Webcomic Review
OddFish
"Little Nemo In Biroland"

The first thing you notice is the rendering, of course.

It's called 'Biro Art' and it's known on the one hand for incredible, virtuosic crosshatching and on the other, the phenomenal control of mass and form shown by the artist known as Nobby Nobody. There was never any question that this was going to be a hit. One doesn't typically find art this striking in a webcomic. It goes beyond the simply professional into the realm of sui generis- you simply can't mistake this comic for any other.

Stumbleupon, and sites like it, catapulted this strip to the... wait, hang on, OddFish is not achieving superstardom- not at the time I write this. It LOOKS like it should, everything seems to be right, so what's the deal? Why is this not kicking sand on Scott Kurtz and giving Gabe anxiety again?

To understand we have to go back into the dawn of comics.

Windsor McCay was the artist who drew 'Little Nemo'. The comparison is high, high praise, but it's not one-sided or glib: I have a point to make. McCay got known for a famous comic, "Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend". In these, somebody would fall asleep and suffer the most outlandish, eye-mangling nightmares, rendered with scary and jawdropping facility. Anything could happen in these, and it always ended with the sleeper waking and vowing never to eat Welsh Rarebits again. (Disclaimer- I love Welsh Rarebits and advise eating them constantly)

McCay went on to a further strip that made him a comics superstar, and that was "Little Nemo in Slumberland"- very much the same thing, except that the fantasy was even more lavish, and the dreamer was always the same little boy, who made a band of peculiar and awkward friends. Little Nemo took up a whole newspaper page and was impossible to imitate.

Here comes the shiv, though- why did you probably not know that, but you know Charlie Brown? Why can you probably not picture Flip from the Little Nemo strip, but you can picture Mickey Mouse, even though Flip was drawn much better than early Mickey? McCay was able to do the first 'cel' animations EVER, and animate Flip and Nemo tumbling in space with total convincingness, and yet we're still watching Mickey Mouse cartoons even now while Little Nemo remains relatively obscure.

The answer touches on virtuosity and the nature of the performer- the difference between being an appealing person, and creating an imaginary compelling person in art.

Walt Disney was a very unusual person. Some would call him a really horrible person, but I wouldn't go that far- but he took extraordinary control in creating many unforgettable characters, notably Mickey Mouse. Mickey didn't come out of nowhere- he was a frantic attempt to replace another popular character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit- who in turn replaced a cartoon cat that was the sidekick of a little human girl named Alice, and that marked the obscure beginning of Disney's career.

The cat was noted mostly for Felix-like visual gags, such as being able to disassemble himself and be used as parts- there was also a mechanical cow, courtesy of Ubbe Iwerks, which had similar traits. Gags would happen, and the characters would cheerfully perform their tricks, and it was on to the next gag, and out.

Oswald was the breakthrough for a very simple reason- he had a point of view, an attitude. This was part Disney and part accident- Oswald started out fatter and more of a schlub, in a film called 'Poor Papa', and hit immediate complaints. The distributors demanded that Oswald be more appealing and likeable- he was given to mean-spirited gags, which Disney gleefully threw in during those early days. In response, Disney wrote back hastily, saying that he would make Oswald 'trim, saucy and venturesome'... and some of his reaction went deeper than just the visual character design. Disney, prodded, gave Oswald an attitude, a proper personality and point of view.

Disney lost Oswald in a business dealing, and at the time he invented Mickey with Ubbe Iwerks, he was frantic, desperate, and he knew that he was on to something in his personality animation- so, in the first new Mickey Mouse films, Disney went to great lengths to understand and evolve Mickey's point of view, and place him in situations where he was challenged and where his personality would shine. There's a later Mickey scene where the Mouse is confronted by a huge, unexpected bear, and all the comedy is drawn directly from Mickey's flusteredness, playing off his alarm, even his self-image. He introduces himself to the bear, even, and becomes even more flustered when he considers that the bear may not have HEARD of him. This is a human and very vulnerable personality in a comedic scene. It ought to be- it was Walt's. Disney had long since lost the opportunity to be vulnerable or a 'little guy' in the knife-fight of business dealings he survived through, and all this vulnerability was poured into Mickey, and through him, to the world.

And this is the missing heart of OddFish- this is the dark secret of Little Nemo. Sometimes when you have a form of virtuosity, there's a comfortableness about that which precludes desperation. Winsor McCay drew endless ravishing vistas and dreamscapes, but his Nemo remained very simple and innocent compared to the ambition, pluck and vulnerability of Mickey Mouse. It was as if Nemo didn't really care as deeply. We didn't really get to know him, only to see him posed against all those stunning dreamscapes.

By contrast to Little Nemo, the characters in OddFish can emote like crazy, mugging for the camera like mad if necessary, because that's just another aspect of virtuosic, glorious artistic representation- but it's all in the service of a string of puns and gags. This guy rivals Brad Guigar as a pun-lover. They're good puns, too- but there's a price to be paid.

You see, a pun is like a short-circuited joke- you go looking for meaning, and then bzot! It's funny because you're actually nowhere, there's no connection at all. Or, rather, you go looking for a connection that tells you about the characters you're watching, and instead you're presented with a connection strictly about some of the words you're reading. It's funny because it's unexpected, because you've been pranked.

But if you're meeting characters over and over- getting to know them, learning who they are- the puns become frustrating, because they hide the people you're meeting. You're going along in a direction that might show you something about their personalities, backgrounds, whatever, and- pun! At a stroke, all the setup becomes just words.

There's another cartoon reference that offers a way around this- Warner Brothers. Specifically, Chuck Jones cartoons. The reason Chuck Jones is the key to escaping this trap is, with Jones cartoons you have some very similar elements to puns. You've got extreme, exaggerated gags which might for instance blow Daffy Duck's beak off over and over, and he'll come back again and again, just like you can go for puns again and again with nobody learning anything from it.

But with Chuck Jones, Daffy is not 'the duck that gets his beak blown off again'- Daffy is the OVER-REACHER, and that's the big distinction. It's not about whether he's going to get blown up- of course he is- it's HOW he goes about it. Instead of being no further on, each time Daffy gets blown up he comes back with even wilder over-reaches, perpetually frustrated and unsatisfied, and the humor is just as much about watching his desperation mount as it is about each duck-demolishing gag.

For the life of me, I can't make out similar identities for the OddFish characters- at least, not yet. They're interchangeable. I can see Howard reads books, I can see Howard and Lovecraft like each other, yet Lovecraft experiments on Howard's brain for the sake of a gag. I can see that Lovecraft is smart and afraid of tiny zebras, and that the zebras are out to get the octopus, but the octopus changes between being terrified and being vengeful. These guys aren't consistent, recognizable personalities, though there's no reason they couldn't grow to be more that way.

Remember Daffy? When he started out he just quipped, "Don't let it worry ya Skipper, I'm just a crazy darnfool duck! hoohoo hoohoo hoohoo!", but years later through his growth and the influence of Chuck Jones he'd become a guy who was just hilariously funny even just standing there. If you KNEW he desperately wanted victory over Bugs and had made some elaborate plan which Bugs casually disarmed, and you saw Daffy standing there glaring at Bugs, you could just FEEL the "you're dethpicable!" waiting to come out. You knew how badly he needed to win, and you knew it wasn't ever going to happen against this bunny, and still he never gave up. That's because he always came from a consistent place, and what he was, had humor to it.

Balked ambition is funny. In the case of Bugs, a unflappable guy with no ambitions at all but a terrible taste for revenge is funny. There's more paydirt in looking for what these guys WANT than in looking for situations where they're forced to react- if you know what they want, then you'll know what's funny about them. Daffy wants the world on a platter, but is totally useless and ridiculous. Bugs wants nothing, but is a terrifyingly effective opponent. It's about what they want, and the more they want it, the funnier it gets.

I'm so charmed by the look of OddFish, and its essential niceness and quirkiness, that what I want more than anything is to be able to convey somehow that I understand. Essentially I'm saying, 'the characters here look incredibly distinct and appealing but I still have no idea who they are or what they want, nothing sticks'. I believe with all my heart that this is just a part of the learning process- that eventually they'll develop more distinctness and it'll become possible to have a gag just by looking at one of them in a certain situation and knowing how he feels. Considering the ability Nobby has to depict facial expressions on sea creatures which don't inherently have those expressions, the potential of this is incredible.

And that makes me sad that, with all the praise for the art, I still spent acres of text trying to explain why the pun-laden writing wasn't bringing me closer to the strip.

But, I haddock. :)