21st Century Fox

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Rating Summary

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Background
It may surprise none of you that I was once a teenager. That was when I first read this monstrosity. Coming straight from a binge of reading George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice And Fire series, I decided to look for something a little lighter. Well in this case, this comic may as well be thin air.

Downfall
While it is possible to argue that this comic has never really taken a serious nosedive to the center of the earth, I would say there are two particular downfalls: The first is the second strip. Now look at the first strip. Yeah, pretty big downgrade in quality considering the quality wasn't that high to begin with. In six months, Mr. Kellogg (HE’S GGGRRRRREEEEAAATT) could not draw a single page of similar quality to the first, and instead devolved into chicken scratches and horrible line work.

The next downfall, and probably the more serious one, is where the racism starts and keeps on going. Mr. Kellogg (anyone else hungry now?) seems to be trying to make a deep social/political satire with animals of certain types taking the places of various nationalities (scavengers for Americans, Lions for Africans, Tigers for the Chinese), but it doesn’t work. Just as the constant, and usually rather pointless cuts to the implausibly big busted news readers over implies the idea of sexual saturation in mainstream media, more specifically the news, the idea of painting all these various nations with a single stereotype, and a constant push of feminism only serves to make the comic lose whatever romantic and comedic value it may have had and when it tries to regain this, it doesn’t succeed, instead flailing around like a dead fish.

Story and Plot
The story is surprisingly simple: Jack is an anthropomorphic male fox who is on the road for love and works fixing machines of THE FUTURE!!! (yes, I do have to do that) While everyone around him finds romance, he is forever alone and the constant crushing loneliness starts to take a horrible toll on his sanity and then…

Oh, who am I kidding. He finds his one true love, a vixen named Jenny, in under a year of pages, and in about three days worth of comic, his grand sense of self-importance says that nothing should ever go right for him and she disappears. After another few years of poor comedy and stupidity, the whole farce ends in a fairy tale romance, between him, Jenny, his best friend and partner Cecil (a giraffe), and Beth and Barb, two female giraffes who throw themselves on Cecil to underline just how poor with the opposite sex Jack truly is.

From there on out, the comic becomes a poor mixture of soap-boxing, Gilbert and Sullivan references, derivative references to other little-known webcomics, casual racism (always fun) and bad romance.

Art review


I believe this has been said before, but this is not art. This is a torture for the eyes and soul. I could do better than this and I’ve been drawing for no more than six years. It does get ‘better’ for a given value of better (see next paragraph). But the anatomy is horrible, the eyes consume half the face, and the faces are comprised of a narrow tube for a muzzle/snout and a ball with bits sticking out for the ears.

It would unfair to say that it doesn’t improve, but then the word "improve" is the wrong word. It gets coloured, and everything is slightly better proportioned, but—and it is a big BUT—everything is still hand drawn and there is a lot more copy/paste. Lines are still untidy, and the characters still look stiff and unnatural.

On the plus side, there have been backgrounds all the way through the comic's thirteen-year run, all hand drawn, with horrible line work and jarring, uncomplimentary colours.

Writing review
Writing, in itself, is based off of three things; characters, setting, and genre. I’m sure someone will argue that point, but to create a story that resonates with readers, you need a well fleshed-out setting with rules, you need to establish tone (genre), and you need a believable character who the readers can feel for, wallow in his despair when he fails, and share in his euphoria when he succeeds.

21st Century Fox has none of these things. Its tone is inconsistent and schizophrenic, the setting is this world in the future with anthropomorphic animals, and the characters, while they grow and mature, they never keep their character traits that made us want them to grow. The characters swap their defining traits for something new and never look back, often causing the few good characters to lose what made them good characters in the first place.

The greatest sin of this comic however, would be this: the writer cannot go a single thrice-damned month without putting song lyrics in there. Just forget for a moment that comics are a visual medium and not an audio medium. I have this exact same complaint with novels that do this as well, even if it is something commonplace like the Gilbert and Sullivan this comic oh-so routinely decides to throw at you like Jackson Pollock throwing paint at a wall. Music is based on melody and rhythm. When you write a song down, you lose the context of each word unless you write down the exact pattern of syllables, often making the words uncomfortable to read. If you don't want to do that, then the rhythm and flow of that song is lost unless you have heard that particular song, and this dampens the effect the writer was going for.

As I previously mentioned in the Downfall section, Mr. Kellogg (someone get me Frosted Flakes) seems to have a thing for woman’s lib. A lot of side characters are either powerful women or potential powerful women who have been under the harsh whip of the most dreaded force on the planet, MAN!!! (yes, man… insert rambling complaint on how evil man is portrayed in movies like Ferngully, Avatar, yada-yada blah-blah) This and the racism that becomes present in the latter half of the comics current runtime really doesn’t help to show that the writer has any idea how real people act.

Author biography
Can’t find much on Mr. Kellogg (no I’m not doing that bit anymore, it got old real quick), but the pictures he shows on his author page either show he has a huge ego or a tiny penis.

Conclusion
21st Century Fox has some good ideas which are slowly lost in the first five years when the writer shifts focus to a sci-fi epic, and all the character building up until then goes out the window.

Final thoughts: slow, boring, plodding, poorly drawn, poorly written, and just plain sub-par, but hey at least it ain’t Fur Will Fly.

Links

 * Interview Right wing sci-fi interviewer who seem to have a problem with furries.