Boston and Shaun

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Rating Summary

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Background


You know, when I stumbled onto this comic for the first time, I thought it was very innocent an unassuming. I actually thought that this thing was something whimsical meant for general audiences. ...And then someone told me about a lovely thing called "vore". Vore is defined as a fetish wherein one gets off on watching another eat voraciously, to the point of getting fat. Really fat. You can call it other stuff, like weight gain/expansion, but fuck it, it's all the same wank fodder. Vore it is.

Boston and Shaun just happens to be the story of a kangaroo and his little dragon friend, and said dragon friend always encourages the kangaroo to overeat, swell up, or otherwise get fat.

I REALLY DIDN'T KNOW THERE WAS A FUCKING FETISH BEHIND THIS THING.  Words can't describe the feeling I had when I first found out about the voraphilia behind this comic, so I made a little picture to sum up my emotions. I call it: "Norad Bush Bleeds from the Eyes."



That said, I'm revisiting this review to educate folks as I have been recently educated on spotting fetishism and why it's not okay to put it in an otherwise kiddie-looking comic.

Downfall
Could this thing ever go up??

Story and Plot


Boston and Shaun is the adventures of Boston, a little green dragon, Shaun, his kangaroo friend. (In the original version, Shaun was a human boy.) There isn't much of a plot here except that Shaun is young and must go to school and take his dragon friend with him wherever he goes. Then a lot of jokes ensue about Shaun getting really fat when he gets nervous or eats a lot of ice cream. Really. This is one of the major driving forces of whatever plot is here. Shaun either expands from getting nervous or fat from overeating. Everything else is mundane bullshit.

Author Biography
Shaun Reveal is a furry fetishist and needs to keep his lunacy off the internet where people can see it.

Art Review
The art here is atrocious. This comic is a major offender in the copy-cut-paste category, often reusing frames with little or no changes. The backgrounds are often simplistic gradients and the character rendering is pedestrian at best. While some of you may say that this is MS Paint quality, I argue that some sort of vector program is used to put out this tripe. If you look at the lines that comprise, well, everything they are very smooth. Line width doesn't vary at all in the inking and there is no cell shading/highlighting whatsoever. This tells me that there is a very amateur vector artist at work. The artwork looks like some crappy clip art you'd find in some print shop software. 15 years ago.

Writing Review
The writing is wretched. The dialogue often includes really weak punchlines, some that make you wonder if there was even a joke to be had. There really is no plot. Shaun's parents are mundane and stupid. Shaun doesn't want to go to school. Shaun meets friends at at school. Blah, blah, blah. The mundane is very disarming, but don't be fooled by this thing. It slips into freaky creepy territory before you know it.

Throughout many parts of the comic, Shaun gets fat from getting nervous. Shaun overeats. Boston, Shaun's dragon, encourages him to overeat. There's a lot of expansion of this poor kangaroo here, and at first I couldn't figure out why. When one realizes that there's a vore fetish at play here, it puts a whole new spin on the (hideously) colorful picture we've got here. Shaun is supposed to get fat for the audience. Huge. Obese. And this is all because the fetishists out there are GETTING OFF ON IT. And it gets worse.

Boston likes to stay in his pouch. HIS pouch. Never mind that in the marsupial world, males do not have pouches. No, Boston just wants to hide out in what is essentially a WOMB on a MALE. Stop and think for a minute how disturbing this really is. At first I just wrote it off as just weird, but look past the innocent veil of this thing and see it for what it really is. More fucking vore. According to the Encyclopedia Dramatica (don't click that if you value your decency!), marsupial pouch play is part of the vore fetish as well. Voraphiles like to watch people get shoved into certain parts of other people's bodies. LIKE DRAGONS INTO KANGAROO POUCHES. The whole sick picture is coming together, isn't it folks?

The worst part of all that this is all under a very unassuming guise, such that someone who didn't know better would think that this is all innocent fun. Odd, but innocent. But it's not innocent at all! It's horrible and porny and there are folks who look at this sort of thing to get off! I'm not the only who feels that fetishes aren't really a bad thing. I'm not mad at the fetish itself, but I'm mad at it being presented so innocently. If an author feels the need to make porn, just make it porn for real aimed at adults. Don't let that kind of creepiness affect our children, for Godsakes!

Conclusion
There are plenty of problems with this comic. The art is bad. The dialogue is bad. EVERYTHING IS BAD.  But the worst thing of all is this piece masquerading as something it's not. Shaun Reveal, I don't care if you make a comic about vore or porn or furries shitting on each other while singing opera and eating live squid. Just keep your fucking creepiness away from society's innocents!

Links

 * Shaun Reveal's 2001 About Me Page Dear God this person is out of his fucking mind.
 * Boston and Shaun Woopedia They don't have much nicer things to say than I did.
 * B&S Makes Something Awful's Link of the Day! Apparently the internet knew how badly this thing sucked before I ever came along.
 * Something Awful also made and entire article yep...
 * Encyclopedia Dramatica Vore Definition In case you missed it above, Encyclopedia Dramatica's definition of vore. NSFW!
 * Circle 4 On cracked.com's "The 5 Circles Baffling Webcomic Hell".
 * Youtube Video Audiobook of this comic... Hilarious.
 * The Annotated Version A mock Tumblr.