February 20, 2008

Snafu Comics

Snafu Comics is more than just a bad webcomic. It's an entire bad webcomic site, providing hosting for not just the festering creations of its progenitor, David Stanworth, but several other talentless hacks including the fairly harmless Herms; the Japanophiles Endling, Fox, Stan, G-O, and Happy; and most harrowingly the pedophile/crossover fanatic Bleedman. While all these contributors have created horrors of blood, sweat, and Photoshop gradients, today I focus solely on the primary comic, Snafu itself.

Snafu Comics has been running since mid-2002, if not before--I'm not entirely clear on the point. Apparently it died and experienced a rebirth, much like Chugworth and Cartridge Comics and Titus & Mal and Power Chord and so forth. But that's of no account, as the farthest back the archives on the site go is this mess. Just looking at it, you should be able to point out several flaws. One is the vomit-inducing artwork. I don't know how Dave creates his comic, but that's seriously on par with the hand-drawn Bob and George tripe. That comic was later shoddily copied and pasted with a new joke about a terrible band. This sort of tacky third-grader shit is all over the place. If those links taught you anything, it's that Stanworth has no idea what people look like, how to draw facial expressions, how to shade beyond liberal application of dodge and burn, how to draw props, how to draw attractive women, how to keep anything in perspective, or basically do anything but create crude things that rank somewhere between stick figures and human excrement in terms of sensory appeal. In more than a few, he takes that googly-eyed/mawkish grin combo straight from Scott Ramsoomair. The thing is, even though the comic has been running for four and a half years, his shit is still terrible.

In that last one, we see yet another webcomic hack who decided to take his shitty superhero self-insertion persona and turn it into a recurring character. A man with dozens of nipple-shooting lasers, except two that "aren't [his] mutant nips"--of course, males don't lactate, so there's still some pretty freaky biology going on in that trainwreck. And that's about all you can expect from Snafu, really: terrible jokes about hero-worshipping nerds and extremely weak video game humor. Oh, and we can't forget the fact that Travis is so offensive! He wants Dave to kill himself. Honestly, Dave? Go for it. We can do without this mediocre shit.

I've dumped rather a lot of links on you, but it's hard to accurately convey just how stupid Snafu Comics is without the visceral experience of reading through it and wallowing in its blandness. In most places, it isn't offensively bad, even when it tries to be. As far as I know, Dave isn't making tons of money off the comic, although he does own a site that hosts three Bleedman comics, so maybe that's lucrative. There isn't any sexual fetishism in the comic, though there are more pedophile jokes than there ought to be (the ideal amount is either none, Electric Retard, or references to literary pedophilia, by the way.), so I can't feel revolted by it. I haven't talked to any Snafu Comics fans, so I'm not sure if anyone actually reads this, although there have been namedrops from This Comic Sucks (now defunct), VGCats (it was its featured comic for quite a while), and I believe Digital Purgatory. It doesn't really matter, though, since a comic doesn't need an abundance of rabid fans to be bad. It just needs terrible art, terrible writing, and no redeeming features. Snafu fits the bill pretty well. It's an extremely bad webcomic run by a guy who runs a site dedicated to bad webcomics.