Episode Fun

Okay, so… Episode Fun. This one’s another request by Jim “Merin” Yoho, who is also the author of the comic. Also, kinda sorta the guy who runs this site and is pretty much the only person who consistently comments on my articles. But, dude doesn’t pay me anything, so I guess I can rip into the comic in my usual vitriolic style.

Right, so, Jim’s a man who likes Star Wars. Then, after the series was completed, there were years of spinoff novels, video games, cartoons, whatever, and I’m gonna go ahead and assume he liked some of them. At the very least he must have liked the Shadows of the Empire game: that shit was off the chain. Anyway, years go by and Star Wars is still Star Wars, but then something happens! I’m… not really sure what. That strip by itself doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. I mean, I assume it has something to do with George Lucas intending to make the Star Wars prequels, but we’re not really given any context. Just, BAM, out of nowhere Star Wars quote. But anyway, the point is Lucas makes himself a new set of movies, and they’re not as good as the last set of movies he did, and that makes Jim unhappy. So he gets his friend Susan to do some art (of, uh… varying quality) and Episode Fun is born!

Unlike my earlier recommendation of Darths & Droids, EF isn’t so much about Star Wars as it is about the actors and such involved. It’s certainly different, but there’s something extremely awkward about the way he puts words into peoples’ mouths. I mean, I know that Hayden Christensen would probably agree, but that’s mostly because I think he’s pretty bitter about people constantly making fun of his acting. Seriously, that role seems to be outright cursed. Jake Lloyd regrets ever having done the movie, Christensen refuses to talk about it, and David Prowse is two steps away from beating the Hell out of Lucas himself (also Christensen, who insisted on playing Vader in-costume for Revenge, instead of letting Prowse do it). The only ones who seem not to be bothered by the whole thing are James Earl Jones (but then again, nothing can harm JEJ) and Sebastian Shaw. Though I’m not sure how he would have felt (he’s dead, fyi) about being edited out of the DVD versions of the films…

Anyway, the comic is basically Jim whining about the movies. He seems to see some irony in how fans of the new movies portray their opponents as basement-dwelling losers, even as he himself portrays his opponents as basement-dwelling losers. Is that the actual joke? That he himself is a hypocritical fanboy? This is either extremely meta or just not very well thought out. In general the jokes tend to fall pretty flat, either way. Seriously, what was the joke there? The only change between panels was the gold bikini Leia at the end. Was that the punchline? Geekdom is strong enough to get women to dress like that? It’s not really much of a joke, if it’s even meant to be a joke. Maybe it’s just a commentary on how the fandom is made up of people other than overweight nerds. The funniest ones are when he makes actual commentary on the fallacies of the films themselves, instead of just generic “this movie is bad” rambling. Though I’m not really sure what to make of this one: I’m assuming it’s some kind of commentary on a problem Jim has with the movie, but what? Does he think she has a tendency to pass out? Is it a joke about how pointlessly elaborate Queen Amidala’s outfits are?

I think a big part of the problems with the series stem from the art. Don’t get me wrong, Susan’s a reasonably competent artist, but her style just isn’t expressive enough to carry a humor-based comic strip. It actually makes me think of the diagrams for those little safety booklets that tell you how to get out of an airplane if it crashes, except it’s about how to hit women with lightsabers. At least, I think he hit her. There are the little “pow” bursts coming off of her head, but she’s not reacting at all. It doesn’t help that the comic seriously abuses cut n’ paste at times. That one’s the worst example I can find, where a previous shot of George Lucas is pasted into the scene, but the shot is for him at a 45 degree angle and the image that was pasted in has him from a straight-on shot. Susan solves this problem by skewing the shot of George in Photoshop, making him look like a bizarre cardboard cutout. It doesn’t help that he’s saying, “Who’s Fake?” at the time, which almost makes me think the whole thing was done on purpose, since the effect makes him look extremely fake at the time. That doesn’t really change the fact that the actual joke is still pretty weak, with one character literally shouting “aiieeeee!!” at JarJar showing up. That’s the punchline. I guess I don’t really blame him, though: JarJar looks goddamn terrifying in this comic. Seriously, I didn’t think JarJar could have an “I’m gonna rape you” face, yet here we are. But anyway, the art: stiff, lifeless. Also, when trying to show off how attractive Hayden Christensen is Susan ends up making him look like a drag queen. Just putting that out there.

The worst part of the comic comes in the form of a brief sequence where Jim makes fun of the low opening weekend sales for Attack of the Clones. Seriously, Jim, why are you so goddamn smug about this? He has several more, dedicating basically a month’s worth of updates to just saying, “Hey, not as many people liked this as liked these other things. Take THAT Lucas!” Yeah, Jim, you sure showed him. I mean, he’s got your money from when you saw the films, but not as much as those other guys! He must be crying himself to sleep at night.

I thought things had picked up with one clever strip, where Lucas is singing Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The song is presented without change, and the joke is in the audience member stealing the “defy imagination” line since, well… some of that shit did defy explanation. He screws it up a bit by having two other audience members explaining the joke in the last panel, but whatever. Still, it reminded me of one of my favorite movies, and it’s a clever play on words. Perfect! Except… it leads into this bizarre sequence where Jim does a series of musical references. These are substantially less clever, and don’t really use the original song to provide any kind of commentary on the nature of the prequels. It’s just an excuse to talk about Star Wars stuff in rhyme. It also doesn’t help that Comics are just a piss-poor place to do anything music-related. It’s a visual medium, and it really takes you out of it when you have to look at something, think about what song it’s supposed to sound like, then “sing” along in your head so you get the cadence right. It was a cute idea at first, but the fact that he just kept doing it right up to the end of the comic just becomes an annoyance.

In general the whole comic just comes off as shallow complaints from an obsessive fanboy. It’s bizarre to see the actual actors being used as Jim’s mouth pieces. These are real people, who I’m sure have real opinions on the quality of the films, but he portrays them as either ridiculously angry or just short of killing themselves for even being involved with these movies. Rather than say anything about Lucas himself he’s just portrayed as a blithering idiot constantly wearing a space helmet. Yeah, real mature. Seriously, what’s the point of this whole exercise? Pretty much the entire series can be summed up as, “Jim Yoho doesn’t like the prequels”. I got that three strips in. Everything beyond that was just meandering nonsense. It’s not a premise that you can build an entire comic strip off of.

Also, JarJar is watching you