i’m all caught up with Out-of-Placers now and i’m sincerely impressed how just a webcomic has avoided a ton of pitfalls a lot of fictional fantasy universes suffer from (i also really like Farscape and the comparison that Mothra made to Jim Henson’s work is spot-on so i’m probably a bit biased)
3 Likes
Oh wow I read some of Thorsby’s stuff like 15 years ago. That was on a different site which…appears to be a breeding ground for viruses or something now so it shall remain nameless. Had no idea he was still going, cool. = D
2 Likes
I’m now fully caught up on Slightly Damned, it has held up a great level of quality all the way to present. Very fun, very cute series that benefits a lot from Chu deciding early that the dramatic could go-exist with the cartoony and goofy without being at all in conflict. I would liken it to One Piece in that sense, in how its kept the gags front and center no matter how deep into drama it dips.
This is a great testament to the strengths of establishing the tone of your fantasy world, where characters earn their cool moments and their cute moments by enduring the countless indignities of day-to-day life. There’s a lot of failure, a lot of self-reflection, a lot of trying and changing and evolving. Big fan of any story that shows how finding the things and people you love is a messy, sometimes embarrassing, often graceless process. And certainly one that revels in how funny that can be.
There is a weird webcomics thing that is sometimes hard to ignore where a lot of panels need to have A Gag in them, something SD slowly grows out of. It reminds me of how all Calvin and Hobbes stripes always needed a gag at the end to be considered complete, this artefact of the olde print days.
This was a series born of Chu’s OC demon/angel OTP, and it’s gone further than any solo project I can think of in building to and beyond that pairing. It takes an incredible act of willpower to bring that idea into reality at the drawing table, month after month. I’ll pretty regularly watch Chu’s draw streams, and find them really inspirational. They make regular time every week to, as a routine, make the next page and just draw shit they love in equal measure. Watching an artist who has found a healthy way to continue to create a series is quite wonderful.
Thoughts on the artwork
You can see the technical ability of Chu improve in the art over the years, while still keeping that cartoony colorful expressive goofiness that pulled me in at the start.
Part of me is a little wistful for the way in which the older panels almost had a cute SD look all the time:
But the backgrounds, the action scenes, the proportions, the coloring, and the perspective have all improved so much that there’s not really any denying it’s evolved into something much more visually appealing as it’s gone on.
Also a huge, huge fan of how Chu just went for it back when they first began the comic, they didn’t put it as something they had to get to X or Y level of art to begin on.
This is absolutely good enough to tell the story and get the character moments across really wonderfully. Any proportion weirdness rarely distracts to be honest. I’ve very much come to the belief that if you can get a character’s expressions right, everything else is just gravy. It’s why I love Sleepy Smiles’ style, for example.
So good.
The Trouble Center
You know me, the world-building is the sauce. This is the good shit. This is what pulls me into fantasy, furry or not.
“The Trouble Center” is a wacky and charmingly optimistic idea that every town just has this organization that does good deeds, presumably funded by the city. It sends people out to solve whatever problems people have, like, say, a grandma needs help hauling groceries, or two people have a huge disagreement.
You sign up, you get these little smiling Newgrounds buttons that tell people you’re here to help, and you just take work as it comes.
This concept is absolutely adorable and it makes you wish something like this could survive in the real world. Now, could it? God, there’s a lot that could go wrong. There’s also just a core driver of our society that strangles out little things like this because they don’t turn a profit. It’s nice to just dip into a world where the profit motive is not the end-all be-all.
I do believe something like this could work in our world, just, lord, how could it ever be shielded from being politicized and wielded?
Makes a whole lot more sense in a very low-tech world like SD’s, where towns don’t really communicate outside of letters, and you have these tight-knit communities.
It’s a Gay, Gay, Gay, Gay World
This is another “wouldn’t it be nice” thing that I see in almost every furry fantasy world, but still, I love how it is utterly unregarded in their society that anyone could love anyone else, in whatever combination, of whatever gender or identity or species.
It’s just nice to exist briefly in a world where these fundamental simple things have not been in debate for presumably ages.
I think this just leads to seeing how they choose their words and how they regard other relationships in an aspirational way, like we’re in a Star Trek utopian future or something. It’s nice to walk in that world for a while.
We are spared the scene where a male-presenting character has to justify wearing a dress and becoming more fem, it’s just a person liking the dress and wearing it.
We got ya lesboids…
We got ya gays…
We got thruples…
We got cross-species found families…
Plenty of queer bad guys…
Yeah it rules.
The World of Medius
This page gives a very cute overview of their world and cosmology, which is weird! Good weird! Probably my favorite thing in fantasy is how it often establishes how the world, the stars they fly through, the realms that overlap, all have this storybook aspect to them where the creation myth is very real, there are clear rules to how the universe works, and sometimes, you even get into why it is the way it is.
Spirits and reincarnation work differently than you’d generally assume, and you can tell this is built out over time from the initial idea of a Hell and a Heaven and the world between. Chu’s filled in details where relevant as they’ve gone along, and it’s always delivered in a cheery and colorful way:
Which makes it much more delightful to see how unremarkable and unregarded this is by those who have lived in this world and never known it to be different.
The playfulness of the world also lets Chu just sprinkle in ridiculous little additions as they occur to them:
And crucially the series takes it all seriously and is consistent.
The jakkai’s coats change with the winter! Right? Makes total sense!
And they use it here as a sign that the entity in charge of the seasons is out of whack!
AND GOD I LOVE THAT THEIR SCIENCE IS STILL EARLY AND ITS MIXED WITH THE MAGIC OF THEIR WORLD. THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW GERM THEORY BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY WOULDN’T.
I eat this stuff UP.
So yeah, really had a great time catching up on this series, and continue to enjoy it as new pages are regularly posted. Such a treat.
1 Like