Thursday, May 28, 2009

what is this I don't even

Page 2

http://triquetracats.com/?date=2003-11-20

This is actually an okay page. Michael's little pose thing is kind funny. The subtitle below the page explains that this one has been re-done with Jessica's "improved art skills". The problem is that, despite the improvement, even the art here is terrible. The coloring is boring and doesn't do much as far as shading, the lines for the wrinkles in the clothes are all wrong, and his hair is blue.

Really? Blue? I know it's a staple of that animu style to give every character a ridiculous hair color, but it doesn't make it any less stupid. It also just seems a bit lazy here with all the blue.

I guess I should be glad Jessica has yet to re-do every page. The atrocity of Triquetra Cats is the only reason it stands out from every other transgender webcomic (yes, among webcomics transgender is a genre), and if every page is like this the art will just be depessingly mediocre, and the writing isn't bad enough to drag it down to the depths it's at now.

Keep shining, you crazy diamond.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

I Ain't Sayin' I'm a Gold Digger

So I'm about to put a link to the Cracked Forums. Specifically, I'm about to link to a thread about the worst webcomics. I should warn that most of them are there for a reason- even the highest-quality webcomics in this thread are disturbing at best. The worst are a blight on the internet (which is quite a feat, because the internet is the worst place).

http://www.cracked.com/forums/topic/36326/the-worst-webcomic/0

Anyways, in that thread, on page 45 (I think) someone linked to a comic called Triquetra Cats. Triquetra Cats is a shitty webcomic that sucks. It's mostly just unabashedly terrible, but occasionaly there's a bit of unintentional humor, which is why I'm writing this. While reading through it can be fairly entertaining (the atrocious writing combined with the surreal illustrations is good for a chuckle), the majority of strips are unfunny, and can ruin the good ones, so I'm going to go through and find the gold so that everyone else doesn't have to cover themselves in shit to find it.


Strip 1
http://www.triquetracats.com/?date=2003-11-19

If you want to know what is so bad about this comic, you need only read this page. It combines a number of stupid things that occur throughout, such as mouths that bear a striking resemblance to a penis, as well as panels prominently displaying the word 'SHOCK' in the background, because you can't tell that the character's ae supposed to appear shocked from the art.

It also pretty clearly states that this is a transgender comic, which is a nice warning to everyone who doesn't like terrible webcomics. Actually, it pretty much beats you over the head with this, because 'Jessica Raven' has no idea what subtlety is.

"Hey Jorgenson, checking her out man?", A boy asks the main character, Michael, who is looking at Trena Warsimmons, the most popular girl in school .While the illustration of Trena might give one hope that Jessica Raven can draw a well-proportioned human-like creature when she puts in the effort, it's more likely she just gets lucky sometimes.

"Oh wait, that's right! You'd rather BE her!", the boy continues, before pointing at Michael and laughing. 'The problem is he's right.' Michael thinks, looking down towards the end of the hallway (one would assume that he is forlorn, but his expression is indistinguishable because Jessica wisely avoids having to draw his uper-face by putting a retardedly huge pair of hypno-glasses on him that magically cover his eyes from every single angle).

This is a painfully obvious attempt to garner sympathy for Michael. Rather than give him any semblance of depth, she makes him exist only for a single purpose that he is ridiculed because of. Of course it all seems unnatural because kids don't get made fun of for having gender dysphoria. If they're flamboyant then maybe, but Michael would seem to be an introvert. How would anyone even know he was gender dysphoric? Maybe he had a friend once that he told, who then turned and told the whole school? Nah, that might make Michael remotely interesting.