Review: Super Stupor #1

[dvandom]

Dave's Rant Special: Super Stupor #1

     I got this in the mail on Thursday, too late to include in the week's
Capsules.  Just as well, I decided I had enough to say about it that I wanted
a full-on Rant.  Yeah, been a while since my last one, eh?

CAPSULE

     Super Stupor #1: Rhymes With Witch Comics - Funny, but not for the
easily offended.  While the work feels a bit rushed in places (both the
writing and the cartoon-style art), it does a good job of combining numerous
one-page gags and an overall plot.  Recommended (technical issues bring it
down a notch).  $2.95 (plus $2 S&H if ordered online)

RANT

     Randy Milholland is probably best known for his snarky quasi-
autobiographical webcomic Something Positive (www.somethingpositive.net), the
first strip of which is reproduced on the inside front cover of this volume.
Super Stupor is one of his spinoff webcomics (along with S*P 1938, Midnight
Macabre and the deceased New Gold Dreams), which has the feel of being City
of Heroes as a sitcom (although without FCC supervision).  Sort of what the
live action Tick show seemed to be shooting for, but Super Stupor has more of
a bite.

     However, Super Stupor isn't Randy's first foray into superhero stories.
He was also involved in the Superguy collective, mostly writing a series
called Gomi.  Go to http://archives.eyrie.org/cgi-bin/superguy and search on
Randy Milholland from the Search By Author drop-down, and you'll get
everything he wrote or co-wrote in one big chunk for your convenience.  :)
So, while this comic is clearly inspired by City of Heroes/Villains in
several places, Randy's not a johnny-come-lately to superhero mockery.  He
was doing it for the public to see as early as 1995.  A fair amount of
superhero stuff was creeping into S*P (the protagonists are gamers), so Randy
finally decided late last year to spin those ideas off into their own strip.

     Anyway, this comic was produced to sell at the Comicon in San Diego, and
has that odd sort of semi-ashcan feel to it.  It's in full color, but the
format is 6" by 9", with all paper the same weight (more or less medium
thickness typing paper), including the cover.  Sort of an oversized
minicomic, I suppose.

     Beyond the format, there's a few other places where the comic doesn't
really feel professional, such as typos (like the inside front cover "hom
page" goof), errors (like consistently mixing up silicon and silicone, and
yes it's kinda important in the story) and a certain amount of opaqueness in
the storytelling (i.e. several characters don't get named until pretty late,
and unless you already knew their names it might not be obvious that it was
their actual codename and not another nickname).  The art gets a bit sketchy
near the end as well, although Randy's deliberately cartoony style does cover
for that somewhat.

     Super Stupor, as a strip, is mainly about gag-a-day, with occasional
short bursts of continuity.  And this comic largely works on this level as
well, with most of the pages being readable as single strips or even as a
pair of standalone strips.  The binding conceit is that a bunch of D-list
superheroes, mostly regulars of the webcomic and habitues of a bar called
Capetini's, are attending a superhero appreciation convention.  Which is,
naturally, attacked by villains.  So there's convention appearance gags (and
a cameo by Davan from Something Positive), aged superhero gags, semi-clothed
superheroine gags, etc.  And then a fairly touching understory about two
people finally reunited after a long time but still kept apart by fate.
There's a B-story about a couple of the Capetini's crew who stay out on
patrol during the convention, too.

     Most of this issue is new material, written and drawn specifically for
the comic.  The exceptions are the first page (which is the first regular
Super Stupor webcomic, and sets up a gag for later in the B-story), Aubrey's
Guide to Con Hygiene (a very popular Something Positive special that's
included because, well, this comic was made to take to a Con) and the inside
back cover which has the very first Something Positive strip.  While not the
funniest or the most offensive S*P strip, the first one is a good gauge of
whether you'll like the comic overall...if you laugh at it, you should be
reading S*P.  If you're offended by it, you should stay away from S*P.  If
you laugh AND are offended, good luck with that.

     The world of Super Stupor is an odd hybrid of serious and silly.  It
seems to operate on Comic Book Time without the characters seeing fit to
worry about it (a couple of characters are established to have been active in
the 1940s as child heroes, and are not yet middle-aged by the time of the
story, which takes place in the 1980s at the earliest, and probably takes
place in the present).  There's a well-established hierarchy in the metahuman
world, with A-listers and D-listers and presumably everything in between,
which feels like a combination of treating supers as celebrities and using
City of Heroes style leveling.  There's no unifying theme for superpowers,
people don't seem too freaked out that actual angels are running around as
superheroes, and in general the abnormal is accepted as normal.  And while
it's not made clear in this issue, even the villains have a fairly structured
arrangement, with levels of villainy and unionized henchmen, etc.  Yes, one
can draw parallels to Venture Brothers here, and I wouldn't be surprised if
Randy was at least a little inspired by that.  But a lot of this setting
stuff comes right out of Superguy as well.  :)

     Finally, just in case I didn't make it clear (which I may not have),
Randy's work is not for the easily-offended.  But if you can make it past the
first page of this book, with its revelation of the secret power Mind's Eye
possesses (http://www.superstupor.com/sust11262007.shtml), then you'll
probably enjoy Super Stupor.  But there's plenty of ways to be offensive that
Randy wields in the rest of the comic that aren't in the first strip, so if
you have any sore spots, he may very well smash at one with a hammer at some
point.  

   Dave Van Domelen, "Dude, our boss is a LiveJournal account and a few razor cuts away from being a junior high goth girl." - Big Killhuna

Comments

[bassbone.livejournal.com]

Good review, though it's "Aubrey" and not "Audrey."

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Fixed.