Computer Love
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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: | Lt. Art Major |
| Webcomic name: | Computer Love |
| Author: | Ivy "Burgeroise" Jane |
| Start Date: | Jan 21, 2013 |
| End Date: | Website went down some time in May 2017. I swear it wasn't my fault. |
| Genre: | Tries to tell a science fiction story through the lens of a slice of life character piece, but comes across as a psychological horror about NEET's getting screwed by their own system. |
| Defining Flaw: | Genre, and lack of meaningful conflict. |
| Things that are fucking terrible about this webcomic: | While wide shots look nice, the art is sketchy and distorted. There are some things that happen in this comic that are disturbing but never get pointed out. |
| Things that aren't terrible but could use improvement: | The setting is cool, but tossed aside to focus on it's uninteresting citizens. |
| Summary: | This webcomic made a city on an iceberg sound lame. |
Rating Summary
| Art: | 
It looks somewhere in between "fuzzy lined 13 year old on Deviantart" and "I took a class in highschool". |
| Storyline: |
It feels like it's building up to something at the start, but later no one ever leaves their apartment. |
| Characters: |
The story is told through pieces of furniture who wax philosophical in their dying days. My favorite one is the chair, because he is so sassy when it comes to the cabinets ego death antics. |
| Miscellaneous Details: |
Title is misleading. The subplot about Fennette being a robot is dropped in the third chapter. |
| Overall: |
This review was as fun to write as the webcomic was to read. |
Background
I, like most people, strive to create the most original content whenever I can. I am going to break this mantra by lifting quotes from other reviews to illustrate what kinds of people enjoy this sort of read.
Unlike a lot of media written by cis, straight people featuring queer characters, this comic is nice (and realistic) in that it features a lot of us. As most regular Autostraddle readers probably already know, most trans and queer people have other trans and queer friends, and this comic shows that wonderfully. Fi and Hazel are trans, some other characters might start IDing as trans later on, and everyone can be considered pansexual according to the writer. It’s nice seeing an entire group of queer friends rather than just a token queer or queer couple. Plus, Jane writes them in a way that makes their queerness important, but not their only character trait.
-Mey, from Autostraddle
This person thinks this webcomic is realistic. The one about a city on an iceberg with free food is realistic. For no reason other than the characters have the gays and couldn't be bothered to be any more complex than that. On another note, the author of this think piece thinks she can practice magic.
Ivy Jane’s Computer Love. Set in a future where genetically-engineered monsters called rats have overrun much of the Earth, the heroes of the story are… a plucky farmboy who finds himself on the front lines of the battle for humanity? A grizzled veteran with one last shot to defeat the rats once and for all? A nuclear family fighting to survive when their home is destroyed? A maverick scientist who has the answer if only someone would listen? Nope, nope, nope. CL is about a bunch of gay queers living in Antarctica and being homosexual with each other.
...neither does it fall into the thinky scifi trap of cold analysis or cynical moralism, using its events as parables for the reader. There’s no lesson, no grand “what if?” in CL’s premise (thank fucking god, tbh). Instead, it’s completely character-driven and grounded in the pathos of its cast.
Wisp, from YesHomo
This dude is prasing this webcomic for being as tame and unchallenging as possible. This webcomic is as vanilla and welcoming as it possibly can be, sacrificing nuance in character development and world building for a shallow tale of freeloaders living in a city in Antarctica[citation needed]. So no one is reading this webcomic looking for high art or sophisticated literature, but with that being said, why is it on the recommended reading list from Zack Morrison, a more or less well revered web cartoonist?
Do people think that this webcomic is good? Probably. Do people think that it's one of the best? That's concerning. If that's the case then the bar for "quality" in this medium is so dreadfully low that there is just no point in critique. Everything is a masterpiece. The Bad Webcomics Wiki is over. Enjoy your shitty medium. I'll see you down the street and around the corner trying to get the Bad Music Wiki off the ground so I can have something to do when I don't want to do anything.
Downfall
The downfall can be pinpointed over the course of two pages: The third one, where Lucy flies on a junkyard to Antarctica, which in spite of being developed five year prior, can distribute free food to its citizens, and the fourth one, which she had to make two of for some reason, which visually sums up the entire webcomic. Looking at these two pages should give you a feel for what a reader is going to be in for.
The comic takes a bizarre and irreparable nose dive on page eighty-eight, and continues to get worse and worse as the chapter goes on. It's so late in the webcomic that it doesn't really make a difference, but I think it deserves a mention.
Art review
The art in this webcomic is lazy. So lazy I won't bother telling you about it. I'll just make a slideshow showing you the "progress" Ivy has made as an artist.
Writing
Computer Love is a webcomic where everyone talks like a computer. Information is input in the ear and information is output out the mouth. It's very mechanical.
No one in this webcomic talks about anything happening in the present. Everyone only talks about things they did in the past and things that they want and only might do in the future. This makes for a very passive story, which is fatal for a work of fiction of any kind. But this passivity squanders most in a character driven work. No one cares what's happening to these people because nothing is happening to these people. If only someone had a list of conflicts appropriate for this webcomic to use?
