I've had a couple of requests for a review of 'Get Medieval', so here goes. I probably wouldn't have given the comic a look if people hadn't asked me to - I despise Livejournal as a format for webcomic publishing. A webcomic page doesn't need to be complicated. If you can do enough HTML to put italics in your blog, you can put your webcomic on a real website. But the people who wrote in about it seemed enthusiastic, so I tried not to let that prejudice me.
As it turned out, it didn't need to prejudice me. I don't know what the people who requested it were smoking, but 'Get Medieval' has almost nothing to recommend it.
Let us break down exactly what the problems are:
Artwork: Lousy. Picture anime-style six-year-olds drawn badly, usually without backgrounds (a major, major problem when the story is so setting-dependent) and you'll have some idea of the look of the strip. All of the characters look alike; even the readers sometimes confess to being unable to tell who is who. And there is no proportional consistency even from panel to panel within the same strip. Too much white space makes the comics hard to look at, and the hand-lettering is nigh unreadable. There is no colour except in the 'holiday' comics, which tend to be painfully un-funny author cameos, and then the colouring looks like it took about ten minutes in Microsoft Paint.
Story: A bunch of aliens crash-land on Earth in a version of the dark ages that appears to have been 'researched' by watching A Knight's Tale no more than twice. Funny, huh? Well, if "ha-ha-fish-out-of-water" jokes don't amuse you, you won't find much to entertain you here. That's the entirety of the comic in a sentence. It's a bit of a shame, because it could have been an interesting and funny idea in the right hands - think of something like 'Lilo and Stitch' set in the dark ages. The major drawback, as I see it, is that the 'aliens' are simply not alien. A couple of them have pointy ears or what-have-you, but really they have no trouble blending in. Nor do they give any indication that they come from a society that would be 'alien' to modern-day humans. You have to wonder what the point is.
Characters: Another of the strip's big weaknesses is the characters - they are sterotype upon stereotype. There's a whiny geek, a tough chick, an emoed-out tweenager, a grumpy old man, a caring wife, a gallant prince, a greedy bitch, an evil megalomaniac, etcetera, etcetera. The characters don't develop at all. Asher, for example, started off as the whiny geek and, a year and half later, is still a whiny geek with no complexity or depth to him. The relationship between him and the tough chick, Neithe, is absolutely one-note: he complains about everything, she is bubbly about everything, and I want to slap the hell out of both of them. It was funny for a few strips, then became grating, and nothing has changed. A lot of the characters also come across as idiots. One storyline features the Grumpy Old Man hiring the Whiny Geek as his squire because a priest told him God wants him to. I refuse to believe people were that stupid even five hundred years ago.
Writing: In all honesty, the writing is really not all that bad at times. The storylines are short and straightforward, which is something I can appreciate after wading through some of the longer-winded entries in the webcomic world (*cough*narbonic*cough*), but they're also full of plotholes and loose ends, with the definite feeling that the cartoonist is making all this up as she goes along. For example, Asher brings the parts for his radio along on a siege expedition... and they are never mentioned again. A whole strip is devoted to explaining that he has them, but it's totally incidental. Jokes also become terribly repetitive after a while. The same gag will be used in different ways in two or three comics, sometimes sequentially, and it often wasn't a very funny joke to begin with. A running thing about angry ducks is astonishing in its stupidity. Also annoying is how the artist assumes that everybody has read the archives. A person just starting out is likely to be very, very confused.
Overall: Annoying, although it seems to have massive appeal for SCA geeks. I chalk this up to there simply being nothing else out there targeted right at them. It doesn't even qualify as a 'train wreck' comic, like 'El Goonish Shive' or 'Unicorn Jelly', entertaining in its sheer badness. It's just sort of overwhelmingly lame.
The cartoonist has another comic, Extended Grobanite Injoke. The title alone should be enough to convince you not to read it, but just in case you're some kind of glutton for punishment: imagine that Hollywood decided to make Mark Twain's 'The Prince and the Pauper' into a teen movie. And imagine they got a committee of washed-up sitcom writers to do the script. It's like that. |
