Black poison blues: Spoiled

I have many habits, smoking, drinking and swearing at cats in Hebrew are amongst them, within the context of this blog my worst habit is reviewing strips that have barely started. Spoiled by Luz is only four strips young but I think it has some clear potential. It's a surrealist trip into modern city life. It feels like a very personal exploration of what it means to be human and poetry seems to interweave amidst the words. There's a political motive behind the strip but it hasn't sufficiently emerged as yet. The linework is crisp against a beige monotone and the narrative looks as if it might develop into something quite interesting.

Blurred Vision: Apophenia 357

Ghastly's Ghastly Comic was the never the most subtle of strips but within its genre (tentacle-pleasure-fiends leering at women) it had a certain cachet. His newer strip Apophenia 357 might have the name of a noxious disease but it is instead an invigorating addition to the plethora of webcomics now current . This is a strip that forces you to think, to make the connections and symmetries where none seem to exist.

In the introduction Ghastly gives the reader a background to the distortion he is created:

Apophenia is the condition where one draws connections between things which are, in reality, unconnected. Conspiracy and End Days theorists often suffer from Apophenia and it is also a common symptom of schiziophrenia. It is also often the way we learn about and interpret new things.

This is a lot darker than Ghastly's previous efforts and the reader interaction recreates webcomics as a possible community as opposed to the author as veritable God for geek-bot fan boys. The reader is forced to create sense out of the strip, Ghastly also states that the narrative of the strips are not determined by him, he is a vehicle for our desires. The artwork is fairly childish and sketchy but the concept behind this strip saves it from being mere chaos. It resembles a series of rebus, symbols forced together, while it's not something you can read and switch your brain off it is an interesting and worthy addition to the web.