Apokalupsis Webcomic Anthology
Staff: C. Meli
Overview:
Buckle up kiddies- it’s time for a train wreck.
Review:
So today we are looking at the Apokalupsis Webcomic Anthology Preview and… oh no. DEAR LORD! What is THAT!? Ladies and gentlemen! Get your combat helmets on! We’ve got POSER 3D ARTWORK! (DUN DUN DUNO) If the cover art is anything to go on- strap in, it’s going to be a rough ride!
Note: I try to keep profanity out of my reviews but… for fuck’s sake man this is that bad. Sorry.
Art:
Ok, so let’s get this out of the way. GOD THIS COVER ART IS TERRIBLE. Like “put me out of my misery, why God, why?!” sort of bad. I’m sure that there is some savant out there who can use Poser 3D to make magic happen but… I’ve never seen it happen. For those who don’t know, Poser 3D is this art program where people can pose pre made 3D models and dress them up. It’s meant to be used as reference pictures for artists but lots of lazy folks elect to use it to just do their comics or whatever.
Inside we at least start with some hand drawn stuff. Now it’s not the best art out there (far from it) but it’s at LEAST better than the soul-searing shit on the cover.
Lettering / Layout:
Lettering wise… this has a long way to go. A trick a lot of letterers use to make their text flow nicely is to use a diamond shape for their line breaks so you have a few words on top, a lot in the middle, and a few again at the bottom. This is because the word bubbles are round and it allows them to get a lot of text in the bubble in a readable fashion without taking up a lot of space. Some of these bubbles are… well let’s just say they don’t follow this rule and it shows. We have some oddly chosen left aligned (rather than center aligned) balloons, the font is inconsistent and the dialogue balloons are at just about the same height. Add to this mess that it seems like some of these balloons are pasted OVER existing one and it’s kind of a gross mess. The cherry on the cake is that 4 pages into the comic and we are still getting copyright information and ads taking up large portions of the page in generic left aligned fonts (that is what the credit page is for!).
At page 4 we get another change. Randomly two Poser 3D images are thrown in as “pinups”. Show me the person who actually printed these out and hung them up- I challenge you. The rooms are devoid of detail, parts of the model clip through each other, and the faces have these SUPER uncanny valley looks like all the images from Poser 3D I’ve reviewed in the past.
Page 5 has literally a 1 page comics that has been shrunk to fit the page or something as it is at an odd aspect ratio. It seems like this was taken from a Jesus coloring book. There are LITERALLY clipped images from what I assume is a google image search in here. God I’ve missed reviewing stinkers like this one… The text clips all over the place. It’s illegible (unless the line “We removed the sails as we might hi(t?) the sirtis” makes sense
Page 7 brings us “Rock ‘N’ Roll Kids” and has a wonderfully low rez image of Malta in the background with a big red box and with white text explaining everything.
Writing / Story:
So… I will try to touch on the “story”. As the name implies this is an anthology. The first 3 pages or so is a scifi story with lots of in-universe slang that is immediately explained in big boxes. There is no story. None we can follow. Then we have “St. Paul’s Shipwreck in Malta”. For fuck’s sake man… at this low rez tiny aspect ration one can hardly read the text- even if you blow it up. It’s about St. Paul but doesn’t really go anywhere. Then we have “Rock ‘N’ Roll Kids” a superhero team up comic. From what I can figure- this is a Christian superhero comic of sorts? It has some god awful, very angsty, backstory. It literally doesn’t go anywhere in the 3 pages it has. The character talks to her parents briefly then walks off and talks about her emotions a bit. So… yeah. None of the three stories go anywhere. I get that it’s an anthology and they should be a sample of the larger stories… but… yeah. Nothing. None of them go anywhere. None of them make me want to read more. In fact I’m pretty stoked that I’m done.
Overall:
Overall… do you really have to ask? It’s an eyesore and a failure of biblical proportions. This is the worst side of indie comics. I’m sure the author means well… but it’s a 100% total mess. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s garbage with a capital “G”. The only saving grace was that it was free and he hasn’t tried to sell anything else. This wasn’t a review- this was an exorcism and I’m done.
Amen.
Indie Comic Review 