Parallax

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Original review author: ZenForce in September 2022
Webcomic name: Parallax
Author: M. Falke
Start Date: December 3, 2014
End Date: December 3, 2020
Genre: Superheroe/Magical Girl? I'm not sure...
Defining Flaw: Unbearable protagonist + really slow pace + rushed and unfinished ending is not a good combo


Rating Summary

Art: Wiki.pngWiki.pngWiki.pngWiki.png

It’s very nice and stylized artwork, but there are some questionable designs for the characters here and there. Especially with the main character.

Storyline: Wiki.pngWiki.pngWiki.png

Pretty decent writing, but the pacing of it and the length of the comic does more bad than good for the storyline.

Characters: Wiki.pngHalf.png

The protagonist is unlikable, his master is a hurried idiot, the villains are not very developed, the side characters… well, everyone has their own special case.

Miscellaneous Details: Half.png

You hope that the last chapter answers some of your questions? Fat chance, mate. Wait for the sequel, if it ever will happen.

Overall: Wiki.pngWiki.pngHalf.png

At the start may you believe it’s an OK comic. But the more you process it in your head, the more you realize how hollow it is.



Background

This comic was brought up in the forum by the user Cinnayanny, calling it like not an aggressively bad webcomic, but an “uniquely type of bad” webcomic. Since it is a really short one, I decided to read it entirely and check how true these statements are. Not only had i discovered that all that they said is true, but (to my surprise) there are even more problems than they described. So let’s see the problems with this…

Downfall

The technical downfall is between the second half of the second chapter and the third chapter, but my personal downfall is the third page, where we see the protagonist crying because his DS’s battery died. Yeah, we start really strong here...

Story and Plot

We follow the life of Lomax Torchstone, a 17 years old edgy crybaby loner trapped in the most boring town in the history of existence, aka Silverdalen (even though it looks like an average town, meaning that Lomax is even more of a whiny bitch), until his physics professor, Dan Rogers, recruits him with a piece of magic glass (called Raiments) for some random paranormal exterminator of “Matter-horners”, creatures that can be best described as Sirenhead-like monsters, but instead of sirens they have geometric obsidian objects for heads. From here we follow their adventures full of mysteries, battles, betrayal, coming-of-age, long scenes of walking and talking, and more for 6 chapters and 305 pages. These chapters are:


Chapter 1/0: Shard/Up is the Only Way

Chapter 0/1 cover.

We meet Lomax and see how “miserable” his life is, how he met his teacher, and his first transformation.

Things to highlight:


Chapter 2: Pierced by Starlight

Chapter 2 cover.

Lomax fights his first monster, and we see the series of events that derived in this battle.

Things to highlight:


Chapter 3: Hazy

Chapter 3 cover.

After the hospitalization, Lomax explores his powers a little, and while he is in another monster extermination mission, he meets another mysterious raiment user that tries to kill him.

Things to highlight:


Chapter 4: Blue

Chapter 4 cover.

Dan and Lomax go on another hunting mission in Central Park, and meets a blue haired Raiment user that Dan mistrust instantly.

Things to highlight:


Chapter 5: The Conductor

Chapter 5 cover.

We finally met the real enemy, and we see the real colors of Dan.

Things to highlight:


Chapter 6

Chapter 6 cover

The outcome of the rescue of the duo.

Things to highlight:

Art Review

When someone says that something is eye candy, this comic is one example of it. The colors, the shading, the effects, how the panels are distributed, the backgrounds, and the covers; there's almost nothing bad about art that you can complain about… Well, except for one thing: the characters design. In specific, four characters:

  1. Lomax: If you read until the third page, then you probably noticed that he has really thick and long eyelashes. The question is: why does he has them? These things are out of tune with the rest of the characters, since the only other character that has them is his father. Nobody else has them, not even THE ONLY THREE FEMALE CHARACTERS OF THE ENTIRE COMIC. Perhaps the author just wanted a girly looking protagonist? If this is the case, then I say: Go full femboy or don’t do it, don’t stay halfway.
    Lomax.jpg
  2. The cat: Look at him, look at the eyes:
    Ramsay.jpg
    Doesn’t he looks like he will be an important character, like a sidekick or something? Well, no. That cat is only a background character. So why give him such detailed and humanoid looking eyes, if he will not be important to the story? It looks like that at any moment, he'll stand up on two legs and start singing. I believe that the author realized this, because later appearances of this cat always have his eyes closed, or backwards, or with his head outside the panel.
  3. The blue haired guy: Again, WHY THE BOOB WINDOW?!
    BlueGuy.jpg
  4. Walt/The purple raiment: No matter how much I read and re-read the comic, I still can’t believe that these two characters are the same person. He is the only raiment user that has this; the rest of them maintain the gender and body structure. The comic never explains why or how this happens.
    Comparación.jpg

Writing Review

Now here is where the real shitstorm starts. Let’s begin with the protagonist, Lomax. He is basically an edgy loner who can’t seem to even speak to other people... not exactly a character you want to emphasize or root for. The worst part is that there is no justification for this attitude: his parents are not pressing him to study all day or anything; there are no bullies or people judge-whispering; or anything in his environment to cause or sustain this depression. The pressure of the school, maybe? He says that he didn’t want to be in a science major, but from my view, it's not because his parents forced him to study that career, but because his parents suggested that career and he accepted it, just because he is incapable of saying no. It’s the most logical conclusion by looking at his attitude in the entire comic. And don’t make me start with all the times he cries. The comic literally starts with the main character crying for his DS’s dead battery, BECAUSE HIS DS’S DEAD BATTERY!!! Man, grow some balls. The only valid reason to cry for a console is because your saved game gets corrupted and leaves your console useless. The only character that I can think of when I see Lomax is Shinji from Neon Genesis Evangelion, but at least Shinji doesn’t reveal how much of a weak cowardly bitch he is in the first episode! This makes the finale feels empty, because it does not feel that Lomax deserves this end. Also, with his withdrawn attitude, he has the annoying character flaw of not really wanting to be the main character in anything - he does not seek adventure: he's trying to avoid it - but the comic seems to treat him as if he's seeking out adventure. All the adventure can be defined like "I'm an edgy loner, nobody understands me" to "what? mystical powers? eww, I don't want this". Normally a good story would have that turn into "I accept my new powers and responsibility, and grow with the task", but this never happens. Or who knows... Maybe in the sequel will appear this feature, but I'm getting ahead in the review. This is a little similar to the transflake from Forward, but less in your face.

But the problems don’t stop with Lomax, next we will talk about Lewi. There two problems with him: First, his friendship with Lomax comes out of nowhere. Like, in the end of the battle where he is introduced, they have a relationship comparable with months of knowing each other, and at the end of the comic, Lomax and Lewi have a super close relationship that comes out of nowhere. And guess what? I don't care about this blue fucker! I have no reason to care about him or his interactions with Lomax; and that is the second problem, he is of zero importance to what's left of the plot, and he doesn’t add anything to it. He is literally used for only two things: being a joke because his keyword is ass, and showing Lomax the surroundings of Silverdale (apparently, it's a country, what the fuck?), something that Dan could have easily done instead. Hell, it would have been infinitely better if in the fourth chapter Dan showed that he is a Raiment user, instead of this irrelevant guy. Talking about Dan, until you come to the fourth chapter, you will spend your entire time thinking of why this teacher randomly gives his crybaby student a shard of magic glass and forces him defend the local town. But even with the explication, doesn’t answer the question of why he chooses him specifically, or why he didn’t search for another solution for his situation that he is in doesn't involving killing himself by summoning monsters. I can continue ranting about the rest of characters, but it will go on forever, so let’s go to the final point.

Finally, we have the pacing, the length and the finale of the comic. As you will have noticed, this is a coming-of-age story, but you also noticed that it has 305 pages and six chapters. It's few, too few for this type of story, because it doesn’t leave you much space for developing. How do you solve this problem? Well, not by speeding up the pacing like it was chased. The start is really slow, where you are looking at solid half of the pages consisting of Lomax moping and being a whiny bitch, but around the halfway point of the second chapter the writer gets real sick of writing and starts speedrunning to get world record for ending a comic. This disinterest of the author is denoted with the sixth chapter because 1) This is the chapter with the least number of pages; 2) The chapter is not even named; and 3) the author doesn’t even bother to put a hotlink for it in the archive. But at the same time, somehow the pacing feels like a glacier at some points of this acceleration. I guess is because the comic spends so much time making the characters walk and talk, and the interesting moments are really short. How the hell you can do this, by accident?

Talking about the finale, the ending is by far my least favorite part. Mostly because it's not an ending. It's a climax, a sequel setup. We've practically lost the school roots. And this leaves a lot of questions without answers. What questions? Well, let’s bring back the pins here: What are the runes for, since the only thing that we see doing is glow with the shards? What does the plot have to do with this 7 years old girl in the news? And why was this little girl in an archaeological area alone? Why a cult, organizations known for use worthless things to manipulate their members, gives gold rings for symbols? Why not a glass ring, where it would have more sense with the theming? Why is Walt being the only Raiment user that changes gender with his transformation? Did Dan plant the monster of the third chapter then hid somewhere to save Lomax in last moment; or plant the monster, go to his house, and come back to the site? Why are there clues that both things happened? Why Dan is the only one has a side effect, since the rest of Raiment users spam their powers and don’t experience any? Since the government of Silverdale is interested in the occult the secrets of the archeological excavations, why don't they put out a special security to patrol the zone? Why did Marcus fault the machine and not his father for the divorce? Why did Lomax's parents straight up fucking vanish from the third chapter onward, even though they are an integral part of his character development? None of these questions have answers, and those are the questions that I remember. What a good finale, no?

Author Biography

I tried, okay? I tried to find information about M. Falke, but the only things that I found about him is this reupload in Pinterest, where it says that he is a cartoonist, illustrator, game artist and “all-round creative person”; and the Twitter of the comic. But there is no more information about him… It looks like the author came out of the ground, spawned the comic, and went back to that ground hole.

Update: The user Taim Safar came to the forum with new information. Apparently M. Falke had a personal twitter account called FIGHTBEAST, which was suspended under the accusation of ownership of CP drawings. Basically because he was drawing NSFW ship art of Randy Cunningham and Howard Weinerman. Here some twits about it:

Twits M. Fallen.jpg

If you search for “FIGHTBEAST Weinerham” results in some the Weinerham ship art. There also a post on reddit asking about the whereabouts of FIGHTBEAST:

Reddit Post.jpg

Oh, and he appears to have an NSFW account named Betobetolove, which he used to publish two comics named Baron’s Black Book and Sparky’s Magical Cam. I also add that in one their grammatical revisions of Cinnayanny, they mentioned that M. Falke had a Patreon that he tells us that he has money problems and he lives solely off his artwork, but also was deleted of existence because of the polemic and only is findable by wayback machine. I would have put it before, but since didn’t find it I decided to leave it out of the initial review.

Conclusion

The best analogy for this comic it is this: You find a gold nugget on the floor, you grab it, and then you discover something strange with the nugget, you scratch it a little, and discover that your dog ate a Ferrero Rocher. If there ever will be a sequel, I doubt anyone will be interested in it. At least I’m not.

Links

And since there is not much else, I will list of the artists that been featured in the webcomic with guest comics: