Our regular readers likely noticed that last week was a bit of a departure for La Casa. There weren’t any jokes. Even visually, nothing was meant to be funny. Heck, there wasn’t even any dialogue. We’ve mentioned before that the comic is a bit of an experiment for us, and last week was a test in dramatic build-up and creating tension. In that sense, it worked pretty well. I think we could have done it better, but I don’t know when I’ve ever done anything and not thought later that it could have been better. So that’s a good thing, I think.

In whatever aspects last week worked or didn’t work, this week we’re back to trying to be funny. Tim really has started swimming a lot, over in Vermont, and has competed in a couple heats and everything. As for the cowboy thing, I submit that I did, in fact, grow up in the country, and that often when I was at the rodeo I was envious of the cowboys and their buckin’ bronco mystique. I was even jealous of the kids who got to mutton-bust. It was something my dad said he was going to sign me up for every year, but never happened and eventually it was too late (they just don’t make sheep that big). At this point in my life, I’m ready to thank my dad for never signing me up, but at the time I felt like I was missing my life’s calling to ride sheep in front of a throng of screaming fans.

Nowadays, a cowboy in a comic demands a Brokeback Mountain quip, and will often include the phrase “I wish I could quit you.” I haven’t seen the movie (just haven’t had time yet), but even so I have that line memorized through entirely tertiary channels. I managed to avoid the phrasal cliche, so far, though I felt obligated to make a Brokeback comment, if only because that’s the sort of thing I would really say were I to find myself in a similar situation in real life.

In webcomics related news (sort of), the NYTimes has an interesting article about Dov Charney. Dov created and runs the company American Apparel, which has nothing to do with webcomics unless you read Overcompensating obsessively (and who doesn’t), and realize that American Apparel is the target of this comic.

Fleen recently put out a call for new writers. Among their qualification requirements was to post daily and not be a webcomics creator. Posting daily is a sensible request, I suppose, but I have no idea why they would discriminate against webcomic creators. So long as a guy doesn’t go writing about his own comic, ever, it just seems like it would be a non-issue. Not only that, but it seems like everyone who really cares about webcomics can’t help but try to create one. Eric Burns of Websnark remains my favorite webcomics writer and maintains two webcomics (GC and BGJS) . He even writes about them sometimes, and honestly, that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. In offering a job that requires daily posting and no compensation except being a famous Fleen writer (oooooh) and about $5 a year (if you’re lucky), it seems as though being overly selective is a little ridiculous. But then, it is Fleen. Somehow, they’ve become a regular part of the “webcomics community”, and I read them, but they as yet have not won me over.

In any case, the first submitted post is up for perusal and criticism. Rather than writing for Fleen, which I might have considered had I been allowed to apply, perhaps I’ll just write about Fleen. Just think, I could start a new sub-genre of webcomics review review. It’s a phenomenon that already happens plenty, so I don’t see why we couldn’t just make it a cottage industry unto itself. But I digress. The first submission is paltry at best, and in some places nonsensical. From the word go I’m completely uninterested. Garage doors and Monk? Way to use personal experience, I suppose, but I could really care less. Mr. #1 goes on to talk about a comic called Killer Robots from Outer Space. He gets points for writing about a webcomic I’d never heard of before (even if I find a new comic on a near-daily basis that’s semi-decent). Still, I have absolutely no idea what he’s saying about the comic. Somehow, I think, it has to do with garage doors. Garage doors in outer space, perhaps? Maybe he’s a mole for Nasa’s new “Send Suburbia into Space” (SSS) program.

The main point of his submission seems to be in the second paragraph (which is a brief two sentences), in that this particular strip from KRfOS is the “best metal picture since” (I assume that should be “mental”, even if the unintentional “metal” pun is fairly amusing), but he doesn’t provide a direct link to what he calls “today’s strip”. Since this post was submitted to Fleen at some undisclosed point in the past, I have no idea what strip he’s referring to on that particular today, nor do I have the patience to go through and try to find it. Hell, I clicked on the Arby’s link, which I felt was more than he deserved for such an unimpressive effort, but I’m not going to wade through the archives of a side-scrolling webcomic just to find the strip he actually wanted to mention.

Mr. #1 gets a 3 out of 10 from me. If I were Simon Cowell I would call it a disaster, and try to refer to karaoke and cabaret in a webcomics sense. Mr. The Kea, on the other hand, gets a solid 10 out of 10 (so far) for leaving Fleen to start his own webcomics review blog (The Kea’s Nest), which so far has been a fun read.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 12:29 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.