webcomic reviews that no one asked for
Dec. 12th, 2022 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluabecause of Reasons TM i decided to read all of Minna Sundberg's back catalog, enjoy
A Redtail's Dream
The premise: Due to Finnish Pantheon Shenanigans TM, wrought by one of said pantheon's youngest/naughtiest/trickster-iest members, a whole village and all of its people have been spirited into the dream world, with no way home. Our lil' trickster diety doesn't have the ability to intervene in the dream world himself (at least, not without tipping off the other gods/spirits about exactly what bullshit he's been getting up to), but luckily, a mortal dude (Hannu) and his dog (Ville) happened to be wandering just outside the village when the spiriting happened, and thus, trickster!diety press-gangs Hannu and Ville into traveling the dream world to save the villagers.
The art is gorgeous, and the primary reason I wanted to read. I'm also really into mythological shenanigans, but the handling of that rich source material is a little disappointing here. Finnish gods and mythic creatures are dropped into the narrative by name, but their powers/backstories/connections-to-the-world are rarely actually elaborated on, and usually only serve a role in a fetch quest sort of thing ("kill this monster so we can save these villagers," "catch this mythic fish so we can save these other villagers", etc).
There is however, a fantastically weird tension between Hannu and Ville—this part in particular is just exquisite. Hannu's been a bit of a selfish brat throughout the narrative, but here we see him reflecting on a childhood incident with a callousness that suggests something really quite twisted in him—and Ville, his loyal and faithful dog, is hearing about this all for the very first time (due to his dreamworld-capacity for speaking human language). Ville's obvious horror—and his fierce determination to never think of it again—is such a raw, awful thing, given the texture of their relationship and the power dynamic there. That theme is developed a little more, but not quite resolved, in a way that feels weird and uncomfortable but also... interesting? Is it's as if it borrowed some aspect of the weird, timeless, capricious cruelty of the gods that we see in some pagan myth, and put a sliver of it in Hannu—and just... let it sit. No particular judgment either way; Hannu is just this kind of guy and that's that.
I dug it. It helps that, while some of the narrative beats are meh, the ending really does come together in a satisfying way.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
The premise: Ninety years ago, a ghastly (and distinctly weird) pandemic swept the world. All mammals aside from cats were vulnerable, and those infected either died horribly or transformed into unsettlingly disfigured beasts and trolls. Iceland, with her cold winters and easily-defensible borders, was able to survive, and is now the largest and most populated country in the world. There's also small pockets of humanity surviving in Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden—either in small cities that have managed to secure themselves via strict quarantine procedures and vigilant border patrols, or else scattered tiny little archipelagoes throughout the lakes and the oceans—each settlement small enough it can be wiped away in a week by ill luck, but also isolated enough that ill luck won't afflict their neighbors.
All the rest of the world is—silent. No sign of human life in decades.
And thus a small, Louis-and-Clark-esque expedition is arranged, to venture out and see what remains.
It's a haunting, haunted world, and Sundberg draws it with haunting beauty. Her art has leveled up noticeably since A Redtail's Dream, and continues to level up over the course of the comic. I tend to read comics more for the writing and the vibes than the art, but I kept pausing on various pages to admire a beautiful landscape here, or a beautiful visual turn-of-phrase there.
The story attempts to have an ensemble cast, but really, Lalli is the story's beating heart. A talented mage and night-scout from rural Finland, Lalli has the stolid dutifulness of a military veteran (when it comes to his job), mixed with a strangely-tween-ish aloof/bratty streak (when it comes to any other interpersonal interactions), all overlaid with a sort of daydreamer-forgetfulness and general naivete. (A night-scout with his unique skills, after all, can act as weird as he wants, so long as he's doing good work—it would be easy to write the AU where this guy's a sysadmin, haha.)
He's also on the aloof side for a more practical reason—while all the other member of the expedition speak languages that are at least moderately-mutually-intelligible, Lalli only speaks Finnish, and thus can only speak with/through his trilingual cousin, Tuuri.
(The way the language stuff is handled is fantastic, by the way. Their speech bubbles are labeled with little flags, when understanding which language is being spoken matters, so you'll have delightful complicated scenes where everyone's struggling to understand the Dane, or Tuuri's fibbing a bit while translating for Lalli, and so on... it's a really fun and fluid way to handle it.)
And, ah, the tension between these two cousins is exquisite. Tuuri leapt at the expedition the first chance she got, having dreamt about this kind of adventure her whole life. Lalli was indifferent. Tuuri doesn't mean to use Lalli, but she kind of does; one gets the sense that she was chosen partially because she can bring a Finnish mage along. Lalli is difficult to read on that front—is he just a very passive get-along go-along guy in this way? or (what I personally think), does he know he's being used a bit, and just decides he's fine with it? Because, damn, that's the good messy narrative stuff. Sometimes someone uses you, someone you love very much, and you just decide it's fine. And you have to keep deciding, and keep deciding, until...
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE.
I figured Tuuri was doomed from the moment we're told that (1) she's not immune to the illness, and (2) she's the only one who speaks Lalli's language, because, like, c'mon, that's How To Set Up A Tragedy 101. And in a catharsis-y kind of way, I was really looking forward to seeing that play out—not out of any lack of love for Tuuri, but because it seemed like such a perfectly awful thing to happen to Lalli in particular. The way the death of someone close to you can sever your connection to others as well, reflected in such a painfully material way. The way you learn the difference between solitude and loneliness, once the person who made you feel not-lonely disappears—compounded with learning that in the loneliest place in the world, out in the middle of this silent world.
Those final pages of chapter 15 are the most transcendent in the entire comic. And while I'm a little disappointed Lalli's solitude wasn't more absolute (his insistence on staying with Tuuri's body until he could be sure her soul had passed on was perfect, but there's a plot contrivance that lets him communicate in natural language with Emil too quickly), I'm glad I read the comic for that bit alone.
SPOILERS END HERE.
The story's also in good form when it's focusing on smaller arcs and slight details. The first glimpse of Lalli's magic, a simple prayer for a moonlit night, is beautiful. And then there's the quiet sputtering of Lalli's luonto (animal spirit), after a different spell of his is spent. And there's a lovely mini-arc around chapters 7 and 8 which feature Lalli and Emil taking on a dog-beast, rich with wordless communication (because, of course, there can be no words between them).
Overall, though—these lovely parts aside, gorgeous art and ambitious worldbuilding aside—the thing overall doesn't quite hold together. It tries to mix slice-of-life charming-adventurer vibes alongside environmental-horror-and-postapocalypse vibes, with limited success—it reminded me a bit of Dark Lord of Derkholm in that respect, a book so tonally strange it put me off Diana Wynne Jones entirely for like a decade. And the characters, outside of Lalli and maybe Emil, aren't deep or textured enough to hold interest on their own. There's so much potential there, the pieces are all in place—which is probably why, skimming the top SSSS fanfics, I was immediately able to find a wonderfully vivid, dynamic character who was recognizable as Sigrun, but she was so much more interesting than anything we get from the Sigrun in the source material. It really makes you wish Sundberg had a beta reader or an editor, someone with an eye for writing—as-is, the story's often dropping revelatory details about characters at the last minute, throwing out inconsistent/contradictory details that make it hard to read their personalities, and generally having voices that sound a little too similar. But it's close! Gah, I can see why fanfic writers got hyped about this one.
And these inconsistencies pile up in the larger plot as well. I'm willing to let a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies slide, for the sake of a good time, but by the end of Adventure 1 I was scratching my head about how some of the setups—which I assumed would be big, deliberately-planned out things!—were fizzling in ways that didn't make sense. Initially, there's tremendous ambiguity about whether magery is even real or not; by the end of Adventure 1, we've seen so many flashy, obvious instances of magic that Sweden's staunch atheism starts to look like nonsensical flat-eartherness. Whether the adventure is meant to be seen as a suicide mission (and thus all these people are a little unhinged for wanting to go), or some very official and cool and cutting-edge thing (and thus these people got a great honor by getting picked to go), seems to flip-flop frequently. Stuff like that tends to dilute one's faith that the story knows where it's going.
Which—I don't mind a story that meanders; some of my favorite bits involved the really unconventional kind of pacing you can get in webcomic form, with a creator just following their whims. But there's a difference between meandering and walking in circles, and by the time I was a little ways into Adventure 2, I decided I'd probably seen all the best stuff and parted ways.
Lovely People
This is the first comic Sundberg published after her conversion to Christianity.
The whole Black-Mirror-does-a-social-credit-system thing is a fine enough concept for a comic, and the art's super-cute, but man does the execution ever not work here. The main problem is not the shoehorned Christian themes (though that is a problem; I was kind of lmao'ing at the elaborate Peter-denying-Christ speech coming from the mouth of some guy who had... allegedly read the entirety of the Bible... during the length of a single commute home...???), so much as the lack of psychological/sociological depth. We know that reading the Bible deducts points from your social credit score in this world. But the Bible may as well be a Macguffin; at no point do we see why or how it's a threat to the existing order. And it's not even clear what the existing order wants. Like, it's some kind of totalitarian government, sure, but what is it doing all this oppression for? "Crass consumerism" seems to be the comic's answer, and like, sure, but... why this method? how is dissent handled? how is stuff decided? It's just incoherent and shallow.
The one bit of the narrative that was resonant (this author seems to always manage at least one really nice bit in her stories) is Peony's utter loneliness at the end, when she's pushed all her friends away for the sake of keeping her precious status, and she's sitting in her home filled with very nice things, fires off a sadpost about how hard it is to go through a friend breakup—and a stampede of internet commenters come in to reassure her. Oh you're perfect. Oh it's their loss. They are all doing the perfectly "nice" thing, they are doing exactly what she expected they were, and it is exactly wrong. Not a new story, sure, but you really feel the horror of her alienation in that moment, the horror of always knowing exactly what people will say before they say it. One could imagine a story, a Christian story even, that grounds its power and interest in people's unpredictability and fallen nature. The social credit system enforces "niceness" at scale, with the result that society is perfectly pleasant for anyone who isn't marked as undesirable. And the denouement could be a resounding counterexample to that—a demonstration that any effort at such vast, inhuman engineering will pale compared to the genuine connection one gets from an authentic relationship with God, and by proxy, other humans, who, even with their foibles and cringe moments, their social-credit-killing vices, even with their very real sins, can do something no credit score can do: see you. In the real, no-kidding way that makes life worth living. Something like that could've worked, I think, beautiful in its own right and decidedly Evangelical in its themes.
(And, haha, now that I'm typing that out I'm actually kind of angry, because I'm realizing that not one of the people in the story with a shitty social credit score do anything that could be described as a real sin. They say mean things about the government, or else they read the Bible, and that's... literally it! What the hell! The problem with this dystopia should be that it has no place for mercy or forgiveness or sincere feeling, and Christianity at its best is a screeching rebuttal to that line of thinking: God loves even the most wretched among us; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, he that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone. But the problem, as presented, seems to suggest that the only problem is which specific items the credit system overlords choose to condemn. And man, fuck that entirely, religion or no.)
Alternatively, if Sundberg's committed to a new Christian direction for her comics, I think it'd be easy to play to her strengths. There's plenty of stories from the Bible that would be rendered beautifully in her art style, plenty touches of the mythic that she could evoke—do the 1956 Ten Commandments thing in comic form.
But, uh, that's not we got here, sigh. I'll admit the part of me that still feels some tenderness for my Baptist childhood was really curious to see how Sundberg tackled this brand new world of hers; there's nothing in sincere religious feeling that's fundamentally incompatible with good art and storytelling. But this is more in the spirit of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind, haha.
A Redtail's Dream
The premise: Due to Finnish Pantheon Shenanigans TM, wrought by one of said pantheon's youngest/naughtiest/trickster-iest members, a whole village and all of its people have been spirited into the dream world, with no way home. Our lil' trickster diety doesn't have the ability to intervene in the dream world himself (at least, not without tipping off the other gods/spirits about exactly what bullshit he's been getting up to), but luckily, a mortal dude (Hannu) and his dog (Ville) happened to be wandering just outside the village when the spiriting happened, and thus, trickster!diety press-gangs Hannu and Ville into traveling the dream world to save the villagers.
The art is gorgeous, and the primary reason I wanted to read. I'm also really into mythological shenanigans, but the handling of that rich source material is a little disappointing here. Finnish gods and mythic creatures are dropped into the narrative by name, but their powers/backstories/connections-to-the-world are rarely actually elaborated on, and usually only serve a role in a fetch quest sort of thing ("kill this monster so we can save these villagers," "catch this mythic fish so we can save these other villagers", etc).
There is however, a fantastically weird tension between Hannu and Ville—this part in particular is just exquisite. Hannu's been a bit of a selfish brat throughout the narrative, but here we see him reflecting on a childhood incident with a callousness that suggests something really quite twisted in him—and Ville, his loyal and faithful dog, is hearing about this all for the very first time (due to his dreamworld-capacity for speaking human language). Ville's obvious horror—and his fierce determination to never think of it again—is such a raw, awful thing, given the texture of their relationship and the power dynamic there. That theme is developed a little more, but not quite resolved, in a way that feels weird and uncomfortable but also... interesting? Is it's as if it borrowed some aspect of the weird, timeless, capricious cruelty of the gods that we see in some pagan myth, and put a sliver of it in Hannu—and just... let it sit. No particular judgment either way; Hannu is just this kind of guy and that's that.
I dug it. It helps that, while some of the narrative beats are meh, the ending really does come together in a satisfying way.
Stand Still, Stay Silent
The premise: Ninety years ago, a ghastly (and distinctly weird) pandemic swept the world. All mammals aside from cats were vulnerable, and those infected either died horribly or transformed into unsettlingly disfigured beasts and trolls. Iceland, with her cold winters and easily-defensible borders, was able to survive, and is now the largest and most populated country in the world. There's also small pockets of humanity surviving in Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden—either in small cities that have managed to secure themselves via strict quarantine procedures and vigilant border patrols, or else scattered tiny little archipelagoes throughout the lakes and the oceans—each settlement small enough it can be wiped away in a week by ill luck, but also isolated enough that ill luck won't afflict their neighbors.
All the rest of the world is—silent. No sign of human life in decades.
And thus a small, Louis-and-Clark-esque expedition is arranged, to venture out and see what remains.
It's a haunting, haunted world, and Sundberg draws it with haunting beauty. Her art has leveled up noticeably since A Redtail's Dream, and continues to level up over the course of the comic. I tend to read comics more for the writing and the vibes than the art, but I kept pausing on various pages to admire a beautiful landscape here, or a beautiful visual turn-of-phrase there.
The story attempts to have an ensemble cast, but really, Lalli is the story's beating heart. A talented mage and night-scout from rural Finland, Lalli has the stolid dutifulness of a military veteran (when it comes to his job), mixed with a strangely-tween-ish aloof/bratty streak (when it comes to any other interpersonal interactions), all overlaid with a sort of daydreamer-forgetfulness and general naivete. (A night-scout with his unique skills, after all, can act as weird as he wants, so long as he's doing good work—it would be easy to write the AU where this guy's a sysadmin, haha.)
He's also on the aloof side for a more practical reason—while all the other member of the expedition speak languages that are at least moderately-mutually-intelligible, Lalli only speaks Finnish, and thus can only speak with/through his trilingual cousin, Tuuri.
(The way the language stuff is handled is fantastic, by the way. Their speech bubbles are labeled with little flags, when understanding which language is being spoken matters, so you'll have delightful complicated scenes where everyone's struggling to understand the Dane, or Tuuri's fibbing a bit while translating for Lalli, and so on... it's a really fun and fluid way to handle it.)
