Supernormal Step

Supernormal Step is a unique little comic by Michael Lunsford. It’s a newer comic, but it shows a lot of promise, and I trust Mike to keep up with his update schedule long enough for this review to still be relevant in a year’s time. I do this because I actually know Mike personally. That might color my opinion a bit for this review, but I figured it’s best to mention it now so it doesn’t look like I’m hiding anything. That said, I like the comic. Mike has a wonderfully infectious art style that just makes you want to see more. More than that, though, is his unique ability to embrace wanton wackiness without feeling like the whole thing is pointlessly random in a desperate attempt to appear funny. There’s also a focus on action, but it doesn’t impress to the same degree as the humor. While reading through the archives I found a few pages in particular where the action really disappointed: the fight was largely vague shapes, minimalist backgrounds, and a lot of close-ups. The first of the two in particular gives no indication of where the characters were in relation to each other. Then suddenly, BAM! Better art style! What happened? Well, Mike decided to cut an update day out of his schedule so he can make sure his art is better. I can admire this: too many webcomic authors are content to just rest on the successes they’ve already had, never improving, never changing.

But enough of that, let’s talk about the comic. The comic largely follows Fiona, a blue-haired girl who is, frankly, kind of boring. It’s kind of a fish out of water story, with her as an alien in a different reality. This fact that she’s from another reality isn’t particularly well established early on, though, so when she’s interrogated about it the scene is treated with a lot of tension, although it’s likely the reader might not even know why. Anyway, as part of this her important character feature is that she’s normal: she doesn’t have the same weird quirks that seem to absorb other characters’ personalities. On the one hand this makes her a nice sort of “reference point” for the reader—a way to interact with the unusual world she’s entered, but on the other hand she feels kind of blank compared to everyone around her.

We eventually learn that Fiona’s travelling with some companions; the first we meet is Jim. He’s an arrogant jerk, and he also turns into a bunny. It’s established that he’s a very skilled fighter, but not in bunny form. So far there are a lot of unanswered questions about him. Largely: What’s up with the whole bunny thing? Now, I know what the deal is (since I know Mike personally, and we’ve talked about it), but within the context of the story all we see is that after he turns into a bunny doing a good deed turns him back. He mentions a curse, but it’s not really elaborated upon. This is all part of an odd double-edged sword Mike is playing with: on the one hand the comic isn’t slowing down with awkward exposition and long rants about character, history, but on the other hand things can get pretty confusing sometimes.

Speaking of which, we have Van, who we know even less about than Jim. He’s another of Fiona’s companions, and something of a smooth talker. This also brings up another aspect of the comic I like: Mike’s ability to draw attractive women without relying on blatant fanservice to remind us which of the characters are supposed to be “hot”. Van’s a magic user with tattoos. That’s… that’s about it. He’s a bit more responsible than Jim, but considering Jim’s character that’s not really saying much. Still, he’s certainly charismatic, even from a viewer’s perspective. At the end of the day, he’s pretty much the brains of the outfit, and it’s nice to see the polite knowledgeable guy having some kind of personality beyond just wearing glasses and reading books.

That’s basically your main trio, though there are plenty of other recurring characters to keep things interesting. The two that appear most frequently are Hall and Eva, a pair of siblings working for Henderson Security. Henderson is another thing that we don’t really know anything about: we know that they work as some kind of police force for this world, but beyond that there’s very little revealed. Anyway, Hall and Eva are partially impervious to pain and have some kind of healing factor. Again, it’s not really elaborated upon. Beyond that they have deliberately dissonant personalities, with Eva brash and loud, while Hall appears more calm and “together” (also, he can either teleport or turn invisible, otherwise I have no idea how they didn’t notice him nearby in this fight). Oddly, their employer seems to trust Eva more. Aside from them, though, my favorite antagonist is Beatle, of the office of the one and once more the good Mr. Kite. He’s only shown up twice so far, but between his design and his way of talking there’s just something that makes you want to see more of him.

All in all the comic is good to read all at once, but it’s pretty slow-paced for a twice-weekly series. The comic is at a little over 50 updates now, and I still know very little of what’s going on. In general it reads really well if you just sit down and read the whole archives, but the wait between them isn’t conducive to the writing style. To give you some perspective, at two updates a week you’re looking at 104 updates a year: at the time of writing this there are already 52 pages (half a year’s worth of updates). Mike’s really dedicated to his plan to not sit the audience down and just explain things to them all at once, which is too bad because when he does decide to exposit it still manages to be quite entertaining. I feel like by now I should know a little bit more about the characters and what they’re doing. So far we know more about the world they inhabit, which is humorously similar to our own… except, y’know… hoverbikes! Conversely, all we know about Fiona is that she’s an alien, she clams up when she’s talking about home, and she has a close, personal friend she doesn’t travel with but knows all about her and who never shows up again. I don’t want to say that Mike’s forgotten about her, but it certainly looks like he did. Still, you can’t fault his character design (though that Irish accent is so thick she might as well be speaking gibberish for the way it slows down the page as one struggles to interpret what she’s saying).

There’s a lot to enjoy in Supernormal Step, but it suffers from the medium it’s in. It would be great as a comic book, flipping through a solid 26 pages at a time, checking back to see how running gags tie together, that sort of thing. It feels like a print book: for better or worse. It’s a common problem in story-heavy webcomics with complex art that it’s simply hard to keep the story moving at a healthy pace without rushing things. It’s a slippery slope trying to balance the issues of time and reader attention spans. But what the series does right, it does very right, so that makes the slow pace easy to forgive.