Webcomic Review
Code Name: Hunter
"Notes From An Unbegun Masterpiece"

Obsessiveness has its rewards- especially when you're depicting the fantastic.

By that I mean- if you are making a comic about tech jokes, the important thing is hitting the jokes crisply. But if you're making an imaginary world, there's no substitute for depicting that world. And if that world is our modern world, but rendered magical by- well- magic, plus also furries?

Then the depiction might need to be utterly palpable- yet this has its own handicaps, and that's not limited to the difficulties of producing the artwork. That has to be mentioned, however. Code Name Hunter has recently switched from color to a grayscale, which alters the tone of the comic enormously, and it's presumably because of how tough it was to produce the color version regularly.

It's a bit hard to imagine how tough that was, as most of the comic appears to have been colored in natural media by a master colorist. There are more appealing pencilers and character designers out there- the Hunter characters often have very small eyes and mouths, the mouth set back in the muzzle in 'animu' fashion (which I believe is the term for anime designed to feature a moving mouth against an unvarying head outline). Sometimes, things like eyes aren't properly in perspective, giving the impression that the front of the head is perfectly flat. It's important to note that this is only revealed because the comic is so intensely cinematic that characters can and will be rendered from every angle- and that's difficult, and more than most comic creators are prepared to attempt.

The art of Code Name: Hunter will literally attempt any angle or view, no matter how difficult, and sometimes the difficulty shows. At least as often the attempt works out- shot from behind slightly above the characters? Scene looking at a collapsed character from low to the ground looking at the top of his head? All that comes off brilliantly, so the rendering quirks can be chalked up to character design, and they don't stop the characters from being expressive.

And it seems unfair to harp on it when most people won't be able to see that part, because of the other side of the art- the coloring and texturing.

These things tell a story- they provide cues to the 'feel' of the environment, describe spatial qualities, set the tone. Especially early on, this comic is shockingly well colored and textured- beyond anything I've seen anywhere else. It's odd, because the drawing quirks are still sometimes there, yet there's this amazing vivid three-dimensionality and realism of texture. You see a guy's leather coat and it's like you could reach out and touch it, but there's an element of cartoonyness to it as well- it's like it's a better leather coat than you could possibly have in the real world.

It goes beyond that. You're in a room with some characters talking, and the room has a globe and bookshelves and pictures on the walls- and these things are just as real as the characters. The pictures on the walls are painted. If a newspaper page is tacked up on the wall you can see the columns and paragraphs, some wrinkles in the paper... When there's a stone-walled building it seems like every stone is painted... it makes you want to be in this world, you don't want to close the page.

The writing has similar qualities. You've got very natural dialogue from very natural people who happen to be anthropomorphic animals of various sorts, and apart from a fae who's a flying vixen who speaks in musical notes, everybody's very normal seeming, and the texture of their interactions is... any guesses as to whether I'm going to say natural or normal? Either would serve.

The story's about these people coping with the recurrence of magic in the everyday world, in the manifestations you'd expect to find it. The site has RPG material outlining the finest details of the characters' magic-hunter organization, and there's talk of 'the story' as some vast thing, certainly vast enough that Darc (the artist) has changed her media and process repeatedly, trying to cover more ground in the story more quickly.

And yet, the comic was never more affecting than when it killed off a very charming character in a paroxysm of drama and emotion- and, having done so, sort of stared around like 'what? now what do I do?'. Scott Kurtz is known for saying drama is easy, just kill your grandmother and Bob's your uncle (or something like that...) and yet this is very similar on the writing level to the occasional jarring artistic quirks. You have somebody who you get to know, set up so that your heart is totally won over, there's action and danger and then BAM, death- and for what? We don't read escapist fiction to learn bad things happen to good people- that's a darker, existentialist notion. When you have such artistic skill that you can draw a vivid, expressive mouth, you're expected not to put it four inches back from where it would normally go. When you have the writing skill to come up with a cute bunny innocent helpful spunky reader-bait character you're expected to come up with a way to rescue that character from whatever plight you devise...

And that's the striking thing about Code Name: Hunter- in every sense it's a masterpiece waiting to discover its own point. I believe the creators have this sense as well- using their abilities to do things like a story arc about the song 'The Streak'. In that one, the art remains at a high level and the writer invents a character of a recurring nagging housfrau who gets her comeuppance in the end, amusingly. It's deft, appealing, inventive- yet it's filling space, it doesn't matter terribly much.

