Webcomic Review
Maskerman
"Cheerio!"

It's hard to get more cartoony than this.

Bright colors, bold reactions- in fact, Maskerman the comic has gone to the trouble of not only giving each comic a snappy title, but using some nefarious trick of Javascript or Flash or something to actually take the letters on the page and swap them out for a whole other font, which is loose and hand-drawn and funky and goes with the logo.

The comic looks primitive as hell at first glance because of the character designs and looseness, and then you look farther and notice all the attention paid to textures, details, the bursts of designerly stuff like words going BAM out of the frame and just outside the panel borders.

After a while you start to seriously wonder- are they making spelling mistakes on purpose as well? Is the commitment to this aggressive, crude, funky style so total that this is actually a tweedy Dutch college professor, unwinding after a hard day's painstaking work correcting grammatical errors by writing a comic that goes BAM! and laughs at all restraints?

I say Dutch because the strip is also translated into Dutch- though sometimes with bits of English present in the Dutch version.

On top of that, now and then even the title logo for the strip (big, cartoony, with some of the characters posing in it) gets swapped out for other ones related to the comic for that day, or the characters present that day. At times the amount of trouble taken for this comic is pretty mind-boggling (so far I haven't seen both Dutch and English versions of any custom title logos, but I wouldn't be surprised.)

So- what the heck do you get when you take lame but rambunctious character designs (with great willingness to pull out all the stops and try anything) and combine them with lame jokes and un-jokes, and then throw enormous effort into getting the tone and presentation just right, but insist on that tone being cheesey, loose and amateurish?

What happens when you choose to draw the cabinet the TV's on top of with amateurish, fake perspective, take pains to make the doors and things a little sketchy and unstraight, and then turn around and make the top and left lines of every element in this sketchy 'amateurish' cabinet drawing distinctly heavier than the bottom and right lines, with each not-perfectly-round knob on each drawer also showing the same line weight detail?

I can tell you this at least- you get to call it a style if you're fussing over it that hard. No question about it. I'm not sure this artist can turn around and do elaborate figure studies and perspective renderings even if he wanted- but I am sure that rather than put forth the effort to become a mediocre (one step up from nonexistent) perspective-renderer, he's putting forth huge efforts in totally arbitrary and different places.

This forms a kind of visual language, in the same way that the jokes and general foolishness form a comedy language. It's a bit like how Andy Kaufman's humor went off into directions that some people couldn't follow- doing things like reading a telephone directory for his stand-up routine. For a normal person, you couldn't do that and be funny. Because it was Andy Kaufman doing such things- to SOME people that was the most conceptually hilarious thing ever, and to some it was just a case of 'you lost me'. Especially since it was actually George Carlin who did that. Kaufman preferred to read The Great Gatsby on stage. And neither actually meant it to be funny, so the analogy breaks down completely.

Back to Maskerman.

My first impression of Maskerman was that it was a lighthearted, fun romp with lots of bright colors and silliness. After reading all of it, I can still see that, but the amount of care and attention expended takes it in another direction- it's like if people were drawn with triangular pink noses, it would appear like an amateurish thing. If you kept ON drawing people with triangular pink noses, it would begin to appear like a style of some sort. And then if you began to subliminally notice a lot of little consistent detail and attention in the triangular pink noses, and got the sense that great effort had been taken to do them exactly like that- a surreal feeling begins to appear, as if the whole thing is a joke you're not in on.

I'm not saying Maskerman is a great general-purpose comic for all ages and all audiences. I think it's a bit strange for that, really, and it's not likely to go mainstream- you should see the additional random comic! It's really impossible to predict what's going to turn up on that, or what bits are serious and what are not.

What I am going to say is this: because of the intensity with which Maskerman pursues its peculiar vision, it's the kind of comic that can be a person's favorite comic. It's not going to be mine, but I sense that in it. Out there somewhere are people for whom Maskerman is the perfect comic, exactly the right loose funky tone and bizarre, silly, simple humor. And that's a pretty huge deal- it's important to be able to be somebody's favorite thing ever. There are so many ways to fearfully edit out everything that could be criticized and end up with something so bland that it'd never be anybody's favorite anything.

And pretty much everything about Maskerman that contributes to that sense of 'this could be your favorite thing, maybe' is something that would be edited out or 'fixed' if you went at the comic and tried to repair everything obviously wrong with it.

The lesson here isn't to do everything wrong because that's funny- the lesson is chutzpah and originality. Maskerman is VERY easy to remember, almost at a glance. It's really consistent. If it's also easy to call lame, you have to remember that it's a very specific sort of lame- an insanely focussed, distinct flavor of lame, so well defined that it compels you to ask, is this really lame- or is it me?

How about a bit of both? Maskerman is limited, indeed it's self-limited, and criticizing it is like trying to club Jello to death with a rock. It just keeps on mockingly wibbling and wobbling at you, not caring a bit- because Jello isn't FOR clubbing to death with a rock, it's for eating. And if you like Jello, that might be a much better idea.

Nobody says you HAVE to like it, or that it has to make up your whole diet.

So eat healthy food, and read intelligent, coherent and funny comics, and then read Maskerman for dessert. Crying 'wheee!' is optional but might help you get into the spirit of the thing. After all, why not?