I’ve talked about Indavo before.

It was one of my first posts on this site, actually – and it was a hell of a time to talk about the comic, with a storyline that is still a blast to read through. Of course, the best place to start is at the beginning, and that’s true now more than ever. With my current focus on Comic Genesis strips that really step things up to the next level – and with the supreme awesomeness currently dominating the strip – now seemed the perfect time for a full-blown review of Freelance Explorer Indavo!

Let’s start with some general discussion about the comic. The description I gave it last time – “good solid fun” – still holds true. This is a strip that absolutely epitomizes the quest for adventure as our heroes travel from one bit of trouble to another – righting wrongs, saving worlds, and fighting more bad guys than you can shake a stick at.

It isn’t surprising that the storyline is never dull, but what is suprising is realizing that it isn’t just one random battle after another. We learn important things about our heroes. They learn important things about themselves. And the big picture slowly – ever so slowly – starts to come into focus.

The strip has currently reached a momentous point. We’re coming face to face with showdowns the strip has been building up to since it began. The latest arc abruptly shifted from its classic style into stark noir tones, and once again I found myself surprised by how far the artist, one Nathan Bonner, is willing to push his skills into new directions.

At its heart, the strip has all the things that draw me in. Updates come at a solid pace – three times a week – and are almost never missed. The archives are simple and straightforward, with both dates and storylines available for easy browsing. The cast page and FAQ are extremely well fleshed out, kept up to date, and include a sizable run-down of what has happened in the comic thus far.

But all of that – it’s good stuff, don’t get me wrong, but it is what makes a comic professional, not what makes a comic good. It is certainly possible to be one without the other – there are a couple of comics I read that have stuck with me simply due to reliability, rather than because they do anything to actually engage my interest. But Indavo ain’t one of them.

The art is easy on the eyes, and that’s always a good thing. Art won’t make the story good, sure – but it really defines how well a good story can take hold, and the art for Indavo fits the story perfectly. I mentioned earlier that Bonner really pushes his skills in new directions, and its true – for all that most of the strip has an old school comic book feel to it, there are more and more moments that go a step – or two, or three – beyond that.

What really does it is that the art in this strip has a masterful sense of style. You see it in the character designs – the Time Traveler in the Big Hat remains my personal favorite, but most of the cast and crew have the right attention to detail to make them uniquely alive. Little details and themes throughout the chapters – such as the noir style rendition of In His Immortal Name – shift the mood to suite the plot at hand. The cover pages for each chapter, while seemingly ordinary at first, not only set the mood for each individual arc, but also evoke a connection throughout the entire story as a whole.

And, of course, it’s a good story. There are a lot of strips that move from small struggles to epic battles, but Indavo is one of the ones that does it right. From the beginning the steps are laid to build up the story, but carefully enough they never feel obtrusive. When the inevitable payload comes along, it feels like a perfectly natural result of all that came before it, and let me tell you – that takes some doing.

I don’t know if we’re approaching the end of the run – the stakes are big enough, sure. But even with everything at hand… Indavo feels like something that could go on forever, our merry trio of explorers wandering the universe from now till the end of time.

I have always been a fantasy fan, first and foremost. Science fiction – I read it, sure, but as often as not because it was lumped into the same section as the books I loved. I won’t say I don’t enjoy it, but it takes a really amazing work to truly get me invested in the story.

Indavo is one such strip. A damn good comic that captures the sense of excitement and adventure offered by a universe of endless possibilities. There’s an epic tale there, but not one that loses sight of the little things, and that makes all the difference.

My time today has a good number of things vying for attention, so the post today will be short; this is a shame, as there are some recent events in quite a few webcomics that deserve some serious discussion.

Rather than try talk about them and fail to do them justice, I thought today would be a good point to mention a recent comic I was sent to review, a little comic called Fish Tank.

Fish Tank was described to me as a comic about three intelligent fish living in a home aquarium, and their exploits. This didn’t seem like a bad idea for a comic, but my first though was that while it sounded clever, it also sounded incredibly boring.

Boy is my face red.

Even outside of the adventures they go on – taking them from the amazon to Alaska to outer space, the characters themselves are really dynamic, and really alive. Part of it is that they are unique – Ted is a brilliant goldfish with a gift for invention, Angelo is an extremely vain but friendly angelfish, and Hoover is a bottom-feeder who always puts his own interests first. But a lot of it is the way they are drawn. The design of the fish is simple, and feels like a very old school style of drawing – a few loose, flowing strokes that come together to create a complete image.

But the simplicity works wonders where a more complex design would have rendered them completely lifeless.

Fish Tank is a fun strip, and it is a clever one, too. But it proves to be a whole lot more than that, and that’s what really makes it great.

Rêveillerie is a fairy tale, but not in the way you think.

It starts in an entirely ordinary fashion, with an altogether ordinary looking young girl, lost in the streets of what could be a perfectly normal city. By the second page, that illusion is dispelled – this world may be similar to our own in many ways, but magic is a part of everyday life in Tamhaile, and that’s all the difference it needs. The first people we meet, aside from our protagonist Emilind, are denizens of an only slightly unusual library – but are undeniably strange and elfin.

Of course, Emilind herself is far stranger.

Rêveillerie does a lot of things that have really won me over. The storybook feel is one of them – and something that is the product of far more than merely being set in a world of magic and fae. Little details lend it an almost classical weight – for example, the use of small pieces of text that feel like excerpts from an old-fashioned story. Sometimes these little lines fill in small pieces of background, sometimes they set the scene, sometime they give insights into a character’s mind… but all in all, they give the comic a sense of being grounded in more than merely pretty pictures.

Like any good fairy tale, Rêveillerie is built around a sense of mystery. Emelind is on a quest… though we don’t quite know why, or what she is truly looking for. We know a bit about her past, but not how it all connects, and certainly not what makes her so seemingly special in this strange world.

And as with any good mystery, with every answer we get, only more questions arise.

Rêveillerie has its moments of action, but at heart is a character driven story. Each member of the cast definitely plays their own role, and even the characters that are around only briefly still have enough personality to feel real.

Including Emelind herself, whose status as the hero of the story is slightly undermined by her vast self-centeredness. She treats other characters as… no more than tools, in many ways. They are useful to her if they will help her in her quest. She can’t trust anyone but herself. The opinions of others don’t matter to her, and she has a certain ruthlessness that indicates she’ll do what she has to to get her own way.

Oh, she acts pleasant most of the time, and when she does mistreat others, she seems to feel it was almost accidental – but that attitude is still there, and it is part of what really brings the story to life. Heroes are, after all, defined by their flaws. Hers are very real – and justified, certainly, by the fact that she was abandoned into a world that wasn’t her own, and the sense of betrayal that brings. It is easy to understand why she is the way she is – and again, thats the difference between a character a reader can be invested in, and a simple image on a page.

Not that the images on the page are bad, of course. The art is well put together, with soft colors that fit the mood of the tale pretty much spot-on.

The comic’s only real weakness, like with many on Comic Genesis, is that updates are intermittent. It isn’t any surprise – artists have lives, and work, and school, and making comics often has to take backseat to more pressing matters.

But that doesn’t make the strips themselves any weaker, and Rêveillerie has kept itself going for quite a few years now. Here’s hoping for plenty more to come.

Have you ever had a comic that is so good it’s frustrating? 

For me, it’s The Wings of Change. It’s a strip that has been around for some time now – over half a decade, in fact. I’ve been there with it throughout that entire run, as it began during the Great Framed Escape of ’01 – and let me tell you, that brings back memories.

So it was, drawn by their part in the crossover, that I was there for the first strip of the comic’s actual story. It’s a damn good start, too – we get dropped right into quite a bit of action, in an exciting and clearly fleshed out world with several interesting characters – a dour minidragon who happens to be a ranger, a young (and winged) half-elf who wants to be a ranger, and a sentient unseen tree-being with a somewhat vicious sense of humor.

