Snafu Comics

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Rating Summary

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Introduction
I found this site by Googling information on one of Bleedman's less questionable doodles. I wouldn't say it's as bad as something like Gaia or My Little Pony fanfiction, it doesn't excuse this site from being turgid with the bile that is forced edginess.

It was started in 2002 when its owner, Dave Stanworth, wanted to compete with bigger webcomics like Penny Arcade and VG Cats because he wanted to make money like they do. His first comic was simply called Snafu, but it sucked hard then and it still sucks to this very day. He tried making two other comics as well, but one was a direct ripoff of someone else's comic (on his own site, no less), and the other he quite literally had to convince himself that it was a good idea. As it turns out, Dave Stanworth's attempts at webcomicry didn't work as well as he thought, so now he relies on other people to bring in the dough because he's too incompetent, untalented, and unoriginal to make anything worthwhile.

This website's slogan appears to be "Who needs responsibility or dedication?", because most of the authors on the site have flat out given up on updating their comics. Oh sure, they're on "hiatus", but when Snafu Comics throws that phrase around as much as it does, the word starts to translate to "Yeah, forget about this comic, it's never going to update again."

The Comics
I don't know what I can say which hasn't been said in the review already. It's still trash.
 * Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi

Again, this one has been reviewed already. What I can add, though, is that Bleedman has decided to dedicate one of his strips in someone's memory. If he really wanted to devote something to someone who passed, he could have found a less disrespectful way than preserving them in a strip from Sugar Tits. Maybe a portrait done using his full artistic potential would have been more appropriate? Nah, no way! They're much better off being immortalized in the form of a wall of text from his comic about poorly depicted love relationships and little furry fox girls!
 * Sugar Bits

Still as angsty as ever, possibly more so nowadays.
 * Grim Tales From Down Below

It's a comic by Dave Stanworth. The reason he made it is because he imagined Naruto being a failure. So, in his head, he repeated the idea over and over again until it sounded good. If the creator of Snafu had to convince himself that it was a good idea, you know it's bad. It's about a ninja, except that he's bad at everything. There's a lot of blood and tasteless humor. The most recent strip, one from 2010, depicts the main character dying. This is the only good thing about the comic.
 * TIN: The Incompetent Ninja (Hiatus)

Another of Dave Stanworth's shitbeasts he calls "webcomics".
 * Snafu (Hiatus)

The third of Dave Stanworth's anathemas. It's the same thing as BunnyWith, proving that Dave Stanworth is as unoriginal as a Sonic the Hedgehog recolor.
 * MyPanda (Hiatus)

It's a comic by a dude calling himself Endling. The art in this comic is... weird. His art isn't that bad, but this comic isn't nearly as good as some of his other stuff.
 * Brain Dead (Hiatus)

The art looks like it was done in MSPaint with a low grade tablet, and the story is relatively uninteresting. There are more than a few filler pages, which gets very annoying.
 * The League

It's a fan comic about Naruto. It takes place after the canonical Naruto comics (as though they had an end to those in mind), and it's complete with irritating fan characters as well as fan pairings. It's essentially just Naruto fanfiction in the form of a comic.
 * Naruto: Heroes Path (Hiatus)

Everything said in the review still applies, nothing has improved in the least. While some might think the art has improved, most would note that it's just the closest ripoff to Bleedman's artwork anyone on the site has been able to accomplish.
 * Skull Boy

This is Endling's other comic, the only comic worth reading on the site. That is, until you get to page 57, then realize that it hasn't updated in years, and it will never update again. It's about a bunch of fairy tale characters taken out of context. The only gripe to be had is that it straddles the fence between 2edgy4u and bearable, because all the characters are in an asylum for the criminally insane, and there's a bunch of killing going on in the first part of the comic. If you ever wanted to see Humpty Dumpty play the role of a sinister warden, this comic will suffice.
 * Ever After (Hiatus)

It's as awful as you can imagine. It's hilarious how awful it is. If you're looking for a good laugh, click the link and read all nine pages of this filth.
 * Invader Zim: Manifest Doom (Hiatus)

The backgrounds are all Google images, it's only mildly challenging to tell since they're all blurred to the point of indistinguishability. Also, almost every character is missing their nose. It's barely ever funny and the most recent strip uses racism as the punchline.
 * Sticky Floors (Hiatus)

It's just a bunch of pop culture references.
 * Training Wheels (Hiatus)

Copy paste art and an infinitely negative quantity of humor. It's not even worth your time to see how bad it is, the most recent strip exhibits everything wrong with it.
 * Digital Purgatory (Hiatus)

