Concession

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Rating Summary

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Background
From the 'about' page of the Concession site: "When I came up with the idea, I was working at a movie theatre. Really a dreadful place, to work, I'd recommend you all avoid it if at all possible. Anyways: the thing about a job like that, as I'm sure a lot of you already know, is that you meet a lot of very stupid, frustrating customers, and if you said what you really wanted to, to their face, you'd be fired. Or arrested. So because of this, Joel was born as a sort of tool for me to say what I kept wanting to, without fear of, ya know, physical assault. The rest grew after that. Of course by now, that aspect of the comic is very far from the foreground, and has been replaced with, well, plot. The plots, I'll have you know, don't have much to do with my personal life at all. So yeah."

Concession began because Immy worked in a cinema and was tired of stupid customers annoying him, so he decided he'd take out his irritation on the internet. Which is nothing new, though going so far as to create a webcomic about it is a bit much. But whatever. This is plain to see in the first couple of comics, which basically consist of Angstwolf and his cinema-staff buddies being smartasses to the customers. They do regular sitcom-esque actions like discss disastrous dates and try to work machinery. At this point the comic is still a little hobby, a pastime; just some poorly-sketched depressed-looking animals blurting out "witty" quips to a plain blue backdrop. It's here where trouble starts to rear its telltale head. You see that? That is a background that is not the cinema.

That is Immelman trying to convince you to give a fuck about his characters. Trying to introduce plot written by himself was what pushed Immelman's comic from 'plain old shit' to 'freaky, perverted, teen-angst shit'. Nowadays Concession has spiralled so far down into its pit of frenzied masturbation and angst that barely a strip goes by without the writer's Gary Stu main character either a) fucking someone or b) killing someone. Or maybe even a both! But don't just take my word for it; we've got examples and everything!

Story and Plot
Let's go over something here right now, and I want you webcomics people to get it through. Take it to heart.

A story has a plan to it.

I know you guys don't understand, so let me make myself crystal clear. An actual storyline, even a bad storyline, does not consist of a writer looking out the window one day and eventually thinking, "You know what? I'm going to go start a story today about random shit that's happened to me in my fourteen/sixteen years of existence with absolutely no coherence or concept." No, it's planned. An actual story, with an actual plot, is not only going to be planned in advance and have an actual design to its creation, but is going to be coherent.

As with most comics with split personality disorder, Immelman's little comic just can't decide whether it wants to be a dippy-dippy drama comic or a lighthearted gag-a-day comic. This is because it started out as the latter, and when that didn't get enough attention he tried to mould and shape it into the former.

The story is so rambling, nonsensical and stained with tears of sorrow and pain that you'll have to wait for the writing review for a real in-depth look at its many numerous horrors. For now the general gist is that an angsty teenage goth wolf was raped by his brother who murdered his sister and sent to an asylum so now he has demon powers and he uses his demon powers to turn his friends into paedophiles and rape people while he tries to build some sort of army out of lazy, lardy, whining cinema staff who do nothing but fuck each other all day.

If you managed to follow that you're already doing better than Immelman, since he's clearly making this shit up as he goes along.

Art review
From this strip: "This is pretty much how all my art classes went last year. For whatever reason, most of the class was either too kind or two artistically blind to actually criticize the artwork before them. But I wasn't. I literally received threats because of my critiques. THIS IS COLLEGE YOU PUSSIES! If you can't handle it now, how the hell do you expect to survive the real world?"

For the record, just saying "the painting looks like vomit" like in the strip linked above is not legitimate critique, that's just being an obnoxious dick. But that's not why that quote is here. The creator of Concession, Immelmann, describes himself as "a graphic art student living in Massachusetts".

You read that right, Concession is created by a graphic art student, and yet it took an entire fucking thread to convince him to stop making just a couple of his amateur mistakes. And I'm talking obvious shit here, stuff like "stop drawing the mouth on the side of the face, your comic is not a low-budget anime."

