08-24-07

Welcome to the Machine
Since I returned to the world of webcomic reviews, I have repeatedly told everyone who asked, "I don't do requests.  The old waiting list is dead, and I'm not starting a new one."  This is because I don't do requests.  The old waiting list is dead, and I'm not going to start a new one.

That being said, I'm going to make an exception, just for grins.  A few months ago I was contacted via e-mail by a PR consultant.  I'm not going to name her or her company, because PR firms get paid a lot of money to hide in the shadows while they push their clients' names forward, and who am I to stand in the way of commerce.  Anyway, she sent me an e-mail a few months ago asking me for a review of a newish comic she represents called The Paranormals.  At first I ignored her; it's pretty easy to spot a PR press release if you know what you're looking for.  When she e-mailed me a second time, politely asking my thoughts on her clients' comic, I replied with a non-committal shrug citing the fun events of May - July as a reason for not reviewing the comic.  It was really a boilerplate blowoff e-mail.  Petty of me, I know. 

Last week she sent another polite inquiry.  That caught my eye.  Not her persistence; PR people are paid to be persistent.  That's how Paris Hilton, a woman with no discernable talent, manages to be in the spotlight more often and completely than...oh, you pick one...you could probably draw names out of a hat and come up with a long list of those more deserving of attention.  No, it was not her persistence, but her continued politeness.  Looking back at the correspondence, I had ignored her, then blown her off.  Then, a month after the blowoff, she still manages to be polite.  Nice, really.  In my past, I've "worked with" PR people before, both when I was editing a tout sheet, and when I was writing for a news outlet that was supposed to be the legitimate arm for another tout sheet, I spent my days talking to (okay listening to) PR consultants.  Few of them were polite; none were nice.  In most cases, the best I could say was that none of them actually tried to eat my entrails via the telephone.

As you can imagine, I was intrigued (I also felt bad for blowing her off, originally), so I decided to follow her links and give the comic a look.  A note to other authors and PR consultants:  the best I can do is go and look.  I do still have some vestiges of artistic integrity gnawing at my soul, and they mostly live in the place where I store my reviews.  Getting me to go look at a comic is (usually) pretty easy.  You still have to bring it, if you want a good review.  If my word on that isn't good enough, go re-read my review of Crowfeathers, and try to keep in mind that I like Amy Watson and respect her talent. 

So I went and looked.  It passed the first test.  I didn't go blind.

The Paranormals, by M. Raven Brown and Ronnie Werner, is not your average webcomic.  If you clicked the link at the beginning of this sentence, you'll notice that it leads, not to the comic, but to the home page of the hosting site, a "children's" website called Bonus.Com.  The reason for this is that, in order to link directly to the comic, I would have to type in an arcane address including a bunch of server commands and at least three nested directories.  This seemed strange; comics are generally provided as a draw to deeper content, and as such are usually accessible more or less directly, with plenty of pretty adds and banners surrounding them.  If that is Bonus.Com's intent for The Paranormals, they may need to rethink their sitemapping.

I was linked directly to the comic, but only to the comic's first issue (The Paranormals is posted in 2-part issues).  I read it, expecting some watered-down, corporate "just 4 backwards-K-ids" soapbox full of Afterschool Special moments and heavy-handed moralizing.  I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.  The Paranormals may not be the product of an intense artist sitting alone in his (or her) apartment, faithfully cranking out pages and strips until carpal tunnel makes him useless, but it's not the product of corporate groupthink either.

The comic opens with a werewolf attack on some campers, punctuated by a bloodcurdling scream.  This serves as prologue.  We are then immediately introduced to Rose Thornton, the lead character in the comic.  Rose is just beginning middle school (or Junior High School, or whatever they call it where you're from).  She then meets, in rapid succession, Daniel Bear, a Native American from the local reservation, and Preston Mulroney, a wealthy latchkey kid.  These three form the core of the comic's cast, and their relationships and the ways that they relate, are the driving force behind it.

Brown's writing is spot on.  Each character quickly grows beyond his or her archetype and takes on strengths and weaknesses to that character alone.  The dialogue is natural, and, with few exceptions flows well.  The comic is targeted at pre-teens, and is, because of this, loaded with valuable life lessons, but these lessons never become the crux of the comic, and are seldom immediately apparent or obvious.  When forced to make a choice between furthering the plot and "teaching a lesson", Brown goes with the plot.  There are some historical and social errors, but these can be dismissed as irrelevant to the plot, and are mostly victims of over-simplification.

The art is slick and stylized in a way that is reminiscent of Disney's Kim Possible, and could easily slide into the Disney Channel's afternoon line-up, were it made into a cartoon.  Each panel is precisely framed for best effect, and, while Werner's art starts out slick and professional, a lot of growth is apparent in the developing issues.  There is a lot of cut and paste in the early issues, but that fades as the comic progresses.

The big problem is navigation.  The comic itself is buried under a stack of nested menus, and, once the comic's home is reached, the reader has no convenient means of jumping from one issue to the next.  Navigation within issues is accomplished by a simple "next/previous" link in the bottom right-hand corner of each page, but there are no jump links to the first page of the comic, or even of an issue, and no way to jump to the current page/issue.  As I mentioned before, if The Paranormals is meant as a means to draw new users to the Bonus.Com site, then the coders at Bonus need to work on the navigation and accessibility of the comic.

It's definitely worth a look, but only if you have the time and the energy to live with the navigation issues.
The Paranormals by M. Raven Brown and Ronnie Werner
Updates:  Unknown
Caveats:  age-targeted, bad history, bad navigation
Rating: