User:Demerol

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Hey, it's Demerol.

Review drafts will be posted here when I get around to writing them.


Original review author: Demerol
Forum Discussion Threads: Link Dead due to 2021 hacks
Webcomic name: A little more humiliation
Author: J. Riley McCool
Start Date: April 9, 2016
End Date: Ongoing
Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Furry
Defining Flaw: Messy art & confusing writing




Rating Summary


Art: Wiki.png

Looks sloppy and rushed, with little semblance of improvement over time.

Storyline: Wiki.png

Any potentially interesting aspects are screwed over by a baffling plot, pisspoor pacing, and inarticulate writing.

Characters: Wiki.png |Half.png

They're fine, I guess. None are particularly interesting, but none are egregiously bad either.

Miscellaneous Details: Half.png

Someone with 15 years of experience should at least be able to fucking proofread.

Overall: Wiki.png

Pretty terrible, though perhaps not irredeemable.



Background

So here's the story: One day I was browsing The Duck, came across this comic, and decided it wasn't good. I then posted it on the BWW forums, where a consensus was reached that it wasn't good. So far, that's par for the course. But then, while doing research for this review, we found out that A Little More Humiliation(ALMH) is actually a sequel to another comic, Public Humiliation.

So does that turn the review on it's head? Not really. I'm pressing ahead with writing this review for two reasons

  1. The BWW tries to focus on comics that are still ongoing, so writing a separate review for a comic that ended five years ago doesn't make much sense.
  2. Most of my criticisms for ALMH apply to Public Humiliation as well, since there isn't a huge difference in quality between the two.

Since this is a sequel, I will add context/clarification regarding its predecessor when appropriate. Don't worry if you haven't read Public Humiliation, you really aren't missing out on much. Now, on with the review.


Downfall

The comic's problems are visible from page 1, and it doesn't get much better from there.

Story and Plot

A Little More Humiliation picks up where Public Humiliation left off. To save time and sanity, I'll condense the backstory into a quick outline for you:

  • The world is inhabited by dragons & "pookas" (magical cat-rabbit things who are also shapeshifters or something) that live alongside humans.
  • The main focus of the story is on Lan & Warmwind, a pooka and dragon respectively, who are adoptive brothers.
  • Lan and Warmwind serve as psychopomps on behalf of Hades, who is Lan's grandfather(somehow).
  • At the end of the original comic , the old Hades dies, making Lan the new god of the underworld in the process.

(Still confused? So am I. Buckle your seatbelt, it only gets worse from here.)

We begin with Lan having just found out that he's the new Hades. This is then followed up on the very next page with the news that both him and his brother have families that they never knew about before. You'd probably expect this to be a bombshell development in any other story, but ALMH steams right past this in favor of having Warmwind bring Lan into their new house. (Which he knew about already, even though Lan didn't?). Apparently gods live in gaudy McMansions in this universe, complete with terrible 3D backgrounds.

Lan, now in human form, meets his 4 year-old daughter for the first time, and establishes their relationship by saying "You smell like my Elvina...I think I might be your dad". After this "touching" meeting, the little girl promptly disappears from the next page without explanation, and we instead introduced to two of Warmwind's kids(Pip and Thermal), as well as Sky, another young daughter of Lan that he never knew about. This reunion is even less emotional than the first one: Sky greets her long-lost father with about as much passion as you might greet a 7-11 cashier, and then immediately runs off to do something else. Lan, for his part, is stone-faced during the entire exchange and barely gives a coherent response at the end.

After some one-off strips, we meet yet another new character, Kite, who is Warmwind's wife. Despite having previously mentioned that Warmwind already had a mate, Lan again just accepts this without question. Oh, and she can fly, because why not. There's a brief attempt at exploring a broader theme about how someone might feel about finding themselves a stranger to their own family, but this is quickly forgotten.

Warmwind and Lan fuck around for a bit, then Warmwind something about about Lan only being able to see his wives...during certain seasons? What? (And yes, that's wives, as in plural - pookas are polygamists, at least according to TvTropes.) While this matter goes unaddressed, we do get to find out that Warmwind's son, Thermal, is being trained by his father as a new reaper. Even the underworld can't escape nepotism, it seems.

At this point, the biggest issue with the writing has become visible, namely its inability to explain what the fuck is going on at any given point. The story is throwing this dense mass of information at us with zero context, leaving the reader feeling more and more lost with each scene. Combine this with the slow pacing, and it makes the first 50 pages an absolute slog to get through. I'll elaborate on these points further in the Writing review section, but for now I just wanna make clear why I'm having to paraphrase so much: trying to glean context from this comic is like trying to decipher a foreign language.

So anyway, Lan tells Warmwind that he "needs to get back to the war" - presumably there was a war in the last story- but Warmwind says he can't because he's dead, which makes sense. Kite arrives, there's some banter around the dinner table, and then Lan teleports away to a ship.

Wait, what?





Art review

Writing review

Author biography

Conclusion

Links