Ink Bottle Syndicate Special
Hey everyone, Zachary the Stupid Inventor here for today's review. For those of you who haven't heard, today marks the launch of a new syndicate, Ink Bottle Syndicate, run by Bill Kellogg, whose been working solely on promoting Tundra until now. According to The Daily Cartoonist, 8 more strips join the fold, 6 of which are of the "Gag-A-Day" variety. Let's review them shall we?
That Monkey Tune: A strip about two monkeys living in the human world. I like the odd drawing style, the monkeys are pretty darn cute. This particular strip seems like a Calvin and Hobbes copy though, so I'll have to read it for a while to get a real impression of it.
Sunshine State: I like the drawing style here, kind of looks like Pogo a bit. The tire and litter are good detailing. Again I'm going to have to review these strips again after a few weeks of them running but I'm curious to see how this strip goes.
Tundra: I think I've posted this strip before. It's good for a gag-a-day, focusing more on animal gags than pop culture references. It's a self promoted strip that has gone on to be in almost 450 papers, pretty darn impressive!
Half Baked: I like the joke, but it looks like a lot of different Gag-A-Day strips already out there.
Future Shock: Interesting style of drawing for a strip. Very realistic, so it stands out a bit on the comics page. But strong art doesn't make up for weak humor, so we'll have to see how funny this strip is.
Biz: David Blazek already makes the Gag-A-Day strip "Loose Parts", but this strip focuses exclusively on workplace humor. Being a mash-up of Dilbert and the Far Side, I'm sure editors are going to love it... I think it's going to go far.
15 Minutes: Another Gag-A-Day, I really have not much to say here. I do think it was clever framing to set up the gag, although I think I would have flipped it horizontally so that you see the polar bear last.
Holy Mole': Very simple art style, but the gag made me laugh. As long as it's always this funny this strip should find a place.
So what does this news hold in store for the future of newspaper comics? Will they succeed or fail? Only time will tell. I'll try to check in on them in a few weeks to see how these strips are doing.
Until next time!
Zach
Stupid Inventor
1 comments:
Most of those comics appear to be written by newcomers (with the notable exceptions of Tundra and Sunshine State) which is great. Good to see fresh people instead of the legacy strip creators and their descendants.
In my unprofessional opinion all of these start up comics have good art and all but one have at least a decent joke. And the one with a bad joke is hopefully just a poor choice for a lead-off strip (Matthew.com, really?), admittedly the other samples online of Future Shock are funnier.
My only disappointment is how closely these tow the line of what people already have seen and expect in newspaper strips. But I guess this is to be expected if you're trying to sell to paper dinosaurs.
Hopefully some of these newcomers can find ways to appeal to both the old and young and avoid going the way of My Cage which I liked but didn't really appeal to septuagenarians.
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