And, ah, the tension between these two cousins is exquisite. Tuuri leapt at the expedition the first chance she got, having dreamt about this kind of adventure her whole life. Lalli was indifferent. Tuuri doesn't mean to use Lalli, but she kind of does; one gets the sense that she was chosen partially because she can bring a Finnish mage along. Lalli is difficult to read on that front—is he just a very passive get-along go-along guy in this way? or (what I personally think), does he know he's being used a bit, and just decides he's fine with it? Because, damn, that's the good messy narrative stuff. Sometimes someone uses you, someone you love very much, and you just decide it's fine. And you have to keep deciding, and keep deciding, until...
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE.
I figured Tuuri was doomed from the moment we're told that (1) she's not immune to the illness, and (2) she's the only one who speaks Lalli's language, because, like, c'mon, that's How To Set Up A Tragedy 101. And in a catharsis-y kind of way, I was really looking forward to seeing that play out—not out of any lack of love for Tuuri, but because it seemed like such a perfectly awful thing to happen to Lalli in particular. The way the death of someone close to you can sever your connection to others as well, reflected in such a painfully material way. The way you learn the difference between solitude and loneliness, once the person who made you feel not-lonely disappears—compounded with learning that in the loneliest place in the world, out in the middle of this silent world.
Those final pages of chapter 15 are the most transcendent in the entire comic. And while I'm a little disappointed Lalli's solitude wasn't more absolute (his insistence on staying with Tuuri's body until he could be sure her soul had passed on was perfect, but there's a plot contrivance that lets him communicate in natural language with Emil too quickly), I'm glad I read the comic for that bit alone.
SPOILERS END HERE.
The story's also in good form when it's focusing on smaller arcs and slight details. The first glimpse of Lalli's magic, a simple prayer for a moonlit night, is beautiful. And then there's the quiet sputtering of Lalli's luonto (animal spirit), after a different spell of his is spent. And there's a lovely mini-arc around chapters 7 and 8 which feature Lalli and Emil taking on a dog-beast, rich with wordless communication (because, of course, there can be no words between them).
Overall, though—these lovely parts aside, gorgeous art and ambitious worldbuilding aside—the thing overall doesn't quite hold together. It tries to mix slice-of-life charming-adventurer vibes alongside environmental-horror-and-postapocalypse vibes, with limited success—it reminded me a bit of Dark Lord of Derkholm in that respect, a book so tonally strange it put me off Diana Wynne Jones entirely for like a decade. And the characters, outside of Lalli and maybe Emil, aren't deep or textured enough to hold interest on their own. There's so much potential there, the pieces are all in place—which is probably why, skimming the top SSSS fanfics, I was immediately able to find a wonderfully vivid, dynamic character who was recognizable as Sigrun, but she was so much more interesting than anything we get from the Sigrun in the source material. It really makes you wish Sundberg had a beta reader or an editor, someone with an eye for writing—as-is, the story's often dropping revelatory details about characters at the last minute, throwing out inconsistent/contradictory details that make it hard to read their personalities, and generally having voices that sound a little too similar. But it's close! Gah, I can see why fanfic writers got hyped about this one.
And these inconsistencies pile up in the larger plot as well. I'm willing to let a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies slide, for the sake of a good time, but by the end of Adventure 1 I was scratching my head about how some of the setups—which I assumed would be big, deliberately-planned out things!—were fizzling in ways that didn't make sense. Initially, there's tremendous ambiguity about whether magery is even real or not; by the end of Adventure 1, we've seen so many flashy, obvious instances of magic that Sweden's staunch atheism starts to look like nonsensical flat-eartherness. Whether the adventure is meant to be seen as a suicide mission (and thus all these people are a little unhinged for wanting to go), or some very official and cool and cutting-edge thing (and thus these people got a great honor by getting picked to go), seems to flip-flop frequently. Stuff like that tends to dilute one's faith that the story knows where it's going.
Which—I don't mind a story that meanders; some of my favorite bits involved the really unconventional kind of pacing you can get in webcomic form, with a creator just following their whims. But there's a difference between meandering and walking in circles, and by the time I was a little ways into Adventure 2, I decided I'd probably seen all the best stuff and parted ways.
Lovely People
This is the first comic Sundberg published after her conversion to Christianity.
