Okay, so, bit busy last week with Thanksgiving and all, but I’m not going to leave you guys hanging! I’m just cool like that. Today we’ve got another look into the wild world of random comics, but unlike my previous experiment where I looked at the land of DrunkDuck, this time I’ll be looking at the desolate wasteland known as Smackjeeves. It’s odd because they perform largely the same service, but somehow Smackjeeves’s reputation is even worse than the Duck’s. I think it’s because it’s just less well known, so people just assume that if they haven’t heard of it then it must be crap. Are these people right? Well, we’re about to look at an unbiased sampling of random comics and offer my extremely biased opinion on them. Yay?
To start with, Smack Jeeves doesn’t have a readily apparent “Random” section. Instead I’ll be reviewing from their “just updated” section.
In all honesty, this is probably a fairer assessment of the actual quality of the comics on the site than the “random” section on DrunkDuck. When the potential updates are completely random, there’s a high probability for one to find a “dead” comic. Seriously: not a damn one of the comics I reviewed about two months ago (two months!) has updated. It didn’t matter what my opinion of them was: the comics weren’t going anywhere. Most of them didn’t have even 10 pages. It’s like doing reviews for movies that came out a year and a half ago: it’s not old enough to be nostalgic, and not new enough to really be worth anyone’s time.
With that out of the way, let’s get to the comics!
Okay, seriously, what am I supposed to say about this that you’re not already thinking? I’m sitting here trying to make sense of this mess, but I kind of feel guilty about it. Like, should I even want to spend more time trying to figure out what the Hell this is supposed to be than the artist spent making it? I’m checking the page, but I don’t see any author comments or anything. All I know is that the page is titled “purple bg?”, as if the artist himself is unsure of what the Hell this is.
It’s not just a sprite comic: It’s a picture of the extremely few steps that go into making a sprite comic. Dude doesn’t even give us a tutorial for it! The author comments are just, “Basically thats how good it should be.” How good what should be? Is this an original character of yours? I need to get away from this; after that last one and now this bullcrap I’m just getting pissed off.
Whoah, there we go! Now, I’m not one for sparkly anime crap, but I’m not gonna hold that against this. Unfortunately this is just a cover, so there’s not much to say. At first I thought that was a tiny girl in front of a couple of huge, feminine dudes (and I’ve seen enough of this kind of art to know that those are dudes, even though they have substantially more feminine features than masculine). On closer inspection, though, I think it’s supposed to be a montage of close-ups, but the fact that they have the exact same shading and lighting as the girl makes them look a little too substantial. I need to move on to the next comic—her huge, alien-like eyes are starting to freak me out.
Okay, 4 non-comics in a row. At least the last one looked competently put together.
Goddamn, another one! Does anyone actually host comics on this site?? The banner for this comic even specifically states that the page is just being used as storage space for non-specific art. I had to double-check to make sure this was a comics hosting site.
Finally! Good god, you’d think with a place called “Smackjeeves Webcomic Hosting” you would find, I don’t know… maybe some comics!? Anyway, this one’s not bad. The full-body shots are a little awkward, but at least this dude is pushing himself out of his comfort zone. I like the shading where it’s used, but I am a little annoyed at the fact that this comic is apparently taking place on what I assume is a snow drift on a cloudless day. Also, big minus points for having a comic named Blood Blade with a main character (who is apparently a half-demon) named, literally, Zero Migumi. It’s like they’re going for some kind of lame anime cliché world record! Now let’s see if they can fit in a dude named “Shadow” and a half-dozen women falling desperately in love with the main character for no reason.
So, I went from a pile of non-comics, finally got myself an actual comic, and here I’ve got a non-update page. Yes, it’s the tried and true friend of the webcomic artist: the “I couldn’t think of an update” update. Is the author really known as “Ph”? Or is that another character? Whatever. It’s not really ugly, but I just don’t really care for the art. Kinda dull.
Ooh, a watermark! Hm… from the looks of things this is essentially a print comic that is also available online as a means of marketing for the print comic. No author’s comments or anything. Or backgrounds. The characters are drawn decently… what we can see of them anyway. It’s all headshots and close-ups on smoke. Not that it’s poorly drawn close-ups or anything, but there’s really not a lot for me to work with here. Overall it’s just a boring page, which would work fine in a print comic but really isn’t the kind of thing that’s going to get people coming back on a regular basis for a webcomic.
It’s just pictures of celebrities with “ironic” quotes underneath them. What can I say about that?
Big Brother Sonic: 7 Key Stories
Let’s be honest here. We saw the name of the comic, and we knew it was gonna be bad. First of all, it’s a sprite comic: that’s a tough hurdle to get over, and so far sprite comics have been batting a big fat “zero” every time I’ve looked at them. Second of all, it’s a Sonic sprite comic. More than that, it’s a Sonic sprite comic about a group of animals with fantastically stupid hair and I think it’s based on the “Big Brother” television show. Was it any surprise that the comic is zoomed in so much that everything is a garbled mess of pixels? (just as an FYI, the shrunken down preview posted here is a lot clearer than the full-page on the link). Was it any surprise that the text is not only needlessly color coded, but pretty much illegible since it’s essentially the exact same color of the character it’s floating over? Furthermore, wouldn’t you expect the facial expressions just to be hastily drawn over the sprite in MSPaint instead of altering the sprite to convey these emotions? As soon as I saw the name of this comic I knew exactly what it was going to be, and I was immensely disappointed that I was right on all counts.
I think we can all learn a lesson here: you can make a reportedly pokemon comic that isn’t a sprite comic and still create something terrible. Important lessons, I’m sure.
Nemution Jewel (potentially NSFW)
Hey, what’s all that stuff behind the characters? All those lines and colors and junk? Oh wait, that must be one of those backgrounds I keep hearing so much about! Wow, amazing how even a minimal background like this gives a definite sense of dimension and location to a comic page. Though I do wonder if the artist can draw full-bodies that aren’t cutesie anime blobs. It’s not terrible or anything, but it certainly seems a little flat, and it’s odd how much more detailed the shading on the hair is than everything else. Are they using the dodge and burn tools to color this? For shame.
Well, that was certainly… something. See you next week!
Shane “Inkmonkey” Woodis started making webcomics in 2003, and didn’t stop until he graduated from the Joe Kubert School in 2008. Since then he’s worked as a freelance artist, and as a moderator for the DrunkDuck website. He has also contributed to two of their print collections. His best known work is Elijah and Azuu, an action/comedy series that ran on DrunkDuck for 5 years and over 1300 pages. 
Benton Sartore on 
Merin on 
Evan Henry on 
Mouse on 
