Sunnyville Stories

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Rating Summary

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Background
Max West (a.k.a. Skyfirefox) has struggled and failed for years to impress the furry community. His magnum opus is Sunnyville Stories, a furry slice-of-life comic consisting of crude scribbles and recycled Family Guy punchlines. While looking at the comic, please remember that West is in his 30s and attended the School of Visual Art.

Downfall


There's really no redeeming quality to any of West's work. The plot of the typical chapter is cribbed directly from whatever 80's cartoon West was watching at the time, and is delivered mostly via characters narrating their own actions.

The narration actually might be necessary, since the art often fails to communicate what exactly is happening in each panel. West can only draw that one generic furry animal face, so get used to seeing it everywhere, often with unintelligible facial expressions.

Most of the punchlines are uninspired, delivered gracelessly and formulaically. Many strips rely on spit-takes and eyerolls as opposed to actual humor. As mentioned, and seen in the thumbnail, West is also not above ripping off Family Guy and Abbott and Costello routines, almost word for word.

The whole pile is held together by West's ego. Convinced of his own brilliance in comic-making, each comic page is adorned with two or three pages of his running commentary. He doesn't have much to say, but he's going to take a page to say it anyway.

Story and Plot
Rusty, a kid from the city, finds himself trying to cope with his new life in the "hillbilly town" of Sunnyville. We rarely see anything of Sunnyville or what's got Rusty so down - we're clued in by his constant narration about how things were better before and how he has no friends, and so on.

On arriving, Rusty is immediately befriended by Sam, and by "befriended", I mean she just finds him and declares them to be friends. There's no developing friendship or build-up - Sam simply appears out of nowhere and the friendship is made. It's hard to shake the vibe that West doesn't actually have friends.

Art Review
Max West has "trained at the School of Visual Arts," yet somehow missed every essential basic cartooning technique. All his Sunnyville characters have the same lopsided generic animal head, with only the ears, fur markings and clothing to help distinguish them. There is no variety in body type, short of tall vs. short and male vs. female. During crowd scenes, you will lose track of who is talking, since there is a real lack of visual uniqueness.

Facial expressions are occasionally unintelligible. Try to interpret what is going on in this page. Body language is similarly clumsy, without any regard to action lines or sense of motion.

For some reason, you can often see the outline of a girl's crotch through their dress. Often.

In a more general sense, little attention is given to line weight, perspective, tone or blocking. There is no sense of volume or scale, and background elements are frequently "above" the foreground, as opposed to "behind" it.

Writing Review
Very little of the humor is original. Expect such great classic punchlines as:

"You can't get the drop on me!"

"You're eating WAX fruit!"

...and of course, spit takes.

Since West's only inspirations are 80's cartoons and animated sitcoms, there's only two personality types: The childish goofball male and the eye-rolling yet supportive female.

Many characters are introduced as "so-and-so's relative" then discarded, having no further use. It's more important to West for the reader to know these characters have a family as a prop, and not so much for plot relevance. For the short time these characters appear, they don't act like realistic people, and serve mostly to react to Rusty and Sam. In some cases, their main purpose is to laugh or roll their eyes at what the main characters are doing, much like the canned laugh track in an old sitcom.

West's wish-fulfillment is a running theme throughout the series, not just with how the characters act but also how he frames the comic:


 * "Sunnyville Stories is a small-press comic about a BIG world!"
 * "Sunnyville, a remote village where the animal inhabitants dress traditionally."
 * "IMPORTANT! – All intellectual property on this page pertaining to Sunnyville Stories (unless otherwise stated) remains the sole property of Max West (that’s me).  So don’t even think of stealing any of this work and passing it off as your own!"

Author Biography
Everything you need to know about Max West can be learned from any 24 hour sample of his Twitter. He tweets frequently, often dozens of times in a day, and often responds to himself as part of a long, rambling one-person conversation. A typical 24 hour section of his tweets will include:


 * Yet another link to a How-To article he wrote months ago.
 * No-content fluff about his current project.
 * Generic feel-good quotes. (The same small selection, over and over.)
 * A link to one of the dozens of online stores selling his comic. (Why would you sell your product online in multiple places?)
 * About how terrible Obama is.
 * Bragging about that one time someone compared him to Walt Kelly.
 * And referrals to that one time FurAffinity didn't award him something in an art contest five years ago.

Occasionally, he makes commercials for his book, refers to his work as a "sleeper hit" (a.k.a. not a hit) and openly wonders why "Why can't people see how good Sunnyville Stories is?"

He's also counting down to a Kickstarter. It will be interesting to see who he blames for that when it fails.

It should also be said that his ambitions and the way he views himself are in proportional opposition with his actual talent. He actually goes as far as comparing himself to well-known artists like Norman Rockwell. He also puts an overly optimistic spin on mediocre reviews that actually mention how "stilted and lacking coherence" his comics are, calling them "praise".

Max frequently tweets about "positive reviews" for his work, which are in actuality, just synopses he's mailed in to non-review sites such as the Midwest Book Review.

And of course, don't miss out on his insightful political cartoons.

Faking Fanmail
While some of the reviews of his work are (VERY mildly) positive, it's not enough for him. He's recently taken to posting fake fanmail on his site. He probably could have gotten away with it, but he couldn't resist writing in his own voice when pretending to be some random 10 year old from the midwest (made rather obvious from the ridiculously aged names given to these "kids" ) :

"Hello, loyal readers. Today, I thought I’d share some fan mail I found in my post office box earlier. This first one is from Hickory, North Carolina. It reads as follows:

Dear Mr. West, My name is Sammy Hopkins, I’m ten years old, and I love to read Sunnyville Stories. I really like your funny cat, Rusty. He makes me laugh a lot. I also like Sam because she is very pretty. I hope you do more stories with Rusty and Sam. I really want to see them have lots of fun in Sunnyville and, like, the woods around their homes.

Sincerely, Sammy - P.S. Tell Margaret I think she’s really pretty too.

Well, isn’t that cool? Margaret Macgregor (Sam’s older sister) has a secret admirer."

"I got another letter from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. As you may recall, their library was the first one to carry Sunnyville Stories Volume 1. Anyway, the letter reads:

Dear Max West, I’m Trudie Lippincott, I’m eleven years old, and I live over in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Sunnyville Stories is way too funny. Anything that Rusty says makes me laugh. I was laughing a lot because Rusty said his new house looked like the Addams Family lived there before and when he said that breakfast was on him. Also the three little ferrets Rusty and Sam meet in the train robbers story are so cute. I think ferrets are the cutest animals ever. My mom was also laughing hard at what Rusty said. You have a good sense of humor to have Rusty say all those things. How do you come up with all that stuff? Please make more Sunnyville Stories. I can’t wait to read more.

Your fan, Trudie Lippincott

'''Well, thank you very much for the compliments. If anyone wants to send letters in, feel free to do so.

(DOX redacted)

Thanks for the letters and keep them coming!'''"

When called on it by several people, both on his site and through Twitter, he took the fake emails down and posted a butthurt response. People who pointed this out to this, intending to be helpful, later got threats to "call the police" on them for "harassment" and many lulz ensued. To summarize, he thinks people are accusing him of "hacking review sites" as opposed to mundane lying, and he's still "eager to receive any email and letters about [his] work."

Conclusion
Sunnyville Stories has dull characters, recycled or non-existent punchlines, and the artist needs to learn how to draw more than one face. Why does the mainstream media not recognize his brilliance?

Links

 * Max West's main site, Sunnyville Stories
 * West's current DeviantArt
 * West's previous, slightly more furry DeviantArt
 * West's FurAffinity profile
 * West's Twitter