The strip immediately sets itself up as a fantasy style adventure with a solid emphasis on light-hearted jokes, as our protagonists start out trying to convince an extremely senile elder dragon that he should take on a human form when in human lands, rather than wandering about in his normal massive form and inadvertantly causing a war. Various hijinks ensue, they eventually manage to make him change…

…and his human form promptly falls from the sky onto a pixy house, killing the parents and leaving a half-dozen children instantly orphaned.

It’s a rather shocking transition – but not quite as shocking as the fact that the story doesn’t let this change the tone of the strip. The kids recover, Mitch and Hazel argue over who has to become their caretaker, and life moves on. To the strip’s credit, it manages to make this work almost flawlessly, and the reader finds themselves forgetting the awful incident almost as easily as the cast seems to.

The rangers and the pixies start to settle in, and we get the sense the strip is going to focus on the friendships developing between them, and their own personal growth and character development.

Of course, only a handful of strips later, we get a prophecy (from a surprisingly irreverent godly voice) about a storm on the horizon that might change the very nature of the world. It’s the standard vague and almost entirely useless spiel, but it definitely sets the tone of the strip a few steps higher.

From there… well, quite a lot both happens and doesn’t happen. The artist, Mari Rose, has created this fantastic cast of characters, and almost every one of them is having their own adventure. We get to see everything from the god of knowledge outclassing magic with simple smarts to the botanical version of Gumby squishing deformed mutant fish. The strip is filled with fantastic art, a good sense of humor and a compelling story. Well… several compelling stories, as it were, and that seems to be both a good thing and a bad thing. Right from the start, she’s beset by Robert Jordan syndrome, and that means the plot is going nowhere fast.

You may have heard of Robert Jordan – if not, he happens to write a little fantasy series called the Wheel of Time. It’s a powerful, compelling epic story that has thousands upon thousands of pages to its name… and is in danger of never coming to an end.

You see, Robert Jordan wrote a world filled with interesting characters… and found himself paying equal weight to each and every one of them. Early on, events proceeded without difficulty, but as more and more characters appeared, and each went on their own way… time slowed to a crawl. In one of the more recent books in the series, the entire book essentially takes place over the course of a single day, with us being shown the events of that day for every one of his myriad heroes and villains.

I like most of those characters – but it impedes the story. Without a focus, there will never be progress. This has been one of the greatest concerns regarding the Wheel of Time – and one that The Wings of Change has been suffering from as well.

Let’s compare this strip with Dominic Deegan. The clearly have a similar setting, and both favor a crisp, clear art style. Even aside from those similarities, both comics have the same sense of purpose and the same balancing act between personal developments and epic, over-arching plot lines. Even, occasionally, the same flair for painful little puns.

These days, Dominic Deegan is one of the most well-known strips around. It has had dozens of story-lines and more than a handful of epic, world-changing arcs. The Wings of Change, meanwhile, remains a nice comic, but certainly not a mover and shaker in the webcomic world – and since the comic began, less than half a week of time has passed.

Dominic Deegan started almost a year after the Wings of Change.

The difference, of course, is in the update schedule. It may not be the only difference – but it is the biggest one. I’d easily say TWoC has just as strong a sense of story, art and characterization – but time moves along at a crawl. Updates come once a week, not once a day, and filler is an all-too-common occurance. This doesn’t make it a bad comic, of course, and the artist certainly doesn’t owe us more comics…

But still. You can see that sense of potential unfulfilled. You can see how much more this comic could be, and how far away that inevitable epic plot really is.

Fortunately, the artist saw that too. She recognized the difficulties that have cropped up in folowing so many different characters at once. She noted that more updates certainly wouldn’t hurt. And that’s step one – recognizing the issue. From there… well, that remains to be seen. Regardless of where it goes from here, I’m confident that the strip will at the least continue on as it currently is – an enjoyable look into a world filled with a diverse cast of unique and engaging characters.

And I’ve got a feeling it’s on its way to being so very much more than that.