Bengal Tales

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CODE YELLOW: CHEESECAKE
(MODERATE NSFW WARNING)

The following comic desperately wants to be porn without actually being porn. Contains more fanservice and fetish fuel than any actual sex, usually patterned off of bad harem comedy anime. It may not even have full nudity (at most may contain exposed boobs), but your teacher/parents/coworkers will surely give you some odd glances if they catch you seeing this. View with caution.

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WARNING: The following webcomic is a complete mindfuck.

This webcomic is disturbing enough to unsettle most readers. It's not necessarily offensive, but features horrible and unsettling perversions and incomprehensible stupidity.
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Original review author: Long Tom
Webcomic name: Bengal Tales
Author: Tom Delano
Start Date: January 1, 2017
End Date: Ongoing
Genre: Furry Soap Opera
Defining Flaw: Poor artwork with excessive reuse of pictures, an erratically paced and unrealistic storyline, and a Gary Stu self-insert protagonist who can literally get away with anything a la Ferris Bueller. And I hate Ferris Bueller.

Rating Summary

Art: Wiki.png

Stiff, flat, poorly proportioned, inconsistent, and heavily relies on the reuse of the same pictures a la Stalag '99. Like that webcomic, it is visually boring and suggests the author is too lazy to care.

Storyline: Wiki.png

Sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow, unrealistic events happen which spoil the story's credibility.

Characters: Half.png

A Gary Stu self-insert protagonist who can literally get away with anything and supporting characters who are not too credible either.

Miscellaneous Details: Wiki.png Wiki.png

Max Black Rabbit's character Zig Zag is a part of this webcomic (yes with permission), but as explained below, she turns out to be an actual blood relative of the webcomic's protagonist, and that is a major element in the story.

Overall: Wiki.png

A more appropriate title for this webcomic would be "J. J., The Gary Stu Self-Insert Who Can Do No Wrong-Even When He Does".



Background

A BWW forum thread pointed to a list of possible webcomics for review. I clicked on this title at random, and just from seeing one strip concluded this was potentially review-worthy. Reading a few more strips changed the adjective to "definitely".

Downfall

This webcomic always sucked.

Story and Plot

The story opens with two engineers of Cincinnati Design Engineers Design Group 6 who turn out to be fighting pals. Ordered to train a new employee, they describe their past to her, and even invite her to Cincinnati Bockfest.

OK, a couple of problems right off the bat. For one, it's difficult to believe a new, inexperienced employee solving in one night a software problem that stumped his employers for six months, simply by looking at it backwards. (Other engineers would not have already thought of that?) Is this supposed to be like the movie Good Will Hunting, about a college janitor who is secretly a mathematical genius? Not necessarily, but J. J. does sound suspiciously like a Gary Stu self-insert by the author. Also, I can tell you that an invitation by two male employees of a female trainee to an outside event might be considered inappropriate by an employer; my own employer has specifically trained us about this. But moving on:

The two best friends are having a restaurant meal when J. J. spots an attractive waitress named Liana at the restaurant, and a day later J. J. asks her on a date and she gives him her number. Turns out to be for real. They become close enough where J. J. is willing to tell Liana about his family problems. At a later stag party for one of the other company workers about to get married, none other than Max Black Rabbit's character Zig Zag is a performer. But she does not merely make a cameo appearance; the author goes so far as to make J. J. and Zig Zag blood relatives. (Second cousins, as explained beneath the picture.) But despite this fact, Zig Zag and J. J. end up having a brief incestuous sexual relationship, and on top of that, Zig Zag says that it was the first time she ever made love as opposed to just having sex. Even that might have been forgivable, as in her canon biography she had been sexually abused by her father as a child, and J. J. and Zig Zag were two consenting adults. But even then, wouldn't they at least have discussed, even briefly, whether it was morally right for them to have sex with each other when they were blood relatives? Instead, they simply hop into the sack as if it were perfectly normal. But why would they even have sex with each other at all? Perhaps if J. J. had a virginity problem and he had been too afraid to have sex with a woman, Zig Zag arguably would have done him a favor since she could not get pregnant (mentioned in the story) and they could trust each other, but he admitted to her that he had already had sex before. (I have heard the story of how fathers would take their sons to brothels when they became of age to learn how to have sex, but I'm not certain this sort of thing happens in real life.) More likely the author's intention was to show the world that his self-insert character would be the greatest lover the famous furry porn star Zig Zag would ever have. This is nothing more than crass egotism, all the worse because his character already was starting a romance with another woman.

But what would happen later would damage the story's credibility beyond redemption.

We learn Zig Zag's "real name", at least in this scenario-and it turns out she hates it being used. But J. J. still has his budding romance with Liana, and in any case Zig Zag's anger is short-lived. Shortly afterward the two of them go on a roller coaster ride together and afterward Zig Zag and Liana meet at a dinner and the two of them seem to get on.

Later Zig Zag and J. J. briefly visit J. J.'s mother in Tennessee and J. J. returns to work and has to train an intern and afterward takes Liana on a riverboat cruise in Tennessee, but it's abruptly back to work again. Then the gang have fun at Oktoberfest and J. J. and Zig Zag go on yet another roller coaster ride, but shortly afterward Zig Zag has to fend off an overzealous fan.

Halloween arrives, and Zig Zag invites her relatives over, but an unexpected unpleasantness occurs. Fortunately J. J. defuses the situation. Later comes Thanksgiving when Liana and her relatives visit J. J. and Zig Zag, but unfortunately afterward J. J. and Zig Zag confess their incestuous liaison to Liana, which unsurprisingly upsets her greatly. But Zig Zag would soon visit Liana at her workplace to try to salvage the situation and shortly afterward J. J. and Liana meet, and they quickly make up, and the relationship carries on as if the incident never occurred. (Duh, you'd think that J. J. and Zig Zag would simply have never mentioned their tryst to anyone else in the first place, let alone Liana. What logical reason was there for doing so? In fact, Liana specifically said that she would have preferred it if they had never mentioned it to her.) Then J. J.'s younger brother, a U. S. Army private, returns home from Germany for Christmas, but he makes a bad impression on Zig Zag. Then follows Christmas and then New Year's Eve and finally the one-year anniversary of this webcomic. The saga continues, but I think we can stop at this point.

Art review

The webcomic's art is a combination of late 2001-era 21st Century Fox badly drawn furries with the reuse of pictures a la Stalag '99 and the tracing and copying of Project 2nd. If you think I'm exaggerating, take a gander at this strip:


It's bad enough to see just one of these pictures, let alone four in one sitting!


As the above strip illustrates, the artwork consists of line drawings with no shading or sense of depth and simple coloring, wonky and inconsistent proportions with thick bodies and overly tapering arms and legs and tiny hands and feet, as well as tails on some characters that look too skinny. On top of that is the fact that the author depicts motion the way a small child might draw it:


The author cannot even depict the collision of two bodies properly? Sheesh!


At the moment of collision, the two characters are not even against each other like they are supposed to be. The characters are also stiff and have no sense of animation and note the different tail lengths of the same characters in the two pictures.

But by far the worst aspect of this webcomic is the fact that the author often uses the same fucking pictures of characters over and over again, and simply changes expressions slightly and moves the characters around in each frame to try to disguise the fact. Sorry, Charlie, it doesn't fool anybody, and it suggests you are too fucking lazy to put any real effort into your artwork. If you don't feel your webcomic is worth adding any visual variety to it, why even bother doing it at all? Bad artwork can be forgiven, but not this fucking lazyass repetition. The author ought to be ashamed of himself.


An example of the tracing the author does.


Writing review

The story gets off on the wrong foot as described above, but it still could have recovered. Bringing in Zig Zag as a relative of the protagonist as opposed to simply making her a sex machine a la Sabrina Online was intriguing, and even the brief incestuous romance between her and J. J. might have been forgivable, as described above. But the story really jumps the shark when Zig Zag and J. J. confess what they had done to J. J.'s paramour Liana, and what happens? She becomes very upset with this, as logically expected. But as mentioned above, Zig Zag mediates a meeting between J. J. and Liana, and Liana quickly forgives the whole thing as if it were some mild indiscretion, and J. J. and Liana carry on with their romance as if nothing had happened. Sorry, I cannot believe for a second that anyone would overlook what J. J. and Zig Zag had done, certainly not when it literally just happened yesterday. This sabotages the story's credibility as far as I am concerned.

And the rest of the story is basically an infomercial for various rollercoasters, hot wings, and special events in Cincinnati.

Author biography

No mention of him or his webcomic on any furry sites, so despite his extensive use of the Zig Zag character, the author is still an unknown in the webcomics world.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, the webcomic is about a self-insert Gary Stu character who literally can do anything. He can easily solve his employer's software problem, he finds a waitress at a local restaurant and she quickly falls in love with him, his second cousin is the famous furry porn star Zig Zag, and they become lovers despite being relatives, and on top of that, Zig Zag would say that he was the greatest lover she ever had. But worst of all is the fact that his future fiancé learns about his incestuous sex with his cousin and though initially furious, shortly afterward she makes up with him and treats what he had done as inconsequential. Sorry, that was too much even for a wish-fulfillment fantasy, and that killed the story's credibility beyond repair.

What else is there to say? As described above, the art is shoddy and repetitive, the characters are unrealistic, the story moves erratically, and there is simply nothing to recommend about this webcomic.

UPDATE: I have a practice of looking up webcomics I reviewed in case anything has changed in their content that I feel the need to mention. For instance, this webcomic did have an audience who posted comments about it when it first started out, but in the years since then, most comments came from a person named "lids delano", with only a couple of other people saying anything. Maybe others besides me didn't think much of a self-insert Gary Stu protagonist who literally could solve every problem and get away with anything. While I was at it, I also checked out the other links I listed. Seems that Tom Delano just cannot get himself much of an audience for his webcomic, and even the inclusion of the famous Zig Zag as a major character hasn't done the trick. Yet the author keeps going at it, God knows why. Okay, the story of J. J.'s incestuous affair with Zig Zag may be in the distant past, and the storyline since then has been mostly about J. J. and his now-wife Liana and their baby daughter, with no more scandalous events happening. Unfortunately, the artwork has not improved in the slightest, with the same stiffness and constant reuse of pictures as before, and the story itself has become more insipid than a Family Circus cartoon. (What a surprise, Liana still welcomes Zig Zag to visit with her family despite what happened years ago.)

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