February 19, 2008

Canine Coprothrustive Conundrum

I begin with a webcomic I know extremely well, since I made it. Canine Coprothrustive Conundrum is a terrible webcomic, for a variety of reasons. The comic is a shitty slice-of-life pile of nonsense, punctuated only with spastic references to racism and political incorrectness. This is all very old hat to anyone who's ever read Cyanide and Happiness or watched Beavis and Butthead, except with substantially worse writing and art.

The art is pretty much shit, consisting entirely of poorly-drawn stick figures. Even though I tend to prattle on in the newsposts about perspective and blocking and shading like I'm trying to learn how to draw well or something, none of the comics are ever cleaned up beyond the "shitty pencil sketch" stage, and all the characters are abrasively simple in design. There's the guy with no hair, the guy with a flat-top, and the girl with a ponytail. Everyone has the same eyes ripped straight from Dominic Deegan and the same mouths taken wholesale from everyone's favorite master of facial expressions, Tim Buckley. In general, it would appear that the only expressions I can draw are "offended," "bored to death," and "stupid VGCats nonsense." I could go on and talk about the fact that the overwhelming majority of the comic takes place in a single poorly-scaled room or describe the completely retarded shadings, but that's pointless. All you need to see is this panel, and you should be able to see all the failings.

That panel is also a pretty good indication of what you can expect from the writing department. Almost all the jokes from Canine Coprothrustive Conundrum consist of the flat-topped one saying something politically incorrect and the bald one being aghast. Sometimes the bald one approves because they're both bigots! But it's all okay, because apparently they're extremely well-read and well-researched and geniuses and did I mention that they can rationalize their bigotry? Yeah, I'm pretty sure nobody cares about the fact that you cited an 1842 study proving the natural superiority of whites over asspees. Aside from the unbeatable formula of bigotry and shit, I enjoy talking about shit nobody cares about. Seriously, did anybody play TimeShift? Has anybody outside of the elitist heavy metal circle heard of Varg Vikernes? It doesn't matter, because the jokes aren't funny even if you are familiar with the material.

And just as you would predict from a comic from a hack author, it's quickly diving into a drama omlette. We also get to meet a new character, who is actually less characterized than Lilah from CAD, since I don't know if she plays video games or not. In fact, I don't think she has any interests at all, except potentially her interest in being an object of flat-top's affections. It's a painfully transparent setup for a whole series of self-insertion sequences, and I can't wait to see how long it takes before flat-top and Girl are making out, cohabitating, and eventually making babies.

Sorry, that last sentence got away from me for a while there.

There are also a lot of little issues with the comic. There's a shitty layout, although the comic is at least on the principle page. There's no archive, which doesn't make a difference because seriously, what fuckin' moron would want an archive of this tripe? There's an ugly little banner at the top of every page reminding you not only that you're reading CANINE COPROTHRUSTIVE CONUNDRUM, but the author is apparently the least competent graphic designer in all history. There's an enormous comment box at the bottom of every page, which no one has commented in. For some unknown reason, the comic has its own forum, which is blessed with a glorious deficiency of members. Each page includes several obnoxious "vote for me" buttons, except since I'm a talentless artist there isn't actually any incentive to vote for me. At least it's not in Comic Sans, although Letter-O-Matic isn't exactly tops as far as fonts go.

Really, all you need to know about Canine Coprothrustive Conundrum is its origins story: It was explicitly constructed to attract an insipidly stupid fanbase who would, when the time is ripe, send its author huge amounts of unearned money. Really, that's how it came to be. Unfortunately, it turns out that I'm a lazy asshole who can't even stick to my own plan, and I haven't been able to stick to the script except through sheer incompetence, as evidenced by the fact that as of this writing, the webcomic has received an average of three returning visitors per day. One of whom is probably me. Canine Coprothrustive Conundrum isn't a financial juggernaut like CAD or The Wotch, but it's still an abysmal failure of a webcomic. Don't read it.