Webcomic Review
Freshly Squeezed
"Wait, What?"

A guy, nearly a stick figure guy. looks at a big red button hanging in space with a huge label that says 'DO NOT PRESS'. Suddenly there's a girl next to him, and she says "I wouldn't do that if I were you." They stare at each other for another panel, not moving, in exactly the same pose that they were (thanks to cut and paste). Then, their heads explode. They don't react to this as their bodies are still cut and paste, it's just red scribble coming out of what's left of their heads, with some larger chunks of gore represented as little blobs.

This is the strip a forum poster used when he responded to my first take on this comic, which was that I wasn't going to review it. I figured somebody else could deal with the guys who wanted to be explosm when they grew up, and at the time I just said no dice. The forum poster I'm talking about made a post where he was setting out to be outraged at how highhanded I was, haughtily refusing to sully myself with the poor guy's comic... and then he reposted this strip (early on- 6/21/08)... and in his post, did a double take and well um er... yeah. His gag was that the comic being shown to me was so awful that NOBODY in their right mind would review it.

What happened? I didn't get less haughty... the comic didn't really get better... it's just that I made a list of everyone in the waiting-for-reviews queue, and discovered there were a lot of them I needed to attend to. And what's one more comic when you're working through fifteen or so?

One of the strips:

"My ADHD may disrupt my class..."

"But someday I'll teach the world something."

"No you won't. You have ADHD."

"You're nothing but a loon."

Or another- a boy is dribbling a basketball (it's in the air and by his side so he must be dribbling it). He jumps with it, towards the basket. He flies up over the basket. He continues flying up and up into the sky.

Yes, there are some funny strips in there- wait until you see the alien that has to take a leak- but due to inexperience and the incredibly primitive drawing and writing, this isn't quite a comic.

It's TAGGING, and that becomes the point of this review.

When I was a lot younger, I had a secret identity. I was "The Poet", and I existed on bathroom walls. I was one of a group of graffiti artists in my school at the time. There was CEREBUS the aardvark, who was given to frothing abuse and changing his font around in the manner of his beloved Dave Sim- there was the elegant The Black Graphite, whose hand was a little hard to read but who had a distinct, acerbic tone- there was The Red Pen, who was a friend of mine (CEREBUS was his roomie). It was an orgy of gentle vandalism, an explosion of personality and expression, even though the subject matter was exactly like what would later appear on Usenet and in internet forums around the world. We had nothing useful to say, and we were saying it like crazy, every chance we got.

I'd picked 'The Poet' because I wanted a twist, some way to be superior, and CEREBUS immediately confronted me, challenging and mocking me and sneering at my lame couplets. If I wasn't going to cough up some iambic pentameter, he suggested, why didn't I just give up and go die in a fire?

That was my cue to sneak off to the library- with the unique thrill of trying to secretively read books on poetic meter and form without letting anyone see it was me reading them- and to learn what iambic pentameter was, as well as many other forms. And I could do them, too. Everyone was carefully not impressed, but I knew I'd won, somehow. I hadn't written a great poem, by anyone's standard- but I was there, it was me up there on the wall, and I'd responded and made my mark.

And here we have Jesus Navarro up on the web, and you know I've read every single comic he's done in the half year or so he's been doing comics. Not only that, even though most of them aren't exactly funny, even though the strip fails on any seriously professional level, at this point I feel like I have an idea what kinds of gags he makes. I can recognize his art and if I was paying attention at all I could tell him apart from other stick figure/crude comic artists.

I know this guy now.

That's all you need for tagging- that you're recognized- so he wins.

All that remains is the question- are you satisfied with that, or do you want me to not only recognize you but seek you out? Do you want to be liked as well? There's a whole world of learning that'll take you in that direction, and it's all about refining your craft and figuring out what you want to do and what you want to do FOR people- or perhaps TO people, if that's your thing.

But I'm going to say that without all that, there's still a level I can understand here. It's that level where for better or worse, you grab a pencil and you put something out there, keep doing it until it's noticed. You go tagging. You leave your mark, just because it is your mark, whether or not you're a hotshot or particularly desired.

Freshly Squeezed loses as a comic, but Navarro wins- because now I know the dude, I know what kinds of comics he does. Whether he wants to do more for me in future is really up to him- there's always that meta-humor thing people do where it's like "I'm not funny. Ha." It's a lot of work entertaining people and he's barely begun on that journey...

But begun, he has- so he wins.