Sore Thumbs

Chris Crosby is the founder and CEO of Keenspot Comics, one of the most successful business ventures in web comics today. He also lives in an abandoned school so… yeah. One thing he is not, however, is a writer. This fact does not stop him from writing multiple series, including the original Keenspot comic, Superosity (which he also draws, despite not being an artist). What we’re here to talk about today is Sore Thumbs, his Political/gaming manga that he produces with artist Owen Gieni. The comic largely flies under the radar by Keenspot standards, but deserves some note for being the web comic with what basically amounts to the largest opening weekend numbers ever. A large part of this is just the fact that Crosby owns Keenspot, guaranteeing early exposure for the series. But truthfully, the real answer for any of its popularity is also the answer to the following question: “What is the name of the television series produced by David Lynch that ran for two seasons, starting in April 8 of 1990 and ending on June 10, 1991?”

"Twin Peaks!"

That’s Cecania, and she’s basically the main character of the series. She also has no personality. None. Sure, she does things that people with personalities do, but hers is so inconsistent that there’s really no other way to describe her. The only thing that stays consistent is the fact that she’s a liberal… mostly. Whenever a gag can be made of it, she’s very liberal. Otherwise it never, ever comes up. Also, if you don’t see the banners for the comic, there is no way to know she has pink hair until 5 months into the comic.

Contrasting this is her brother Fairbanks. He’s a conservative. That’s it. That’s his entire character. He’s everything wrong with the Republican party, and he communicates through convenient HUGE WALLS OF TEXT. I couldn’t make a character with less actual character if I tried. Go ahead and read that page I linked to again. Now read it again for five years. That’s pretty much the exact same joke that this comic makes for 80% of the humor. Something of painfully forced wackiness occurs, Fairbanks says something stupid, and something equally contrived happens that reverts things back to the status quo. Also, he kills people from time to time and nothing of any importance ever occurs because of it.

Just to get an idea of how forced the writing is for this, let me give you the premise. Lady Titsalot comes home from college to live with her Mother in her lavish mansion, but her Mother is having none of that because she’s basically a female version of Fairbanks and doesn’t want a dirty liberal living in her house. She eventually agrees on the grounds that Boobarella work in her brother’s game store, Sore Thumbs. Oddly, Fairbanks actually hates video games, and in fact doesn’t play them. So why does he even have a game store? Because, Shut Up, that’s why!

Really, though, the reason he owns a game store is so that somehow, tangentially, Crosby can take advantage of the popular gamer demographic to market this comic to. Seriously, despite gladly advertising it as a gaming series, the gaming aspect largely amounts to name dropping a few games from time to time with no actual commentary on the games themselves. (Also, the fact that she’s good at video games never has any impact on the plot… ever.) In fact, the comic goes pretty much a full year before they do much more than mention the name of a game offhand to justify the “gamer” description for the comic, largely because Crosby knows that no one on the internet wants to read a political comic. It does confuse things a bit that it’s not much of a political comic either. So why does it exist? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

Whatever. So, Cecania (no, I don’t know how to pronounce it) starts working with Fairbanks when her old friend Harmony shows up! How long have they known each other? What do they like to do together? … Shut Up, that’s what. Harmony doesn’t serve any real purpose to the plot other than to be delightfully ditzy on a regular basis (as opposed to Jugzilla, who is only delightfully ditzy when Crosby wants to make a joke about it). But wait, there’s a twist! It turns out Harmony is actually a genius! A prodigy doctor, in fact! This has absolutely no bearing on anything and is pretty much completely forgotten for the rest of the series. There’s a brief bit of story very early on implying that she does things like memorize the dictionary, but Crosby couldn’t think of any good jokes to do while keeping that plot element consistent so it was basically dropped. Also, she’s asked to marry Fairbanks in an extremely round-about (and ultimately pointless) attempt to control the store, which somehow leads to her falling in love with him. Don’t worry, because nothing ever comes of it (that phrase will be coming up a lot, in case you didn’t notice by now). It’s never entirely clear whether or not they’re dating, even as she briefly proposes to him. Also, it never matters in the long run because he dumps her for someone he’s known for even less time and she instantly (as in, the next comic) falls in love with someone she barely meets and is a lesbian for the rest of the strip. Nothing changes in any significant way as a result of these relationships.