You'll never be able to get any of the pages to display, no matter which browser you use. There's that quality control again, making sure that the site is in tip-top shape. It can be said without doubt that the comic must have been true to its name.
 * This comic was either called Awful or This Comic Sucks, I'm not sure which. (Hiatus)

This is the comic that Dave Stanworth ripped off. Funny how he rips off the comics that he hosts on his own site, huh? Well, it's trash, to say the least. Imagine that you have one punchline, then repeat the punchline over and over. That's this comic. It's a rabbit without arms. The punchline for each page is "Bunny with (insert noun here)". Does that sound good to you? It doesn't? Well, I guess you're not an idiot then. Like many of the comics on this website, the best part about it is that it went on indefinite hiatus.
 * BunnyWith (Hiatus)

The artist really sucks at drawing hands as well as... well, they suck at drawing in general. It only recently made the jump into colored pages. The comic itself sports a septic dose of poor grammar, and the story is more bland than Marevich's
 * Titan Sphere

It didn't even make it past ten pages before going on hiatus. This is drawn by another artist who seems to have an aversion to drawing people with noses. Otherwise, this comic follows the site's pedophilia trend, except instead of little girls this comic's focus is little boys. Undoubtedly, this is the tofu of the webcomic world: it's tasteless trash which does nothing but takes up space.
 * Soul Frontier (Hiatus)

This one only made it to twelve pages before its inevitable hiatus. The entire thing looks like it was drawn on a napkin.
 * Forgotten Tower (Hiatus)

No, it's not about the awesome fighting game, it's some bullshit love story which only lasted thirteen pages before concluding. This thing is the least noteworthy comic on the site, it's a wonder that the site still hosts the damn thing.
 * King of Fighters (Ended)

No exaggeration, this is quite possibly the worst comic on the site. The art is hideous and guaranteed to offend your eyes to the point where they shrivel away, just to make sure you never see anything so horrible again. The comic is disgusting for the sake of being disgusting, offensive for the sake of being offensive, tactless for the sake of being tactless, and more saddening than it is interesting. This garbage is really what members of our species find humorous? It's the webcomic equivalent of Lake Karachay. But, knowing what the author finds humorous, he'd probably take pride in this. All I can say to that is this: Your inability to understand why what I say is a bad thing only exemplifies your poor standards and physicality.
 * Satan's Excrement (Ended, but not linked just to save your brain from this crime against humanity)

Community
The site does indeed have a forum. There's a section for site news and comic updates, it's nothing special. Then, there's the rest of the site. When you count them all, more than half of the forum's sections are devoted to general discussion, despite there already being a section for general discussion. I suppose that if you find the failures of others to be hilarious, you'll have a blast looking at this site.

A wondrous land where you can discuss all sorts of enticing and informative topics, such as:
 * Snafu General Discussion
 * So why are YOU awesome?
 * Shounen Manga Discussion(Naruto Bleach etc. spoilers inside)
 * The Ultimate Crossover Thead

It's supposed to be primarily for the discussion of Bleedman's stuff, but the community just shoots the shit about anything they want in this section.
 * Bleed Forum

The comic which only lasted 57 pages got so popular that they made a section for it, and kept it even though the author pretty much said he wouldn't update it ever again. Just like Bleed Forum, it's primarily supposed to be about Ever After and anything related to Endling's works, but people don't talk about that stuff in this section.
 * EverAfter

That piece of shit got its own section, but just like the other two sections I listed above, nobody talks about the damn thing. Also, half the threads are locked, which is fairly humorous. This section might be the least trafficked part of the entire forum.
 * Digital Purgatory

There's nothing special about this section, it's actually probably the most bearable part of the forum. All people do is talk about video games.
 * Snafu Gaming

While a section devoted to tabletop role playing would be righteous, that is sadly not what this section is about. This section is for internet role plays, none of which are original or interesting. There's an X-Men role play, a Naruto role play, a One Piece role play, an X-Com role play, a Mass Effect role play, a Fallout role play... Yeah, these people are just about as original as Dave Stanworth. Though if they tried being original, they'd probably fuck it up, so maybe it's better that they stick to source material.
 * Role Playing

If you think that this is for discussing actual literature (The Adding Machine, Slaughterhouse Five, Conquest of Gaul, etc.), you're wrong. It's full of fan fiction, shitty short stories, and creepypasta.
 * Literature

This section is full of inane topics and is very likely to lower the intelligence of anyone who browses it for too long. Avoid at all costs.
 * Wham, Spam, Thank you, Maam!

Store
The store... It's called SharkRobot and it's awful. Well, it's technically not Snafu's store, they just have merchandise on it. Either way, the following still applies to most of SharkRobot. You know how Hot Topic just sells things in the moment before their fad-like status is about to plummet? This is like that, except it also deals with the worst culture in the world - Internet culture.

Oh wait, Hot Topic does sell that crap? Well I guess this store is just a Hot Topic wannabe, which isn't a very good thing to want to be. Most of the crap on the store is just... Oh God. Hahahahahaha, I can't get over how appropriate this is. I don't know if someone at SharkRobot put this up as a joke or what, but:



No shitting you here, this is an actual shirt on their store section. Anyways, as I was saying, most of the crap on the site is just a bunch of gamer culture and anime culture references smashed together. It's fucking awful. There's some Haruhi shit drawn by Bleedman, there's some Bleach shit drawn by Bleedman, and there's cords upon cords of pop-culture peppered liberally over every product they sell. I'd say it's a good thing that they don't sell those excessively narcissistic/ignorantly idiotic slogan shirts (you know the ones, they usually say something like "You laugh at me because I'm different, I laugh at you because you're all the same!" or "Guns don't kill people, I kill people."), except that they have some shit which comes pretty fucking close.

A good amount of the merchandise on the store, as you may have noticed, has absolutely nothing to do with Snafu Comics at all. And that's what really gets me. The comics and the site aren't nearly popular enough to bring in good revenue, so they rely on the popularity of other franchises to bring in the gold. That seems to be a common theme in Snafu Comics, doesn't it? The entire website is pretty much dedicated to clinging on to popularity and exploitation of other people's hard work. Bleedman's two most popular comics, Dave Stanworth's titular comic, the Naruto fan comic, the unfinished Invader Zim coimc, the merchandise on the store, and more. It's all just one big pop-culture parasite, sucking and thriving on the ebb and flow of media sensation.

Various Failures
SNAFU Comics has no quality control whatsoever. Not in the forums, not in the shop, not in the comics. Yeah, putting too many restraints on an author can make them quit, or find another host, but when you have nearly three quarters of your comics just not updating, and the ones which do update are shitty anyways, it's clear that you don't know how to run a webcomic group. The site doesn't deserve to be on the internet.

Conclusion
That analogy at the beginning of this review, the one equating this to a refrigerator full of expired food? It's true in every sense of its words. You've got this refrigerator full of expired food, right? It's got a jar of pickle juice, but that's just vinegar and it's not going to go bad any time soon, yet this still doesn't stop it from tasting fucking awful. There's also a bottle of stagnating water, some flat cola, moldy cheese, a half eaten sandwich, and so on. Every one of the comics on this site is a food product in the refrigerator we call Snafu Comics. And what do you do with a refrigerator like that? You throw away the expired food and stock up on some new stuff. That's what this website needs to do. It needs to get rid of the comics in hiatus (unless the authors agree to start updating again), then it needs to enforce some sort of quality control.

"But you can't stifle people's creative output!" some might say. Well, fuck that. I say you can, since when their creative output is putting out horse shit. Nobody's stopping you, Dave Stanworth. It's your fucking site. If they don't like it they can take their shitty comics somewhere else, what you've got to do is enforce a measure of quality control. It's not hard, just screen the damn things before uploading them. You won't get any more of Bleedman's 9/11's, your forum's sections will actually be dedicated toward what the sections are supposed to be for, and your store will actually sell innovative merchandise. What's more is that the comics will actually update more than Gone With the Blastwave does. Right now, as it stands, the website doesn't do any of that. It doesn't control the quality of its content. It doesn't even want to be original, because making original things with dedication and spirit is too hard for the site's members. Right now, this website contributes nothing original or good to the webcomic scene.

Dave Stanworth needs to redesign the website, not cosmetically, but substantially. He needs to accept original comics of quality make instead of the amateur brain diarrhea we see today. He needs to overhaul the forum so that the community doesn't just use the thing for general discussion. He needs to put some effort into getting some decently designed merchandise for the store. He needs to get some good comics. He needs to get rid of the shitty ones. He needs to threaten to delete the ones on hiatus, and then do so if the authors don't update them. He needs to make the website a good one. Right now he has a mildly profitable website, but that doesn't make it a quality one. As the site currently stands, it's a cancer on the webcomic community, which can only be chemo'd if he'd just use some fucking quality control. Dave Stanworth may not have talent for making webcomics, but fuck, it doesn't take much effort to have standards.

I guess that all this would actually have an impact if he loved webcomics more than he loved money. I guess for now, if you're planning on making your own webcomic group, don't make it SNAFU.

Links

 * Their shitty website.
 * Their shitty store. Look but don't touch, make sure you speak with your wallet and tell them that the merchandise is shit.
 * Encyclopedia Dramatica article about Snafu Comics.