#ALSO my whimsy cosplay is almost done i’m so excited

[oddcausingchaos]

my own take on this old non-canon video

whimsy, ellie(?) and angel belong to @urbanqhoul

second version below the cut vvv

[woohooligancomics]

Webcomic Whimsy Review: Iron and Steel

Welcome to the Woohooligan Weekly Webcomic Whimsy! I've given a couple of interviews in the past, but this is my first experience with reviewing. If you have any suggestions for ways to improve these reviews, feel free to leave a note. If you're a webcomic author and would like a review, you can see my announcement and review rules here.

Title: Iron and Steel

Author: Erin • DeviantArt

Site: Iron and Steel

Genres: Sci-Fi, Mystery, Espionage, camp, Inspector Gadget Alternate Universe

Rating: PG(?)

Updates: Tuesday and Saturday

Synopsis: (from the ComicFury hosting profile) This is an alternate universe take on Inspector Gadget. It mainly draws it's base inspiration from the classic series, but does use bits from the other incarnates done over the years. Don't expect to know what this is from knowing the canon content. This is a more serious and elaborate take on the fandom. I highly suggest reading the back stories connected to the comic before reading it. That is the only way the characters and plot will make total sense.

I have a confession to make. I have very mixed emotions about writing this review. Maybe I should have turned this one down, but I've already done the reading and the author is a friend of mine. So maybe this will be a learning experience for me, getting my footing writing these reviews, as this is new to me and only my third. On the one hand, I enjoy helping other creators (I publish my own humor comic), and my goal with these reviews is to help creators find their audience and readers find the kind of works they enjoy. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that with this particular review.

When Erin requested this review, she said that the comics more or less require supplemental reading if you want to fully understand them. When she sent me the request for the review, she suggested that I start with the first prose backstory (of three), titled "The Nature of Change and Destruction". So I checked it out and realizing it was more than a few paragraphs decided I would need to print it out... had it been as much as ten or twelve pages, I might have read it. Over the past few years I've managed to improve my reading speed quite a lot, however, even assuming slightly large print, there's no way I had time to read 70 pages of backstory before getting to the very first page of the actual comic. (So if the other two are of similar length, that means an entire rougly 200 page novel before one page of comic.) Because I'm really busy lately both with publishing my own comics and a lot of errands and doctor's visits among my family (I'm the only driver in a house of six people), I decided I needed to set a cap on the amount of time reserved for these reviews. I figured I could devote at most an hour a week to reading, prior to writing my review, so the whole review process takes about two hours per week. My job is to condense that hour of reading into something you can digest in a few minutes to get a feel for the work before deciding if you want to commit yourself to reading it. Had I tried to read the backstory document, I could guarantee that I would have exhausted the hour before reaching the comic. So I decided to go ahead and just read from the first page of the comic to see if I could tease-out a plot. I got through thirty-two pages.

As Erin mentioned in her description, this is an Inspector Gadget fan-comic in an alternate universe. Having said that, I don't recall MAD being mentioned by name more than once, maybe twice in those thirty-two pages? The canonical master-villain, Doctor Claw appears once in about two pages. Inspector Gadget and Penny don't appear until page twenty-one, and for only eight pages before returning to the villains. So in a large chunk of the opening of the story, the heroes exist for only a quarter of the material I read.

In those eight pages, they only manage to wake up, get out of bed, discuss what time of year it is, that Penny is volunteering at a cat rescue for college credits, introduce two new junior detectives sent by HAPPY (the organization Gadget works for), and the fact that the same junior detectives cosplayed at Dragon Con and Penny isn't interested in dating them. To be fair, there is a bit of slap-stick visual humor in those eight pages, which is partially responsible for the minimal amount of information in that particular passage.

The face at the bottom of this page also shows one of the other reasons why I only managed to get through thirty-two pages. The panelling in this series is unconventional and all over the place. Rarely will you find a square panel like the one in the upper-left corner of this page. There are no gutters, just a thick black line between panels, usually squiggly, sometimes saw-toothed like these. Characters often escape the borders of panels with no clear understanding of the purpose for that. The lower-left panel in this page for example shows a plain orange background to emphasize the horesplay, but despite ample room on the page for the characters' feet to be inside that panel, the panel was cut through their legs. Meanwhile the similar horesplay panel immediately above it (blue background) offered an opportunity for the same feet to escape the panel but instead cut the feet inside the panel and allowed the characters to escape the panel on the other side where they overlap yet another panel.

I understand that on this specific page the characters are horsing around and panel breaking here could be an intentional style element. The issue I have is that panel breaking is a constant visual theme in places where there isn't any action and there was ample room to keep characters in the panels. The apperance of Gadget's face in the bottom middle panel underscores that overall feeling that panels and backgrounds and the readers visual orientation aren't given priority. Yes, you see the two at the door in the first panel in the upper left, but there's no "click" sound effect of the door opening, there's nothing to orient the face to the other characters who are already in the scene, so the only way you know he's just opened the door is if you're observant enough to notice the tan triangle on the right (the door) and realize that it's not just a fragmented portion of another irregularly-shaped, sometimes puzzle-piece-esque panel. That missing sense of orientation makes for a lot more trying to tease-out what's visually happening on the page... and then the desired visual orientation is provided on the very next page.

But again, even though that visual orientation we want is provided in that first panel, the rest of the panel layout begs for a do-over. This is a page with almost no dialogue. There's ample room for all those panels to be square, and given that it's just a basic introduction page with nothing particularly exciting happening (joke notwithstanding), all those panels probably should have been square.... but more important than the irregular panels, why do "Fidget and Digit's" heads escape the top of the third panel?! Even without moving the final panel down a little and to the right (make that a bust, we don't need to see his shirt all the way to the belt), there was ample room to get the two of them entirely inside that panel. The only thing letting their heads escape the top of that panel accomplished was to wash their hair out in the black and make it near invisible, giving them the appearance of having odd, bald, yet flat-topped, mask-shaped heads.

I really genuinely hate to be so critical here, I want these reviews to be mostly about helping people find their audience and as I said, I wasn't sure if I would be able to do that this time. There are some cool ideas in this comic (I'm usually fond of stories that feature shapeshifters), but there's been a lot of emphasis placed on backstory and on maintaining the sense of mystery, so the story istelf is parted out in really short scenes and in thirty-two pages (which incidentally is about one and a half standard comic issues), there's not been enough revealed to even guess at the plot. For my part I have to wonder, if that much backstory was necessary, then why wouldn't you just start drawing the comic from the first page of the backstory? I know a lot of people enjoyed the TV series Lost for example, but that's because they watched it from the beginning. You don't start into Lost from an episode in the middle of season three, and that's how I feel trying to read these.

So I wish I could say I have a pitch for this... If you like long-reads, a lot of mystery and Inspector Gadget, it may be worth a look, I just wish I could give you a better idea what it's about. Sorry, Erin, I tried.

If you are a webcomic author and are interested in a review from me, you can check out my announcement and my review rules here.

If you enjoy my reviews and would like to help ensure I'm able to continue publishing them, you can contribute on our Patreon or if you're short on funds you can also help me out by checking out and sharing my own webcomic, Woohooligan!

Thanks! Sam