Search Engine Funnies (fo' real)

Minor clarification

The third artist, uncredited on the site, was hired and left before he could draw one strip.

Well.

Let me start by saying, I love Penny and Aggie.

Anyway, approaching these strips, I basically feel like someone who's never played D&D would about Order of the Stick. There are jokes. I have no idea if they're funny or not. Penny Arcade also comes to mind: rather arcane humor, explained for laymen in the news, but which point it's usually already too late. Perhaps you might consider the approach of putting the news first, like Tycho does?

Anyway, this, together with the facts that you're purely a writer and that I'm not qualified to evaluate gag humor leave me basically critiquing the art direction. About which, I have this to say:

You need a graphic designer. When your artists do traditional strips, the do fine (wonderfully, in the case of the Konfabulator sequence). But you have a lot of strips that are just text and maybe some slightly photoshopped images, and you have nobody in your stable who knows how to deal with that.

Stuff like this just makes the eyes bleed. The challenge here is not cartooning, it's information architecture, and it isn't risen to. The text is bland and really dense, it's not immediatly obvious what order to read things in, there's no hierarchyof information, the first image is really boring (she looks like she's falling asleep), and the second one is so subtle that by the time you've worked out the joke, it's lost its punch. You even let your artists discard the usual convention of panel borders, which rarely works and never helps you out.

This, on the other hand, works pretty well. It's not Milton Glasier, but its an information-dense strip that reads just fine. It looks especially good when contrasted with the preceding strip, where a similar situation is handled with basically no imagination at all.

I want to be constructive, but to do so I'd basically have to explain an entire discipline. What you need is a designer/cartoonist as your artist. This is going to be hard, since us designers make decent money, so to attract one you'll also have to find a designer/cartoonist who's passionate about search engines, which I'm guessing is a pretty tiny demographic.

Either that or stop writing such dense strips. You seem to be moving that way with the Black Hat stuff, but I'm not crazy about the visual dirrection you're taking with that. The serial story gives you the chance to develop some strong characters, which I think is a skill you really have, but the clip-art format limits your storytelling options.

There. I hope that wasn't too hard; I generally enjoy your work, but this one doesn't do much for me.

Heh, don't blame my artists for those particular lame designs you criticize. Those two strips were all me, baby.

(I could potentially have come up with better designs if I weren't so busy covering for my artistic inadequacies.)

Oh. Sorry. I wouldn't have been so blunt, if I'd realized.

De nada-- my opinion of those designs is not too high either. And this isn't "Dignified Reinforcement," here.

The thing that kept popping into my head as I read through this was "I don't get it". Even after reading the comments below each strip my reaction was along the line of "I...see...". I'd have to agree that this reminds me a bit of Penny Arcade in that there is a lot of information required to fully understand each strip. But you can often get by without reading this for PA strips (take todays for example, I have no idea what game they are talking about, but it of only minor relevance to the strip). There are some strips that fit this bill with SEF, but they are quite few. The result is that after reading a strip I'm left wondering what the point of it was and after reading the comment below I might have some idea about the point, but the jokes has fallen flat by then.

Who is the target audience of this strip? I'm guessing that most people just use one particular search engine and don't think much about other search engines or the "business" of it .

The almost complete lack of recurring characters and the varied themes and topics (and styles) means that there is little cohesion between the strips. While I don't usually think that it is necessary to think to much about the potential audience of a strip, when it gets this specialized I think it warrants some thought. Niche comics have been moderately succesfull online before, but I've got to wonder if this isn't narrowing the focus too much.

Noguchi and Thorvaldson's art is competently drawn, but does not make much of a lasting impression on me. The one strip that is an exception is the one about sneaking into Google. The last frame is etched into my mind, very nice indeed.

I've tried reading though the SEF archives before, but since I usually don't get the strips and have little to no interest in delving deeper into the world of search engine news, I've usually given up after only a few strips.

