A Game of Fools
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Someone (either the creator or the hosting service) pulled the plug on this webcomic. The links in this review are dead. If you want to see more of this webcomic for some insane reason, the Wayback Machine is your best bet. And even that's a long shot. | 
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| Original review author: | Groggarioth |
| Webcomic name: | A Game of Fools |
| Author: | Asha Leu |
| Start Date: | August 2, 2009 |
| End Date: | February 12, 2010 |
| Genre: | Sci-fi, Comedy? |
| Defining Flaw: | Everything, just everything |
Rating Summary
| Art: | [no stars given]
I am deeply ashamed that this mess can even be called art. It gets no stars what-so-ever. |
| Storyline: | 
One part comedy, one part science fiction, add some originality, and sprinkle with shit (gallons and gallons of shit). |
| Characters: |
I wish a slow, torturous death on all these characters, save for two; they get a quick death. |
| Overall: |
At the very least, it is original. Sadly it is also unwanted, unneeded, and unjustifiable in its existence, as it should not be. |
Background
It seems a lot of the webcomics I read come from TV Tropes, mainly tropes that involve villainy, evil or color theory. Going through this page you'll find at least two good comics, and at least 8 bad ones, some of which have already been featured on this site.
I was going through this page when I came across this little note: "Gloog from A Game of Fools. Even the Big Bad is pretty horrified by his alternate plans for the Alien Invasion." Fool that I am, I thought that it was a human general/scientist with some dark intentions for an invading species, of course I was 100% wrong. Turns out the plan that Gloog had wasn't morbidly dark, or interestingly evil, but I'll get into that in the writing section.
Update: TVTropes removed the Gloog quote (and several others) on Sep 10, 2012 for not being evil enough to be considered complete monsters.
Downfall
By the definition of the word "downfall", a downfall must happen after the start of its event. In that case, the first downfall of this comic is the third page, where I started noticing a rare phenomenon found most commonly in bad art called "Hand-Foot", where the palm of the hand begins halfway down the forearm, and the fingers are only a quarter of their normal length. No matter what I am reading, if I see Hand-Foot, it gets an instantaneous banishment to the 7th Circle of Artist Hell, where demons constantly pull your bones and flesh into increasingly more twisted and disgusting forms. (See also: the characters in Jack, and Jack (the other Jack.)
Story and Plot
Our three lovable scamps, Adam (the straight man, A.K.A. "he who should be sectioned"), Joey (the stupid one, A.K.A. "he who should be under constant adult supervision") and Sylvester (the conspiracy pothead, A.K.A. "burn his corpse and salt the ground where his deep unmarked grave is") go out camping. They get abducted by the one sympathetic character, Captain Septultra, and the most disgusting character, his subordinate, Admiral Gloog.
Our three main characters (they're not heroes, they can't be heroes) escape through the stupidity of everyone else; as they return home they meet recurring character 'Tomato' who almost manages to top Gloog on the revulsion list, and we discover that even Adam's cat Emmy is not free of the evil taint that affects all the living creatures in this comic.
Then events happen, and the aliens kill off the actors of Batman, Superman, and all 10 Doctor Who's believing them to be Earth's greatest defenders...
I don't want to rehash any more comics, I'm just 60 comics in out of 216, and already I feel dirty and tired. Here's a bullet point summary:
- Adam gets a job with a completely unlikable character (unenthused yaaay).
- Sylvester's sister, Katie, moves in with the guys.
- They discover that their old landlord was an alien in disguise, and that he's become the part of the Australian government.
- They capture Admiral Gloog and torture him for information. It turns out he gains sexual pleasure from torture. (Extremely unenthused yaaaaay.)
- Gloog escapes because Joey is an Idiot.
- Septultra is replaced in the alien army by Captain Nique, who is just as sympathetic if not more intelligent.
- More completely unlikable characters show up in the form of Sylvester's mother, her boyfriend, and his dog.
- The aliens attack burning down the house and a fight ensues, with the characters torturing captain Nique and planning to take his place in the alien army.
