Manly Guys Doing Manly Things is the story of the Commander and his adventures in helping your favorite video game characters find their way in post-game life. Well, the manly ones. Duke Nukem, Kratos, Marcus Fenix, and other manly video game characters. And that's really where the initial charm in this series comes from; watching these insanely muscled guys trying to function in a society where all of life's answers can't be solved with violence. Of course the Captain himself is an interesting character himself; sure he's a ex-space marine who travels time to fight with himself, but he's also a divorced father of two who makes time for his children. And those children are adorable. He's got a girlfriend, Jones, or at least I'm pretty sure they're dating. I could be wrong on that one.
My favorite character, though, is the Pokémon trainer Jared. Now, Jared isn't your normal Pokémon trainer; he's also an intern with the commander and a source of much humor. His origin is perhaps my favorite in the history of origins; his mother got sick of him being a slacker and forced him into the life of a Pokémon trainer. He chose a Magikarp, which is the only correct choice, ever. He then proceeded to bludgeon other trainer's little critters to death until his critter evolved, which again is the only correct decision to make. Sadly he got stuck in a different without a job, which is quite a pickle. Luckily for him, the Commander is a nice enough guy to put up with his hi-jinx and allows him to intern for him. Clearly this man has won the lottery in life, because he gets to own a Gyarados and interns at the awesomest place on earth.
But enough about the characters, it's time to talk about the meat of this comic; the humor. Manly Guys Doing Manly Things is hilarious. It could easily just be a one note strip, but it isn't. Humor is drawn from more than just than the pop culture referenced, but by the situations of these characters in real life. The Commander's life as a father is constantly used for humor. There's humor about sexuality and gender roles. And while there is a large abundance of video game jokes, they're all amazingly well done.
And more-so than the humor, Coelasquid's art is fantastic. Her panel layouts are great. She draws fantastic facial expressions. And her art style isn't stagnant. It's evolved in the year or so of strips that she's being doing. Just take a look at the four strips I've posted here and see how they've changed. She can draw huge, hulking muscle men, women who look like human beings, adorable children, slackers, Pokémon, and everything in between so well that it makes me embarrassed to think that I went to art school for a year.
Okay, so I've talked enough about this webcomic. If you haven't been convinced by the sentence where I tell you about bludgeoning Pokémon to death with a Magikarp and didn't realize that you need to be reading this stuff yesterday, you clearly have something wrong in your brain. Maybe your mother dropped you on your head. Well if you are lacking in thinkingness (Holy crap, spell check isn't flagging that word!) Coelasquid has got your back with her blog posts. Sure you get the standard one paragraph posts, but every now and then she posts up a whole essay on art that is crazy awesome. You will learn stuff reading this blog. No, not my blog. Taking anything I say here seriously (outside of me telling you to read and watch stuff) is madness and doing so is ill advised. But listening to Coelasquid will make you a little smarter. Sure it's mostly art, but it's all stuff that is well written and well thought out. In fact, her blog posts make mine look like mindless dribble (well, even more so than most youtube comments do) and I almost feel like I'm doing a disservice trying to put into words how awesome her posts are.
Verdict: Read it!
So that's it for this week's Webcomics I Like. Then come back for my next article. I've got indie comics to catch up on and I'm ready to give you some verdicts on all of 'em.
No comments:
Post a Comment