have no personality. This can work if the comic is just silly and episodic, but when you try to insert DRAMA? you'd better have some personality.

Earlier I compared Dresden Codak to Minus. Minus also has no characterization for the characters. At most, a character's entire personality might be an emotion, like "angry guy". But Minus was never about the plot, the characters, or anything other than just being wacky and silly. That's not to say I wouldn't mind a little more characterization, but strictly speaking it doesn't need it.

At its root, that is Dresden Codak's problem. It's not just the painfully bad exposition [http://www.dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_041.html]. It's not just the fact that I can't care about the plot because it makes only marginally more sense than the earlier strips; I can take it not making sense of it's funny, I can't take it not making sense if it doesn't even have the humor to make up for it. It's not that the comic strip has one of the worst update schedules I've ever seen (and this is AFTER the author made a big announcement about how he was making it his full-time job and said he would go on a weekly schedule; quite frankly, the schedule is about as erratic as it was before that announcement). The problem is simply the fact that I can't care about the characters at all due to their lack of any sort of personality, and thus I don't care about the story.

Again, Dresden Codak was quite good earlier on. But it's lost what drew me to it (the crazy humor) and has instead inserted a plot that I really can't find myself caring much about. Take note, everyone: When you enter Cerebus Syndrome, don't lose what make the comic good in the first place.

I WOULD, however, recommend reading the pro-Hob strips. And the artwork IS quite good.

Rant over. Sorry for wasting your time with something only marginally related to the topic.

 

[Zoinker]

Okay, in the interest of fairness I went and read through a shitload of Penny Arcade comics.


Anyone who slags of CAD without Slagging Penny Arcade is now a douchébag of the highest order.


Seriously, what the hell? How can you POSSIBLY like one and not the other to such a polarised extent? I like CAD, but PA doesn't do anything for me. I don't hate it, I don't even dislike it, I just wouldn't actively read it. Why? Because it feels very much like CAD, except it is annoying in small ways that spoil it too much for me to like it.

Did you read their recent stuff or did you start at the beginning?

I don't have the patience to read through all 550+ comments so I don't know if this has been pointed out before, but if you read some of PA's early stuff (Say around 2003-ish) and compare it to CAD (Pick ANY strip) you don't see much of a difference. You have the minimalistic copy-paste art, expressionless faces and overly wordy and badly structured jokes ( example [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/8/28/])

Now read some of their strips from the last three or so years. Their art is vastly improved, their jokes are better structured and they are able to do more with less words (often none at all, unless it fits the joke [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/10/]). Meanwhile, the only evolution CAD seems to have gone through is diving headfirst into Cerebus Syndrome territory [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CerebusSyndrome].

 

[Reaces]

I'd just like to say that I only found this site through a web comic, namely GU-comics. And I promptly watched all the episodes before registering to make a reply. Not that it's usually in my nature to post on forums, I'm not registered on any web comic forums for instance.

The major difference I feel that's been largely left out in the replys here (not that I read all the replies, 18 pages of the same opinions over and over would make my eyes bleed) is that some web comics serve another purpose than just a comic that's out to cash in on an old cashcow.
Besides the comics penny-arcade still reviews games, and organizes stuff, comics such as GU-comics provides commentary on whatever's a hot topic on line at the moment (let me be more precise: whatever nagging noise the author found himself directed at that specific day).
While it's not needed to have other activities to make the comic worth reading it sure helps if you don't plan on making the comic the full brunt of your website. Comics such as (god help me I just find this comic funny) Dr. Mcninja can bring hilarious storylines without any delusions of what they are... Comics.

And just like MGS4 that tried to be something it wasn't, CAD is trying to be a novel of some sorts. Well get over yourself, you were okay when you were just a gaming comic but trying to be a novel online is beyond your reach, tone it down already is what I'd say.

And I wont even start on the stickmen "hehe I'll just add some stabbing, it worked for 8-bit" comics... Their stupidity needs no commentary.

 

[Therumancer]

Yahtzee is pretty popular for all of the talk, remember a lot of people are going to check out CAD just because of his bashing.

I'd figure with Webcomics any publicity is good publicity.

Out there is someone probably crying because Yahtzee didn't directly bash them.

>>>----Therumancer--->

 

[Helix08]

Least funny of the Zero Punctuation series. Rather boring actually. Yahtzee it appears you are running out of material here.

I tune in to listen to witty and insightful comments about the gaming industry (your Popcap and Zach and Wiki review), or to see you highlight something I haven't considered playing, like Painkiller (bought it immediately and love it).

Answering your fans' letters was well done. This was not.