You get street scenes where a secret agent is exchanging secret verification code phrases over the phone. The scene is extraordinary, with everything from denim to glass to brick rendered charmingly. The codes are absurd, even funny-sounding. It's all incredibly immersive but doesn't end up meaning anything. The comic echoes old songs, Cerebus comics- it's a kaleidoscopic display of impressions dazzling a bunch of characters who are seldom in control of what's happening, and often aren't sure what they want. (avoiding an attacker is always a good bet, though the comic won't even promise that you can do that reliably)

I'm waiting for any sort of overall PERSONAL goal, from anybody. Overall in that it will persist and not fall prey to a momentary outburst of action. This is a story, so the person driving the story does not get killed meaninglessly due to bad luck- it really stings that the one character with the most distinctive flavor (don't want to spoil things for new readers) isn't still with us.

In a lot of ways, it seems to me that Code Name: Hunter is the conclusive counterexample to the Kurtz Theory that drama is easy if dramatic things are happening. Here, the comic is gradually learning that just having dramatic events happen isn't enough...

...without motivation.

That's going to be the magic bullet for this creative team- you can see them steadily picking up on the idea, stumblingly but inevitably, and it speaks well for what the comic will eventually become.

If you have stunning vivid expressive rendering on a random rock in the wall, that's pretty but distracting. If you have the same stunning expressiveness on a character's face at a key moment- or a special weapon, or a reveal on some object with great plot significance- suddenly that's much more important. It's putting the power where you want it.

If you have a cute helpful puppy beloved by a key character, and you have the puppy brutally killed by a big bad monster which is promptly destroyed, you just ruined your readers' day for nothing, just to make life a little bleaker for the key guy. On the other hand, if this happens and the monster gets AWAY... both the character and the READER are left beside themselves with the need for vengeance, and you've hooked them in a big way. They now NEED things to happen in a certain way in the story. That's the point...

After all, the art and the writing serve the story, especially in so story-based a comic. It really doesn't matter to people if the organization your hero works for calls a certain rank a corporal or a lieutenant- that's detail on the level of the rock in the scenery wall. To focus on that stuff is to further the immersiveness of the story, at the expense of what people care about.

Maybe the most fundamental moment of drama is the Mark Hamill "NOOOOOOOOO!" where something unbearably tragic or wrong has happened- but pay attention to the context of the original Hamill Nooooos. On the one hand they are obviously a squalling outburst of emotional extremeness- you can see the contorting face, feel the emotion- but in their story, they mean one thing. A re-evaluation in Luke's mind. The dramatic moment MEANS something, and a primary character has just changed- either his world's totally changed on him in a significant way, or his motivations have done a 180. The insides of the guy's head are different, radically different. The dramatic moment is just your tip-off.

Code Name: Hunter begins to learn this with Ruby and Hunter- the moment I'm thinking of is unmistakable. It's one thing to know what characters want, but when you can sense that a character (in a dramatic moment) is suddenly filled with NEED, that's crucial... if the reader has the same need (see helpful puppy paragraph above) you're really playing with fire, but even if you still have to explain the details to the reader, you've still got something important- just as the rendering of the character includes recognizable features, so the contents of the character's thoughts include recognizable features.

So- if you have characters with conflict in their past and they encounter each other once more, you've got something. But if you have characters the reader knows, they encounter each other, and what they don't know but the reader does know is that there's conflict in their FUTURE- just by knowing what each character needs, and anticipating the fireworks that are going to happen- then you've really got something.

I have to strongly encourage Darc and Matt to return to color, simply because their comic is SO GOOD at it that it's a little shocking. You don't want to discard one of your very strongest points. The color art can be crazy good, and the fact that most of the comic has been that effusively colored is pretty amazing.

As far as the story is concerned, I'd just be asking (for each huge dramatic situation), who is changing their mind and how? We know so little about these characters' points of view and what makes them tick, and the few times we clearly get someone like Ruby vowing terrible vengeance (or some such point of decision), it's powerful stuff. Yet there are so many situations where events are happening and the characters are just surviving (or not) the events, with nothing in particular demanded of them. Perhaps they just don't understand what's happening, or they don't really know what to think. After a lot of that, a reader doesn't know what to think either.

Just keep reminding me who cares about what and why- there is soooo much detail in the comic that's on the 'rock in the wall' level, that it's hard to keep track of what really matters to the characters. I know somebody is filled with rage at what happened to her father, and that's great, the slightest hint will bring back that enraged face in my mind's eye. I also know there are two mage girls who want to be together but are being separated, though I'm a bit unclear on the whys and wherefores- but I sense their bond and wonder what sort of relationship that is. Depending on that it could be an awfully big deal...

This has been an unusually long review but Code Name: Hunter deserves it. It's just a matter of what the sound and fury DOES, in the end, signify. In the end, we can ignore huge amounts of detail about how an organization works (or the politics of a country) yet be totally captivated by the simple, innocent desire of a magic vixen-pixie to be helpful.