Ozy and Millie
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| Original review author: | Long Tom |
| Webcomic name: | Ozy and Millie |
| Author: | D. C. Simpson |
| Start Date: | April 29, 1998 |
| End Date: | December 23, 2008 |
| Genre: | Furry/Anthro, Slice Of Life |
| Defining Flaw: | Actually, I've put this review up to show that this author, despite having done two webcomics bad enough to be listed on the BWW, is also capable of greatness. |
Rating Summary
| Art: | 
Deceptively simple-looking line drawing with subtle shading, managing to be expressive and animated without resorting to exaggeration. |
| Storyline: | Not applicable, as the strip has no overall plot, but a series of gags and story arcs. |
| Characters: |
The characters are all credible; the children aren't miniature adults and the adults aren't clueless idiots. |
| Miscellaneous Details: |
Originally based on Calvin and Hobbes, but the webcomic finds its own style soon enough. |
| Overall: |
Definitely a classic in the webcomics world. |
Background
One of the first webcomics I learned about when I started reading webcomics, and it actually managed to live up to the hype it received.
Downfall
The webcomic weakened a bit as it got toward the end, but not to the "jump the shark" level, and D. C. Simpson ended it with a bang, if not quite the ending I hoped. (I would have preferred Locke over Llewellyn as the groom.)
Story and Plot
There is no overall plot, just a series of gags and story arcs.
Art review
Monochrome line drawings with some shading, with the occasional color ones. Rather coarse at the beginning, but soon gets much better. The characters look like genuine children and adults, and are cute without being excessively so. The proportions of the figures make the characters actually look more animal-like than many furry artists manage to achieve - a major part of the strip's charm.
Writing review
The webcomic is much like the old Calvin and Hobbes strip in the sense that the children have unusually large vocabularies for their age, but is otherwise not derivative. Unlike Calvin and Hobbes, where the tiger is just a stuffed toy made alive by the boy's imagination, fantastical elements in the strip are real - not really a surprise in a comic whose characters are anthropomorphic animals. The dragon Llewellyn and his relatives are weird but real, and the pirate world hidden in the sofa is also real - in fact, the pirate captain Locke is Millie's biological father. Locke also ages back and forth between childhood and adulthood. There is a series of storylines over the course of the strip, some of which work and some which don't. Some representative strips over the years:
1998: Ozy and Millie disprove an old quote
1999: Millie meets Captain Locke
2000: Millie tries her paw at avant-garde art
2001: Ozy is an arctic fox, which is not always advantageous in winter
2002: How our heroes' plans typically turn out
2003: Millie's plans for Career Day at school
2004: Millie talks religion (D. C. Simpson herself is an atheist, BTW)
2005: Millie shows her schoolwork to her mother
2006: Llewellyn deals with the neighbors
2007: In real life, D. C. Simpson will take this idea much further
2008: Ms. Mudd's retaliation against an unfair schoolteacher
Also, there is the annual running joke of Millie shaving Ozy, akin to Lucy and the football in the old Peanuts comic.
Author biography
Dana Simpson (she no longer uses her former name D. C. Simpson) is best known as the author of the well-regarded furry webcomic Ozy and Millie, which has received much acclaim and numerous awards. Whether this person's becoming a male-to-female transgender has had anything to do with it, Simpson has also produced duds such as the bungled Raine Dog, although humorless, pretentious political comics such as I Drew This prove that even in her Ozy and Millie days she had a penchant for being overblown and unfunny.
But Simpson seems to have gotten back into her groove, finally receiving newspaper syndication with her latest strip Phoebe And Her Unicorn (originally titled Heavenly Nostrils) and that has turned out well enough, so there is hope for her yet.
Conclusion
Fortunately this is what Dana Simpson will always be remembered by.
Other comics by this person reviewed on this site
Links
The awards this comic has won:
- Winner of the Web Cartoonists' Choice Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic in 2002
- Winner of the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip in 2006
- Winner of the Ursa Major Award for Best Anthropomorphic Comic Strip in 2007
And TV Tropes has an article on them too:
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Ozy and Millie is part of a series about keenspot
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