… a plucky farmboy who finds himself on the front lines of the battle for humanity? A grizzled veteran with one last shot to defeat the rats once and for all? A nuclear family fighting to survive when their home is destroyed? A maverick scientist who has the answer if only someone would listen?
Wisp, from YesHomo
These are some good ideas.
Computer Love is a parable about young NEETs walking from one apartment to the other and riding monorails. That's it. This is one of the most boring webcomics of all time. I only take issue with how mundane this webcomic is because the webcomic takes place Antarctica. Sort of. It takes place in Antarctica, but nothing indicates Antarctica. Everyone goes on and on about great Antarctica is, but as far as I'm concerned there is no Antarctica. Even if they did manage to terraform Antarctica into a perfect utopian landscape, there are a few things inherent to the region which are inescapable. For one, it doesn't snow every day in Antarctica. Antarctica is a desert, which means it absorbs more water than emits. It snows maybe ten inches a year. Second, the sun doesn't set in Antarctica. From your perspective, the sun would stay above the horizon for six months (summer) and stay below the horizon for six months (winter). It doesn't set at a perpendicular angle to the horizon. The difficulty of surviving within that latitude of the earth aside, these are fairly drastic deviations from reality.
This misstep has lead me to considering one of two conclusions.
1. The author is a flat earther
2. The author is a shit world builder
The correct answer is obvious, but it's funnier to think it's one.
The city in Computer Love has a strange motif with free food. THE FOOD IS FREE except for the hamburgers. There is an explanation for that, and it's fucking weird. THE FOOD IS SOCIALIZED as long as you have a job and a house and pay your taxes on time. While most people would continue to wince on about how free food is stupid, I want to know how the food is free on an iceberg? There's so much that could have been explored with having your setting in Antarctica, but the story not only could have taken place anywhere else; it would make sense for the story to take place anywhere else.
There are some other FUTURE aspects of the city like virtual reality and hiring a boat [sic]. There are probably other things they did. One of the gang's favorite things to do was to dress up as animals and molest each other. Later we are informed that this is apart of Antarctica culture and the tall blonde lady gets molested by a short creepy furry. I don't understand the point of this scene. I don't think it's fanservice because it's not remotely attractive. I hope it's not trying to be cute, because if it is that carries some creepy connotations.
So that's stupid, but then the webcomic gets retarded because on the very next page we are informed that the hamburgers which are not free are actually made of humans. OK. Why? There was no tonal build up to this at all. The build up was of furries laying on top of each other and then we learn that soylent green is people. This is stupid. Hamburgers are mass produced in the city. How many people are dying so that Antarctica can have a hamburger industry? I would be taking issue with the mortality rate in this city. How do they cover this up? Do they take dead dudes from other places and make them into burgers? Are some burgers dudes and some burgers not dudes? How does this work? How does anyone like this webcomic?
This subplot is dropped in the next chapter. There was something else about rats but I can't remember what. Also the speech bubbles suck.
Author biography
Ivy Jane is the fakest name ever created. She is a communist/furry/weeaboo, which are three of the worst kinds of people to ever grace this hollow and empty earth. In her free time, she likes to be edgy on twitter and work on another webcomic called Croquette Dragoon, which is the same thing but in space. It has nothing to do with coquetting or dragooning and you need to pay her to read it. Fund her internet welfare here. She was apart of an art group that sold a book called trans girl illuminati which you can buy for ten dollars. What a deal. Think about all the art you can buy for just ten dollars.
Her online presence is completely milquetoast and possesses nothing in the way of poor internet etiquette or intents of searching for trouble. Good job.
She made this webcomic because she wanted to showcase what everyone who wasn't a main character did in a sci-fi story. Now we know why no one else was late to the punch. People who aren't apart of a grand scheme to save the planet are boring. That's why some arbitrary side character in any kind of story isn't the main character. They have nothing to contribute and nothing for the readers to invest their time in.
In a complete stroke of irony, her tumblr is her most quality source of content. It's not saying much, but it's saying something. Feel free to psychoanalyse her through this assortment of macros and compilations.
Conclusion
I don't get the appeal. This webcomic is about nothing and even Seinfeld was about something. It's a long 110 pages of nothing happening. I would ask you to read it yourself but the webcomic has been taken down since I started the review.
I can't believe this has to be said. This is the only thing this has to be said for. Conflict is the soul of drama. It doesn't even have to be meaningful. Do not write anything this way. More importantly do not ever posterize as a meaningful character analysis when your characters are not significant to anyone but themselves. There are no side characters, thus we never get to see what the characters look like or are perceived from another perspective. No one cares about you and your friends being you and your friends. No one wants to read a story about some dude and her friends living in a big city accomplishing absolutely nothing.
I don't even know why I wrote this review. No one is going to learn anything from this. The website is down so it can't be used as an example. I don't think it has a following anymore so they can't learn anything. This webcomic rests in a happy medium between obscure and found, so there's really no spectacle in bringing it up. I don't think the author can learn anything, because she amplified her mistakes in her new webcomic, which is takes place in fucking outer space and is still about "the mundanity of the unexamined life". What a fucking dump. F+.
Links
- Here is an eighties pop single about what this webcomic should have been about.
- This strip is more endearing than the entirety of the webcomic of the same name.
