Ozy and Millie

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Rating Summary

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Background
One of the first webcomics I learned about when I started reading webcomics, and it actually managed to live up to the hype it received.

Downfall
The strip weakened a bit as it got toward the end, but not to the "jump the shark" level, and D. C. Simpson ended it with a bang, if not quite the ending I hoped. (I would have preferred Locke over Llewellyn as the groom.)

Story and Plot
There is no overall storyline, just a series of short stories using the characters.

Art review
What typically happens in this webcomic.

Black and white line drawings with some shading, with the occasional color ones. Rather coarse at the beginning, but soon gets much better. The characters look like genuine children and adults, and are cute without being excessively so. The proportions of the figures make the characters actually look more animal-like than many furry artists manage to achieve-a major part of the strip's charm.



Writing review
The comic is much like the old Calvin and Hobbes strip in the sense that the children have unusually large vocabularies for their age, but is otherwise not derivative. Unlike Calvin and Hobbes, where the tiger is just a stuffed toy made alive by the boy's imagination, fantastical elements in the strip are real-not really a surprise in a comic whose characters are anthropomorphic animals. The dragon Llewellyn and his relatives are weird but real, and the pirate world hidden in the sofa is also real-in fact the pirate captain Locke is Millie's biological father. (Locke also ages back and forth from childhood to adulthood and back.)   There is a series of storylines over the course of the strip, some of which work and some which don't.  Some representative strips over the years:

1998: Ozy and Millie disprove an old quote 1999: Millie meets Captain Locke 2000: Millie tries her paw at avant-garde art 2001: Ozy is an arctic fox, which is not always advantageous in winter 2002: How our heroes' plans typically turn out 2003: Millie's plans for Career Day at school 2004: Millie talks religion (D. C. Simpson herself is an atheist, BTW) 2005: Millie shows her schoolwork to her mother 2006: Llewellyn deals with the neighbors 2007: In real life, D. C. Simpson will take this idea much further 2008: Ms. Mudd's retaliation against an unfair schoolteacher

Also, there is the annual running joke of Millie shaving Ozy, akin to Lucy and the football in the old Peanuts comic.

Author biography
D. C. Simpson is best known as the author of the well-regarded furry webcomic Ozy and Millie, which has received much acclaim and numerous awards. Unfortunately Simpson's talents seem to have deserted her lately. The liberal Simpson, an MTF transsexual who recently had her sex-change operation completed a few years ago, seems to have had her wit and wonderful sense of humor removed in her operation, with her later work consisting of heavy handed and ultimately impenetrable political allegories like Raine Dog, although humorless, pretentious political comics such as I Drew This prove that even in her Ozy and Millie days she had a penchant for being overblown and unfunny. She did finally receive syndication for a new strip of hers, with the working title of Girl, but unfortunately she simply recycles her old Ozy and Millie strips for that one. Fortunately the new strip that has appeared in newspapers, Heavenly Nostrils, about a little girl and a unicorn she adopted, does take its own path, so there is hope for her yet.

Conclusion
Fortunately this is what D. C. Simpson will always be remembered by.

Other Comics By This Author That Have Been Reviewed On Our Site

 * I Drew This
 * Raine Dog

Links

 * Define Cynical, a website for Ozy And Millie fans

The awards this comic has won:
 * Winner of the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic in 2002
 * Winner of the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip in 2006
 * Winner of the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip in 2007

And TV Tropes has an article on them too:
 * Ozy And Millie on TV Tropes