Reboot Remix

Back in August I did my first review of Owen Gieni and Chris Crosby’s Sore Thumbs, a political/gaming comic that was nearly literally painful to read. Not long after that I reviewed Chugworth Academy by Dave Cheung and some other guy. The comics had a lot of similarities, one of the odder of which is that both series’ “rebooted” around the time that I reviewed them. While the Sore Thumbs comic destroyed and reconstructed the comic’s universe, Chugworth simply skipped the story forward and moved the archives to a separate part of the site. They’ve both gone through drastic changes in presentation, but did the decision to start clean really improve either one?

We’ll start with Sore Thumbs, which had rebooted shortly before my original review went up. As you may recall, a thermonuclear warhead had just been shoved into a giant, demonic Osama Bin Laden’s ass, resulting in the destruction of reality as we know it. Yes, really. This leads directly to a filler page, where Crosby correctly describes “scrapping the entire plot up to this point” as “fixing”. And suddenly we’re back and—whoah, WTF COLOR!? And Boobula’s time at “horror movie host college” has been retconned to the infinitely more plausible, “Just hosting horror movies on basic cable”? Fairbanks, who flip-flops between annoying and boring, is about to kill himself? Even the writing seems to have cut back on the painfully forced “wacky” dialogue in favor of realistic dialogue that still manages to fit in a few jokes. And this is just the first page after the reboot, and it’s already easily the best page in the whole series! Granted that’s a bit like being the best potato chip in a pile of leaves, but it’s something.

Things, for the most part, get better from there. Harmony’s largely ignored backstory of being a prodigy Doctor is expanded into her actually being a doctor. It certainly makes her bizarre personality more entertaining when you see it in the context of the largely serious field of medical procedures. When she was just another employee in a store staffed entirely by the insane her chipper yet selfish demeanor had no edge to it. That’s not to say that she’s not still annoying, but at least now she exists as something other than “Tits Mcgee’s stupid friend”. She even manages to be funny (or at the very least tolerable) from time to time without just outright changing her character, which is quite impressive seeing as she was only marginally more tolerable than Fairbanks before the reboot.

Speaking of Fairbanks, he manages to survive despite his best efforts. He’s still largely unchanged, with his annoying walls of text and largely one-dimensional personality, but at least now he spends less time ranting mindlessly about Crosby’s version of Right-Wing bullshit in a pathetic attempt to justify the comic’s “political” description. Now the focus seems to be on his hatred of… oh goddammit. It’s Rondel. Of all the characters from the original series, he was easily, easily the least entertaining. His jokes were always the most forced (even more so than Fairbanks’), his plots the most pointless, his character design the dullest. He is the one character who most desperately needed to be dropped from the series, and he’s back. And he’s the one who hasn’t changed at all. He’s still just as predictable, boring, and one note as ever. In fact he seems to actually have a bigger part in the comic now. On the plus side, he does end up delivering what is essentially a big Fuck You from Chris Crosby to his own retarded plot. So in a way I guess even he gets some redeeming qualities.

That aside, the writing is better, the art is better, the plot is better. Granted you don’t need much to make a better comic than the original Sore Thumbs, but this is substantially better. If it wasn’t for Rondel and that fucking bear, I’d say this hasn’t just stopped being mediocre: it would be good. The coloring almost looks like a goddamn painting sometimes. There’s more subtle nuances at work as well, with the art seeming more to embrace its own style, as opposed to simply aping the Manga style. I mean, it’s not perfect: the sloppy backgrounds look much better in color, but Owen’s unwillingness to represent inorganic objects as anything other than a blob of color really falls apart when there’s no figures in a panel to contrast with. Also, judging by how Hooty McHooterstein has such viciously exaggerated sexual features, I can’t help but think that Gieni must have some kind of boner for women with no whites to their eyes. Though he does draw a lot of the male characters with just pupils in their face, so maybe it’s just force of habit. You can really see what kind of problems this sort of thing can cause when he’s tasked with making one of the characters roll their eyes.

Still, I’m goddamn impressed. I still don’t necessary like the comic, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are a lot of perfectly fine things out there that I don’t, personally, like. For example: I don’t like Grand Theft Auto. The gameplay just doesn’t appeal to me. I wouldn’t at all suggest that the games are bad just because it’s not a game that I enjoy. Sore Thumbs still has a lot of things to dislike, but there’s a lot more to like from it now than there was before.

Well, this has been a refreshing change of pace. I managed to read a comic last week that was good enough that I had substantially more trouble writing the article than getting through the archives, and this week I get to see some of the things I specifically complained about addressed in a comic that I hated. Not that I think he actually read my review: from what I saw when looking up info on the comic everyone had basically the same complaints I did. Except not quite as many people seemed to hate Coleman (the fucking bear) as much as I did…

Let’s see how “Chugworth!” can ruin this feeling. And yes, it is just “Chugworth!” now (with the exclamation point); I’m guessing Cheung realized that the actual “Academy” has about as much bearing on the plot as… well, there really wasn’t a plot in the first place, actually. Anyway, the fact that it was set at a High School didn’t serve any purpose other than to cater to Cheung’s ephebophilia. So, the comic has dropped the Academy pretense and jumped ahead about 6 months since the last update to Chugworth Academy, which is a little odd because Academy just kind of stopped abruptly in the middle of a story arc. We rejoin the new Chugworth! and find main character Sally in the middle of a tennis match and… wait, they actually show the match this time? Sally’s supposed skill at the sport is actually demonstrated instead of just being implied? This thing is looking quite a bit bett—oh wait, never mind: they still try to treat Chloe being loud like it’s a punchline. Goddammit, Cheung…

Well, we move on to the next page and we’re right back to the actual goal of the comic: showing 16 year olds taking their clothes off. And also, Chloe is stupid. That’s the joke. The background looks nicer than before… so, yay? Okay, eff this noise, NEXT PAGE! Well, this page is pretty harmless. Chloe is still being dumb, but not obnoxiously so. They immediately start talking about stuff that really only makes sense if you’ve read the archives, kind of defeating the purpose of the whole “reboot” thing. Whatever. The next page just catches us up with Sally’s boyfriend and has a pretty decent joke. Boyfriend dude’s line is a lot funnier with that serious look on his face: usually he’s just “oh so wacky”, which kind of took away from the impact of anything he did. The comic ends with Sally convincing Chloe to join her in a game of “Dragon Rod Riders”, which is basically just Dungeons and Dragons except the name is a really lazy cock joke. The wannabe gangsta white boy that got abducted by a group of pedophiles is back now, even though Academy ended in the middle of a story arc specifically about rescuing him. …and that’s it. The comic only has those five pages. The art is improved, largely because it seems to take a few notes from that story arc in Academy where he deliberately copied the Ultimate Marvel style. The characters’ annoying points haven’t been addressed at all, and ultimately the only difference between “Chugworth!” and “Chugworth Academy” is that Chugworth! isn’t in 4-panel comic strip format.

So there you have it: even though Sore Thumbs didn’t really change the personalities of the characters, by presenting them in a more creative and believable environment they’ve become much more tolerable, and perhaps even likeable. I think it’s safe to say that every aspect of Sore Thumbs has improved. Then you have Chugworth!, which is basically just more of the same except now with bigger pages. Oh well, at least it was short this time.