Hooterclause, for her part, falls in love with Sawyer, an Iraq war vet who lost his penis in the stupidest way imaginable. Of all the regular cast, he’s the least implausibly insane. They go great together, because he doesn’t really have a personality either, though in his defense what personality he does have is more consistent than Boob-o-tron’s. Basically he’s Crosby’s idea of a good conservative, in that he quietly believes in the church and family values and never at all questions any of Cecania’s liberal nonsense. Also, as some kind of parting gift for the war he was given a trained midget polar bear named Coleman. I hate Coleman. He serves no purpose whatsoever, aside from being extremely lame merchandising potential (he even kinda looks like The Merch from Penny Arcade), and as an extremely violent Deus Ex Machina used to get the gang out of trouble from time to time. Anyway, Sawyer works as a videogame distributor, an occupation Crosby put absolutely no effort into researching because he seems to think it involves standing behind in a desk in an empty room and trying to convince people to buy a bulk supply of videogames he already owns. Somehow this leads to him getting hired at Sore Thumbs, where he starts up a relationship with Titty-Jean. By the way, they’ve known each other for about a day when that strip happens. They also live together (All the employees of Sore Thumbs live in the same mansion, a fact that is just as stupid as it is never, ever addressed). Their whole relationship only seems to exist when they’re either cheating on each other, breaking up, or getting back together. They don’t treat each other any differently between these events no matter what state their relationship is in. They both have a number of other relationships outside of each other, but they all fall apart for essentially no reason. Most of the time it feels like Crosby just forgot that they were dating anyone other than each other and tried to quickly brush these other (often healthier) relationships under the rug so they could get back to the ever-sacred status quo.

More stupid crap goes on for a long, long time. There are other characters, but they’re even more one-note and pointless than everyone else. The worst is probably this Rondel guy, who has never done anything funny or entertaining in the entire comic. They try to make him important to the plot at various points, but it always, always feels painfully unnatural. He owns a rival game store, a plot point that is quickly forgotten, and he ends up just hanging out with the other characters for absolutely no reason. Seriously, why do they tolerate this guy? He starts out simply cocky and annoying, but to make him seem more villainous than the racist, misogynist Fairbanks they just try to make him gross. He ends up kinda dating Cecania’s rival (largely just as an excuse for the two of them to regularly appear together), who is just as one-note and pointlessly evil as he is. They just get more and more evil as the series progresses for one simple reason: the longer the series goes, the easier it gets to hate all the regular characters. Fairbanks just keeps being the least interesting character ever created. Harmony’s only consistent character trait is that she’s stupid. Sawyer spends all his time with that fucking bear. CeeCee Luvins’ hotness becomes so exaggerated that you can’t help but notice every single flaw in her character design, from her grotesque hands to the fact that her eyes apparently don’t have whites. Also, she’s kind of a slut, (she was actually officially dating Sawyer while working as a prostitute, by the way) which is in such stark contrast to her regular behavior that they tried to say that she was drugged into doing it.

That’s another thing you’ll notice about the comic: Crosby is constantly trying to undo his bad ideas. For example, he hilaaaaariously decides to introduce a sentient game console. Why, what a delightfully trite and cliché concept! After getting a total of zero decent jokes from the premise, the Xbox is unceremoniously killed and never mentioned again. This goes on and on, though more commonly he just points out the stupidity of his comic, as though that excuses him from it. When not doing that he’s either taking indirect jabs at people who criticize the comic’s shortcomings (fyi: The comic does go immediately back to its status quo shortly after that comic), or just stroking his own ego. You can talk about how great you are satirically all you want, Chris, you’re still talking about how great you are. It’s like those guys who are trying to get their girlfriend into a threesome. The whole, “Haha, yeah, that girl is kinda cute. Oh man, it would totally freak out your best friend if I got a picture of you two making out. Haha, I’m only joking… unless you want to, I mean.”