You're probably familiar with my thought on SEF with all the discussions we already had, and at the Otakon Workshop. But let me nutshell it all again for ya:

-Niche... Way, way niche. Niche nearly to the point of suicide, but I have to congradulate you for as long as it has gone and could've gone with your writing, because Search Engines are a VERY limited topic. And I still don't get the "Black Hat" thing.
-Art varied too much for my liking. This is just a personal preference thing. I loved Jami's work, and Thor's stuffs were good as well. Then there were T's DIY strips, so with three different illustrators at the helm of this strip the inconsistency just kinda rubs me uncomfortably.
-Most worthy of applause was the ambition and dedication put behind the project. Really admirable.
-The jokes were good, but again, sometimes too niche to understand, even after the expositional comments.

So yeah, overall good, good shit. It's only real problem is its uber-niche.

And now for the fan's eye view. I'll check to see what if any obligation's I have. If someone feels the need to savage my stuff, here, it's a click through. http://members.cox.net/droolingfangirl/frog/frog01.htm

I had a really hard time connecting with this strip. The lack of characters really tells here. For me, it's all about the story, and the characters in the story. I confess to a shameless level of squee at inspiring a rather funny two part strip. (Darn it I was KIDDING about killing Thor...well mostly)

But then Blackhat started. Too much hype. Too little pay off. I don't understand what's going on here.

Might I suggest looking at this one as a character building experience?

I read it. I'll leave some comments sometime next week after I get an interweb hookup at school.

Ok. I couldn't really get into it much.


... guess why!

Anyways, the strips I had a problem with were the ones that did little to inform me of what they were commenting on within the strip. Like the Rosenbloom one was probably the one like that that stood out the most... I had no idea who this woman with the ghost behind her was, and when I read the commentary on the bottom, it explained it well enough, but also sorta came off as explaining the joke. "see see... it followed her around... like a ghost... so I drew a ghost...get it?" kinda thing. The Macher search and some of the other strips that were sassing things I wasn't aware of did a better job of getting me to understand the point of the joke without knowing what you were referring to beforehand.I didn't find many of them funny even when I did get them though, and I think that was just a matter of not pushing the humor much beyond the idea.(Macher search strip- for example -just took the search engines premise and showed how it would apply to other groups...and that's it. )

But besides that the strip was generally ok.

comments were pretty short there... so...one more paragraph...

I liked the micropundits comic(probably could have cut the "micropundits") out of the last panel. I think it could have been done with almost any sort of topic really and worked as well. The opening strip also did a good job of informing me about something I know nothing of and care little about while still being able to be pretty funny. I think for this kind of strip what you did with that one should be a template for how you approach them in general(maybe it was?) You also probably would have benefitted from including more strips with the "company reps" like you did with google near the end. It lets you lampoon a decision or mentality while filling the reader in on what that decision was in an easier manner. Seems like something you could have taken advantage of a few times.

Niche, most certainly. A learning experience, to some degree.

I walked into this one fully aware that it was a big risk: that it might not find its ideal audience. My crucial mistake, one I've made before, was not to take adequate steps to market the comic to that audience.

The Penny Arcade comparison is apt. I was largely inspired by PA and User Friendly in building a highly niche-focused, technology-focused strip. I probably took their example a step or two too far when it came to recurring characters and continuity. UF and PA spend about half their time focusing on a main cast. That was something we didn't get in SEF until it was far too late.

FYI for those who care: "Blackhat" refers to advertising practices that some people, especially search engines, consider immoral. "SEOs" regularly use the search engines as an advertising platform, or try to. The center of the story would have been a man who rose to the top but had to sacrifice his principles to remain there, and soon, like Macbeth, found his efforts to get out of trouble getting him into it, deeper and deeper.

Worth a try, anyway... I'll put all this research to use SOME how.

Okay T, I honestly tried to get through it all. I honestly did. But you know how I am about insider geek humour, and this just got to the point where I threw up my hands and gave up. it went way into the arcane.

It was sort of dead on arrival for me. I can't think of anything constuctive to say about it either way. Especially now that it's premature ending came about.