And that is where the comic ends with the threat of coming back soon...
Yeah, please don't.
Art review
Let us sing a fun little song,
A fun little song of all things wrong,
It involves two friends of sub-par taste,
Their names are copy and paste, copy and paste (repeat ad nauseam)
The artwork is less offensive than the writing, but that's not saying much, because the only difference is that it's consistently bad. There were three artists who contributed to this catastrophe. Asha Leu, the writer and owner of this comic, whose art is by far the worst art I have ever seen... the faces are commonly blocky rectangles, with a lump for the chin, or pointed chins that resemble a bullet that has gained a horrible sentience and knows that its only purpose is to kill and die in an explosive burst of gore and viscera, and everything wrong with humanity...
Sorry, I went on a tangent there, don't know what possessed me. The second artist, and the best one by far, is Danielle Phillips. Although after closer inspection, and some time away from the main comic, her art is still pretty littered with art mistakes, like inconsistent proportions and an ever-present use of copy paste. The biggest problem with her art, however, is that it doesn't last long enough. She barely draws 20 strips before fucking off back to Rat's Ass, Nowhere, and leaving us to suffer the blinding mess that is Asha Leu's art work.
The third artist is James Miller who stuck around for all of 9 strips, from 68 to 77. I can only think that he saw the script and ran away screaming in terror, like those who see the face of Great Cthulhu, their minds forever broken and twisted, and left empty shells of humanity... or he just couldn't be bothered anymore. Considering the single shape style that he uses sets a new level of laziness for a comic artist, this second explanation is far more likely.
Writing review
Every single character in this comic is slime or worse. The writing in this thing is beyond even the worst fan fiction where 'suddenly Vegeta'. I am truly dumber for having read this thrice-accursed abomination all the way through.
The writing is far, far worse than the art in that it is inconsistently bad. "How?" Let me list the ways.
- In the first comic, the three main characters are playing Dungeons and Dragons (never mind that you generally need at least 4 people to make a Dungeons and Dragons group) but they don't have any maps or models, and they have people getting stoned and drunk at the table. But they do have dice so I guess they have everything important.
- Joey, the certified idiot and RAPIST, is the designated driver. He is so incompetent that he can't even kill a person who has managed to become stuck under the back doors, and yet they rely on him to go anywhere that the bus doesn't.
- They go camping because Joey wants to see 'wood nymphs' (so he basically wants to fuck a corpse that is turning into a tree).
- As I said earlier in the Downfall, Gloog had his own plans for the invasion. Those plans turning women and children into sex slaves while killing us off at random and then raping our corpses. Are you sensing a theme with the corpse-fucking and death?
- Katie's mother's boyfriend is a drunken, homophobic redneck drug dealer, who acts like the series is set in America, when it is set in Hell. (Read: it's supposed to be set in Australia, but the setting is almost as bad as CWCville so yeah, it's set in Hell.)
- Sylvester's best friend is 'Tomato' (to-may-to) a serial murderer, rapist, animal abuser, inciter and just general scum, and somehow Adam is a bad guy for not wanting him in the house.
I would love to list everything bad with the comic's writing, but we'd be here for another ten pages if I did that, so in summary... This comic is wrong, it should not be, and I can only feel hate for its writer. A deep, seething hate.
Author biography
Asha Leu is Australian. He has a master's degree in creative writing from Queensland University of Technology, and as far as I can tell he hasn't been involved in any internet drama. His only fault is having a girly name and making this godforsaken waste of time.
Conclusion
You know, I wish I could find this guy and ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing when he made this, and get his honest opinion on his own fucking work. Because without his defense of it, this comic has utterly no redeeming features at all. It fails at humor, it fails at drama, it fails at tragedy, it fails at being worth my time, your time, the time that it took to create, and the energy it takes to store it on the internet. It is utterly worthless, and so should be cast back into empty void of space where hopefully it will never be found before it drifts into a star and is reduced to pure ash... but then that creates the risk that it becomes stardust, and becomes a part of everything. I don't know what I'd do if that happened. I really don't.