The main problem with Immelmann's shoddy art is how it stinks of laziness. Look at these fucking characters. Look at how they are drawn. And remind yourself that these characters are each meant to be different species from each other. Are you getting my point yet? Let me help you get my point. Goodness look at all these animals, all so varied with their different bone structures and things. Look at how the little mousey's nose points down, or the funny shape of the pangolin's head, or differences between their eyes and ears and things. Look at the badass claws on that motherfucker on the right. Surely all these drastically different looking animals would make a varied and creative cast of characters if you were to draw them together. Immelman... if you can't be bothered to draw animals, don't do a fucking half-assed job. What is this shit? Your mice can hardly be told apart from your fucking cats, and your cats look like stripy wolves. Have you ever actually looked at an animal? Because now I'm genuinely in doubt. Immelman was actually called out on this on his forum, and this was the reply; Drawing anthropomorphic animals... to look like animals... would make them too ugly.

Working with animal characters gives you the exciting opportunity to experiment with different body types, bone structures, anatomies, attitudes... and somehow Immelman makes every animal the fucking same. Each muzzle is an awkwardly-shaped wonky rectangle jutting from the front of the face; each eye is a big white square with a tiny pupil, slapped randomly onto the side of the head; each ear is allowed to wander around the top of the head wherever it likes. And yet somehow he thinks this makes them prettier than their original, more imaginative designs?! Immelman seems to think that giving something the colours of a tiger makes it a tiger, even if it has dog ears and the nose of a smurf. It almost gives the impression that Immelman would have been more comfortable drawing humans, but had to change the cast into anthropomorphs so he could wank to them, what with the majority of the content being badly drawn furry porno shit.

Hell, it isn't even well-packaged furry porno shit. I mean, can furries actually laugh and jack off to that lizard with the bullet nose?

Haha, we know the answer to that.

Since the creation of this review, Immelman has actually made several differences to the art in his comic.
 * He's stopped drawing the mouth anywhere randomly on the side of the face and started drawing them actually attached to the fucking jaw.
 * Wolves and cats now actually have a slight difference in the size of their muzzles.
 * Hands actually have paw pads and claws sometimes.

Now let's compare this to things that still need improvement;
 * The cat's hair looks like an octopus is flailing about between his ears.
 * Characters' arms are long narrow sticks, even characters who are intended to be overweight.
 * Characters' torsos are misshapen elongated tubes.
 * The poses of the characters seem robotic, they don't flow well.

Immelman's style, similarly to that of Tim Buckley, suffers from being a style that has a natural blandness. It is true that characters should be initially sketched in shapes, but with Immelman's art it feels as if he doesn't pad out these starting shapes at all; just connects the blocky rectangle muzzle to the big circle head and the tiny triangle ears and BAM, he's got an Immelman head.

Then again, clearly it's not the art that keeps Concession's current audience sniffling around like starving dogs.





Writing review
After all that filth you've just witnessed, are you willing to accept that the writing in this atrocity is even worse than the art? You'd better be!

Now first of all, I want you to look at this sentence I'm about to show you really long and hard. And if after that you still can't see the message we're trying to convey here, then clearly you're the creator of Concession himself. Are you ready? Ok.

When Art Spiegelman created Maus, he didn't just start with some dumb violence and animal jokes and then suddenly decide "well, that material's dried up, guess I'll use these characters that I have established to be wacky and cartoony to do a serious plot about the Holocaust!"

DO YOU SEE WHAT I AM SAYING HERE

As previously mentioned, this comic starts as a simple gag-a-day strip about furries working at a movie theater. This goes on for the first few pages, until we get our first taste of Immy's unrelenting determination to make "and then they had sex" into the only punchline ever used in his comic. And a shit punchline it is.

The gag-a-day format goes on a bit longer, but very soon after we get treated to a helping of tentacle rape porno (and then they had sex!) By now anybody even within a five-mile radius of normal is going to have ran right the fuck out of here, and for once with good reason to do so. Thus, with the bulk of the Internet audience completely lost Immelman chose to bring us into complete (and then they had sex rape!) motherfucking batshit insanity.

At this point, the comic is officially lost. From here on out, it's downright disturbing emo drama mixed with horrifically inappropriate attempts at "humor" that fail so miserably they'd might as well have been drawn by A. W. Mann.

But trust me, a paragraph is definitely not enough to cover the various themes of Immy's work and how he handles them! Let's dissect the festering toad carcass that is Concession and take a little look inside.

 1. Rape 

During Concession's current run we have been treated to no less than two separate rape scenes. (How kind.) But before these can even happen rape is mentioned numerous times for comedic value. The fact that words like "rape" and "murder" are thrown about willy-nilly by the characters on a daily basis makes it awkward when scenes like these start popping up. What the hell are you trying to do, Immelman? You've been using "lol rape" as a punchline and now you want to actually throw in an actual fucking rape scene? What reaction are you even trying to get from this?

Well let's go into the forums and find out! Reactions to this scene include;

"RAPE! that is all"

"I read the comic and all i could think of was this [insert charming 'YOU GONNA GET RAPED' macro]"

"Aw, man, can't see crap on this stupid POS monitor. Is it teh hawt raep yet?"

Well what an adorable pack of disrespectful fucking crows your fans are, Immy. I wonder how it makes a person feel to know that their characters are amusing for nothing but the depraved sexual fantasies of lonely shut-ins. Well, what about the next page, when the actual rape happens? What is the fans' reaction to such downright creepy imagery?

"NICE. ...NICE. Disturbing but also fanasizingly hot... T_T Why, God, must I be split in twain? ...but then that gets back into clonesex."

"That'd be a great way to get paid, wouldn't it? $50 per rape. I'd make a killing."

"Also, it's good of him to rock her world for an entire night, as opposed to the wham-bam of your typical rape."

"I notice that Thonnen is tied up nicely, but why is there rope around her waist? What the hell is it holding? It was also very nice of the rapist to untie her after-words."

Y'know what, I don't care how much of this shit is sarcasm, your fans are creepers Immelman.

And just for the sake of science let's check out the reaction to the most recent rape fanservice Immy threw into his pit of howling fanboys:

"Boobies"

"MILLICENTS NAKED"

"Oh my lord... that's disgusting and beautiful at the same time... well the beautiful part was panel two... the rest was just... holy hell wow"

"Nice tits :wink: . (I said that he was going to rape her)"

"This is the first strip in which there've been nipples since #63!"

Oh fuck you and your creepy moronic fans, Immelman. Clearly yours is one of those anime worlds where people who don't want to be raped just haven't realised how hot it is yet or something. That's the only explanation I can think of for you using fucking RAPE as pandering to your audience. Oh no wait; there's always the possibility that you're completely batshit mental!

 2. Paedophilia 

Downfall
There is one place where this comic completely loses it. It's near the start of the comic, and while the first comic is bad, just citing that as its downfall completely misses the horror of the following arc. Thus, in this review I'm sticking Downfall in the middle. Here is the place where the comic dies. After Immelman took his perverted horror of a Noah's Ark of Furries here it had no hope.

The arc starts out innocently enough. A little girl is lost. Aww, how cute. We have a badly drawn sheep girl looking for her parents.

Next page of the arc. Overtones of pederasty. They can't find the little girl's parents. Boo-hoo. We are sad.

After badly-timed humor comics, we have strip the third of the arc. Call the police. They find out where her house is. It's next to a red church. Two of the employees of the movie theater a movie theater employee and one of the cops start fucking right in front of everybody. The manager does nothing but say "Don't make a mess." Goddamn, we're already at Augustin Burroughs Running With Scissors here Immelman. This is completely fucking disgusting already.

Strip the fourth. Little sheep girl's house. "At the Warner residence..." The father has killed himself. The daughter's response? "Just like you, dad, running away from problems." The girl doesn't cry, or have any emotion over this. In fact, she asks him whether he needs anything at the store... "Oh, never mind." Apparently this is Immelman's idea of humor. Any way it goes, it basically means that the arc has already died from bad writing, everything after this is the equivalent of raping a corpse. Dead serious, Immelman. It doesn't matter whether you're joking or not, you've just completely ruined your entire comic.

Next comic. The characters are asking what to do with Daddy's corpse. The comic insinuates that they die in a car wreck on the way to the store. Yes, we're done with the rape, Immelman? Now apparently you're setting your comic's corpse on fire and giving it an acid bath? Fan-fuckin' tastic. You... astonishing. Piece. Of. Shit.

Final page of story arc. Little girl now lives with her grandmother because her entire family has died. Apparently she "doesn't understand what has happened", so she's serenely playing with toys. It cuts to the crash scene, where there is a massive pool of blood. The black-furred wolf licks some of it up, Jesus Christ. The response to that? "Please don't do that Joel. It worries me."

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This can't be taken as black humor, because it's steeped in bullshit drama. It can't be drama, because drama is usually well written by writers who actually fucking know something about writing, and writers who normally don't try to derive humor by a character getting stabbed in the eye.

There are all kinds of other examples of this horrifically bad, anti-humorous, not-dramatic, Gothy creepy-ass emo bullshit scattered throughout this comic like cancer. Which, ironically enough, a character has. Oh yeah, and the comic parodies his cancer in later comics. And that same character molests the little sheep girl whose entire family dies?

All of this is supposedly perpetuated by a single bad egg, the black furred character. He supposedly is the puppet-master behind this horror. He's the one that licks up the dead family's blood. He's absolutely not funny in any fucking way, but Immelman tries to derive humor from him. See that? The black-furred character skins the mild-mannered "Matt" alive. Literally, cuts his skin off, ripping skin from flesh, because Matt said something mildly humorous. Likely with screaming and agony and pain and unbelievable suffering on the part of Matt, for absolutely no Goddamn reason.

Later on? The character is absolutely fine. Imagine that! Having all your skin ripped off does nothing to you in this angsty goth drama comic! Or retarded horrible humor comic. It doesn't matter. "Matt's" so nice he knits the black-furred one a sweater. His thanks? Nothing. What does our sweethearted, mild mannered brown-striped cat ask for?

Well, how about you promise not to skin me alive again?

Oh yeah, and the two have sex later! And the black-haired wolf's mom has to check poor Matt to make sure he's good enough for her son. You know, you have to check your child's boyfriends, lest they be creepy fucking weirdos.

This comic makes me sick.

Author biography
"Immelmann" is the name the author if this particular garbage chooses to go by; a name he apparently "got from an anime." When he is not subjecting the internet to more of his shitty porn/drama/humour/furry comic he works on his other webcomic, "At the heart of it all" It's this work that is possibly the most telling about its creator.

"At the heart of it all" is a comic about Immy himself. Or, more accurately, about Immy's life, and how incredibly difficult it is for him to live it. Every strip - all beautifully rendered in shitty little stick-armed cartoon blob animals - is about his pain, his suffering, his patheticness, his suffering again, as if he's expecting it to earn him some sort of award for being such a brave little soldier.



Immelmann, Immy, whatever the hell you want to call him, is your common or garden variety of generic emo furry. There are hints to this in Concession, like the melodramatic attempts at plot, or the fact that despite being some kind of "all powerful raging demon thing" the black wolf character still insists on wearing dull, grey shirts that advertise rock bands. (I like to think that any self respecting human demon would at least have the decency to dress themselves in scary shit like skulls and intestines, and not spend all their time serving popcorn in a motherfucking cinema.)

Immelmann admits in his angst-fest side-comic that the demon/satan/wolf character is actually a marysue. So basically he feels that he can really identify with and look up to a spiteful, hate-filled bastard who does nothing but murder strangers, ruin his friend's lives and shag everyone in the neighbourhood with gay abandon. Unfortunately (for him) I sincerely doubt that Immy-wimmy has ever so much as touched an actual woman, so it seems the life of being a badass motherfucker whining melodramatic sociopath is... well actually, maybe he and the wolf aren't that different at all.

The wolf definitely gets more sex though.

Conclusion
In Conclusion



And don't forget to check out the "Concession fan reply". Where an angry fanboy wrote us an anti review... lol.

Links

 * Immelmann's own website, if you're interested.
 * DON'T EVER CHANGE IMMY WE LOVE YOU - UGLY MOOMIN-FACES ARE JUST YOUR ~STYLE~
 * The Furry: Can it be used for the forces of good?: a BWW article giving advice on how to write a furry comic.
 * Anthropomorphic Animals and Their Use in Cartoons and Comics: a BWW article about why anthropomorphic animals are used cartoons and comics.
 * Circle 4 - On cracked.com's "The 5 Circles Baffling Webcomic Hell".
 * Webcomic Relief on YouTube also has a review of Concession.