The whole Black-Mirror-does-a-social-credit-system thing is a fine enough concept for a comic, and the art's super-cute, but man does the execution ever not work here. The main problem is not the shoehorned Christian themes (though that is a problem; I was kind of lmao'ing at the elaborate Peter-denying-Christ speech coming from the mouth of some guy who had... allegedly read the entirety of the Bible... during the length of a single commute home...???), so much as the lack of psychological/sociological depth. We know that reading the Bible deducts points from your social credit score in this world. But the Bible may as well be a Macguffin; at no point do we see why or how it's a threat to the existing order. And it's not even clear what the existing order wants. Like, it's some kind of totalitarian government, sure, but what is it doing all this oppression for? "Crass consumerism" seems to be the comic's answer, and like, sure, but... why this method? how is dissent handled? how is stuff decided? It's just incoherent and shallow.
The one bit of the narrative that was resonant (this author seems to always manage at least one really nice bit in her stories) is Peony's utter loneliness at the end, when she's pushed all her friends away for the sake of keeping her precious status, and she's sitting in her home filled with very nice things, fires off a sadpost about how hard it is to go through a friend breakup—and a stampede of internet commenters come in to reassure her. Oh you're perfect. Oh it's their loss. They are all doing the perfectly "nice" thing, they are doing exactly what she expected they were, and it is exactly wrong. Not a new story, sure, but you really feel the horror of her alienation in that moment, the horror of always knowing exactly what people will say before they say it. One could imagine a story, a Christian story even, that grounds its power and interest in people's unpredictability and fallen nature. The social credit system enforces "niceness" at scale, with the result that society is perfectly pleasant for anyone who isn't marked as undesirable. And the denouement could be a resounding counterexample to that—a demonstration that any effort at such vast, inhuman engineering will pale compared to the genuine connection one gets from an authentic relationship with God, and by proxy, other humans, who, even with their foibles and cringe moments, their social-credit-killing vices, even with their very real sins, can do something no credit score can do: see you. In the real, no-kidding way that makes life worth living. Something like that could've worked, I think, beautiful in its own right and decidedly Evangelical in its themes.
(And, haha, now that I'm typing that out I'm actually kind of angry, because I'm realizing that not one of the people in the story with a shitty social credit score do anything that could be described as a real sin. They say mean things about the government, or else they read the Bible, and that's... literally it! What the hell! The problem with this dystopia should be that it has no place for mercy or forgiveness or sincere feeling, and Christianity at its best is a screeching rebuttal to that line of thinking: God loves even the most wretched among us; thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, he that is without sin among you let him first cast a stone. But the problem, as presented, seems to suggest that the only problem is which specific items the credit system overlords choose to condemn. And man, fuck that entirely, religion or no.)
Alternatively, if Sundberg's committed to a new Christian direction for her comics, I think it'd be easy to play to her strengths. There's plenty of stories from the Bible that would be rendered beautifully in her art style, plenty touches of the mythic that she could evoke—do the 1956 Ten Commandments thing in comic form.
But, uh, that's not we got here, sigh. I'll admit the part of me that still feels some tenderness for my Baptist childhood was really curious to see how Sundberg tackled this brand new world of hers; there's nothing in sincere religious feeling that's fundamentally incompatible with good art and storytelling. But this is more in the spirit of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind, haha.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-13 12:45 pm (UTC)I loved "A Red Tail's Dream". Nice art, interesting story - a boy and his dog! And demi gods at play.
SSSS was cool at first but sort of lagged at the end for me. I found the art was a bit inconsistent - beautiful landscapes, horrifyingly detailed monsters, then cartoonishly drawn people. And oh my god the Rash *things* - even the dead ones - nightmare fuel.
"Lovely People" - I mean, I get it: she's a fresh and bouncy convert but it reads like a Chick Tract with cute bunnies. Ugh. Pretty but I don't want to be preached to.
Honestly, I liked Red Tail the best. I should check to see if Minna will reprint some hard copies.
-m
no subject
Date: 2022-12-13 06:03 pm (UTC)