Webcomic Review #8: Ctrl+Alt+Del

Well, I finally feel ready to post this. I was afraid, apparently rightly so, that making Ctrl+Alt+Del part of the poll would lead to it being voted in due to its fame (or infamy, depending on your stance). So, I expected the series of "I want you to review it because it sucks" comments in the poll, along with the "I want you to review it because it is my favorite comic" responses. In the end I had two polarized groups demanding something from me.

Neither of you is getting what you want.

First, let me say I cardinally refuse to compare Ctrl+Alt+Del to Penny Arcade because, as far as I can tell, the feud between the two centers around the fact that Tim Buckley does a comic similar to Penny Arcade and never cited Penny Arcade as inspiration. I'm not touching that one because I haven't read Penny Arcade in a while and because I'm going to review it later and if I see a serious similarity between them THEN I will heap piles of criticism on Buckley, but not before. Do not post comments explaining the details of the feud to me, I do not care. If you would like to see someone rip the comic, watch Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation on webcomics.

Cue the fanboy ranting against me for not doing what you wanted... and there it is.

So, now that the disclaimer is out of the way I want to summarize my feelings about Ctrl+Alt+Del before I start to pick it apart. It's not a good comic, but it is also not a bad comic. It is extremely hit or miss, but in this case I can identify point by point where it is funny and where it is painfully unfunny. It's a very average work, which doesn't mean it shouldn't be read because the occasional gem still pops up, but it certainly isn't setting the world on fire anytime soon.

Let's start with the artwork. Many critics complain about the fact that it is photoshopped. Sorry, but that is a stupid complaint especially since Buckley admits right on his site that he makes his comics that way. It's really a roundabout way to accuse him of being lazy, which he might be, but that's not a reason to hate on the comic. The work still looks good and plenty of other hand drawn comics are hurt by having ugly art, it's not worth griping over how Buckley makes the comic look the way it does.

With that out of the way let's talk about what is worth griping over, mainly the different types of comics you find in Ctrl+Alt+Del. First, there is the main plot which contains eccentric protagonist Ethan McManus and his much more realistically characterized roommate Lucas. The fact that Ethan's craziness is so over the top is one of my major problems with the comic because he's not terribly funny except in certain situations or story lines and that is not what you want from the main character. I'm going to go into more detail about my issues with the main story, but let's get the other comics sprinkled in the piece out of the way first.

Ctrl+Alt+Del is a gaming webcomic and within that niche is where I find it to succeed the most. Buckley does a lot of one shot comics or spinoffs from the story that are, almost without fail, pretty funny. There's his America's Army gags in the first few, which grow into shots taken at other games and gaming companies. A lot of what he is saying echoes sentiments of other people, but that doesn't make it unfunny. When he rips the PS3 for having little reason to be played by making it a sad, unloved wife of the gamer who never uses it he's hitting the mark. When he has Marcus Fenix at home with his apron-wearing wife trying to spread butter on his toast with his chainsaw gun "because it has a chainsaw" he's got me. You get the idea, Buckley can tell a great gaming joke and make me laugh pretty consistently when he does, unfortunately he also tells other jokes.

There's Chef Brian, the insane chef that talks nonsensically and has surreal experiences (you might call them LSD trips, I did) which completely miss the point of bizarre humor. Well, that's not entirely true, they miss the humor part but definitely nail the bizarre. I don't think a single one of these comics made me even crack a smile, I'd like to see them done away with.

Then Buckley has the four Players (ostensibly numbered 1-4 and called only by their number on their colored t-shirts) who are conceptually brilliant. The gags that could be had around having four people who actually are the four players in multiplayer or co-op games are numerous, but Buckley taints the concept by making them excessively violent and insane like Chef Brian. Just as Chef Brian's craziness destroys his value as a character the nuttiness and violence of the players ruins their potential. Really, I'd like to see him scrap or rework the Players and focus more on his gaming humor (like the Gamer Glossary jokes that I find much more entertaining).

Buckley also tried some "choose your own adventure" stories allowing readers to email in their choice for the main character's next action. Again, cool in concept, but largely ineffective. I didn't like the stories when I read them as he was writing them and I burned through them with even more disinterest while reviewing the comic. Again, he has good ideas, but there's a lot of poor execution.

But all of this is really tangental to the main plot, which is theoretically the driving point of the webcomic. In addition to Ethan and Lucas there are other characters, most notably Lilah, Zeke, Scott, and Ted (Scott's penguin). There's also Kate, Barry, Rob, Mickey, and Christian who are effective minor characters. I'm going to break some of them down in terms of their value and effectiveness in the comic.

I already pointed that Ethan is too weird, he simply doesn't work as the main character. The things he does are so over the top that you don't buy him as a person and it certainly doesn't make any sense that he would have a girlfriend and definitely not a job when all we see is him doing his best to alienate customers and not work. The thing is if Buckley just made Ethan a nut who didn't have a girlfriend or a job but somehow fell into money and occasional one-night stands (the Kramer effect) then he wouldn't be such a problematic character. When he gets hit in the head and falls for the allure of Mac computers, joining the Mac Panthers, he is as funny as his character can get. It is because Buckley tries to grow him up AND keep him the same wacky guy that he grates on the reader so much because it forces him into serious situations that don't make sense based on how he is portrayed. His timelines of personality growth and life events do not synch up and it hurts the comic since he is supposed to be the center of it.

Lilah isn't such a bad character until she gets paired up with Ethan and we have to slog through the relationship plots that are often tedious compared to other comics. Her adventures as a professional gamer are entertaining, along with her former ex-boyfriend Christian making an appearance or two. In the end she's a serviceable character but she gets shafted the most by Buckley's Titanic plot twist. I use Titanic in the sense of the ship, because for me this is where the comic hit an iceberg:

SPOILERS START

While planning on getting married Lilah discovers she is pregnant and she and Ethan go through the cheesy and unfunny "how shall we ever raise a child?" flux. Shortly thereafter, we are misdirected into believing that Lucas is injured fixing the house, but in fact Lilah has had a miscarriage. Yeah, that's right, he out of the blue brought in a pregnancy then tossed a miscarriage on top of it. It was not well handled, it left a smear on the next twenty plus comics that was still there when I reread them for this review. Buckley openly admitted he expected people to be turned off by the plot twist but had planned it already and wasn't going to change course. For that I can respect him, but it doesn't mean he handled it well at all. He didn't... at all.

SPOILERS END

Sometimes I think Buckley would have been better off with Lucas as the main character. He is consistently funnier and more realistic than Ethan, which would seem to make him better off as the protagonist, but maybe I'm clamoring for too much standard practice and I should be praising Buckley for breaking the mold. Still, Lucas and Zeke, the robot Xbox Ethan creates, provide most of the bright spots for the comic. They bring a lot of good humor and some compellingly developed characters. Often I find Buckley trying way too hard to be serious, seemingly out of the blue, but I actually do like the sobering moments with Lucas and Zeke because they manage to be funny and serious at the same time.

There have been changes in the comic and for the most part I don't like them. Scott and his creepy penguin Ted were funny niche characters that just progressively lost space in the comic to the two-headed monstrosity of Lilah and Ethan, and that's a shame. The couple was funny when they were courting and Ethan clearly had no clue what to do, but then they became a terribly overdone cliche of the odd couple trying to stumble through life's responsibilities. It was not endearing, nor was it a good reason to give the reader less of Scott and Ted. The same thing has happened to other minor characters. Barry was written out because he filled no purpose, Rob has stayed the same redone Counter Strike stereotype plugged into vaguely different scenarios, and Mickey has almost disappeared (or at least his funny side has, he's as useless as Barry now). It's a shame because they all could have fit in somewhere in minor roles and were effective before, in the earlier days of the comic.

Which brings me to the biggest problem with Ctrl+Alt+Del: commercialism. I am convinced a lot of what made the comic funnier (it is still funny, just not as funny as it once was) was cut out to make room for the characters Lilah and Ethan and recurring plots like Winter-Een-Mas (Ethan's winter gaming holiday) that push Ctrl+Alt+Del merchandise. Buckley pushes products, and that's alright in some respect because this is his comic and he can do what he wants with it, but that doesn't mean it hasn't hurt the product. The comic brings in readers and Buckley makes money off of ad space, the animated series, shirts, his Digital Overload convention, and other events. This isn't unlike what other webcomics do to stay afloat, but everything Buckley does is geared towards the financial aspect. He's gotten away from telling a funny story or talking about developing games and more into generating drama (and theoretically reader interest) to get people on the site. It's become a cyclical relationship between convention, comic, animated series, and holiday event. They bleed into one another and each aims to compliment the other, thus generating traffic and money. Buckley is a marketer of his product and though he is affiliated with Blind Ferret Entertainment, the same company that also has quality work like Least I Could Do and 8-Bit Theater, I don't find the comic to be the focus of his efforts. He's grown this thing into something larger and less personal.

And that's alright because, as I said before, he can do what he wants with his creation but that does not mean I have to like it. I still read Ctrl+Alt+Del because there are glimmers of the funny moments I really loved when I first went through it. The comic isn't bad and at times it is really good, but there is better stuff out there, including within the Blind Ferret company. This doesn't mean I would discourage someone from reading it because I genuinely like parts and I think some readers would really be amused at different points. My advice would be to try it, start from the beginning, and see if you like it. Get through the earliest stuff, up to at least the first few comics with Zeke, and that should give you an idea of whether you want to read the rest.

You can find Ctrl+Alt+Del at www.cad-comic.com

I will be plugging away at Drowtales now, sorry if this took a long time to get out but I wanted to make sure I took my time on it knowing how many people would react to the comic.

NOTE - Artwork forthcoming for this and other reviews I have neglected. My deepest apologies for not putting it in sooner.

Source: http://teachtraintype.blogspot.com/2010/08/webcomic-review_9445.html