The comics I’ve linked to throughout this don’t really do justice to how bad this comic is. The truth is, when I thought to do a review of this comic I was surprised that it was a lot more enjoyable than I’d remembered it being. That feeling lasted about 30 pages. The comic has this thing about, even when there isn’t a joke, people have a humorous way of wording what they’re saying. It’s similar to Scary Go Round in that regard. It’s very deceptive because it can make the comic seem quite enjoyable in small enough doses. The difference is Scary Go Round uses this to add color to their world and flesh out the quirkiness of some of the characters: Sore Thumbs just uses this as padding to distract you from the fact that nothing ever happens. They rely on it too heavily, turning what could be a page of interest into a dull wall of text. Even worse, they take what could be not just a joke, but a damn good joke, and entirely ruin it by the fact that the characters just won’t fucking shut up! It’s called a sight gag, Crosby, look it up!

Also, in case you were somehow growing attached to any of the characters despite all this, the creators decided to create this whole sub-series about how nothing that happens in the comic is real and all the characters are just actors on a TV show. A common complaint about breaking the fourth wall in a comic is the fact that it brings the reader out of the book: it reminds them that everything that happens is fictional and that nothing in it matters. You’ll notice that a LOT of good comics online have made fourth wall jokes, and either they take it the whole nine yards and make that the point of the comic, or they stop. It’s a cheap writing trick, and often the sign of an inexperienced author.

Maybe my criticisms aren’t very clear, but I can tell you in all honesty that it was a chore to get through this comic. Every Christmas cheesecake pic was a badge of honor knowing I’d survived an entire year’s worth of this mediocrity. Seriously, this comic is stunningly average. It is ridiculously par. It is the absolute, most blatantly, mind numbingly, world-shatteringly bland comic I’ve read in years. The overwhelming level of “Meh” this series exudes is only exceeded by just how insane it is. There is always something just painfully ridiculous happening, and I’m just stunned… shocked at how seeing these characters deal with it is about as exciting as reading The Family Circle. How did they manage that? It boggles the mind! Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Dr. McNinja: I’d forgotten that the bizarre is not inherently entertaining. It actually needs good writing to back it up.

Still, there’s hope. Crosby started off by pretending to kill Sawyer (to the surprise of no one, he’s actually alive). This gets the whole cast to fly to Iraq to save him, where they confront Osama Bin Laden. It’s at this point that things get boringly insane. Osama turns out to be a demon, a one-note character who happens to be nigh omnipotent (yet entirely not interesting enough to have bothered mentioning up to this point) turns out to be his son. Also, Osama is a giant demon for no reason. Then they systematically kill off each of the main characters, which somehow manages to not provide any drama or tension whatsoever. I think it’s because there hasn’t been more than a passing excuse to be emotionally attached to any of them, and the suddenness of all their deaths one right after the other tells you that something’s going to happen to undo the whole thing. That “something”, in this case, is the remaining characters shoving a WMD up giant Osama’s ass. Yes, that happens. Because this series is oh so wacky, that blows up the planet, and also somehow reconstructs it into a hopefully better comic.

The potential is there: if you just add a few actual dimensions to the characters you could go somewhere. This has only just happened, so there’s not enough content to know whether or not things have actually improved. Still, I take some comfort after suffering through this mess that Crosby must have taken a look at what he’d done, realized it was pretty bad, and just said fuck it and restarted the whole thing (albeit in the absolute most retarded way possible). Already the characters’ back stories are getting more than a passing comment, which actually does a lot to improve on their painfully one-dimensional nature, even in the extremely brief time they appear. Make a good comic, Mr. Crosby. Prove me wrong and be a writer, not just some jackass who puts words on paper.