Webcomics Review: Bob and George

Recently, after my failed attempt to start my own short-lived webcomic, I looked at some old webcomics that I used to read back in 2002 to about 2004. These comics were linked to by my friend PM when he was beginning work on Tales from the Duh.

The first webcomic I'll talk about is Bob and George. This is a sprite-based comic about two guys who get stuck in the Mega Man universe. It was originally going to be about a guy and his life at college, but he found out he couldn't draw. That happens to a lot of us. The comic is credited as being the first of many sprite-based comics.



The Good

David Anez updated almost everyday for about seven years, so there's a large archive to read (and reread.) It's a very quick read too, and you can have seven comics on a page at a time if you want.

He covers the first six Mega Man games, and the parodies of those games are where he's at his best.

My favorite parody was of the fourth game, where he made up a storyline about how the USSR collapsed because Wily stole something. Wily also kidnaps Dr. Cossacks daughter by accident.

One of my favorite non-Mega Man story lines had one of the characters travel into another dimension to meet the Japanese 'Rock Man' characters.


The Bad

A lot of story lines that aren't based on Mega Man games don't go anywhere. In some of his commentaries, he mentioned how every year he would introduce a big boss, but I couldn't remember more than two when I read that.

There were a couple story lines that just plain confused me. At one poin Mega Man goes evil (or crazy?) and starts shooting people (running around like an idiot?) and for no apparent reason there's tiny sprites running around in the background.

It's frustrating to read a story line about time travel and see too many "I hate time travel!" punchlines. There are many of those.

Bob and George are rather undeveloped characters. I don't mind it so much for Bob since he's just evil, but George should have had better character development since he gets a lot of screen time as the comic goes on. Since he starts off mostly eating ice cream, his powers seem to come out of nowhere.



The Ugly

One Halloween they made a movie that was a parody of zombie flicks. There's nothing gross on screen but for some reason it disturbed me, even if it was just robots being attacked.




The Rest

Dave's site is also the home of a ton of fan comics and sub comics. I remember reading one comic that used sprites from Final Fantasy VI and the very first comic had characters telling dumb gay jokes. I might have read one of the other sub comics afterwards, but for the most part I stood away.

At one poin, PM was able to get Tales from the Duh listed at the fan comic link page. It's no longer there since PM hasn't updated the comic since 2004, but it was neat to see it there for a while.



Summary

I don't want to sound harsh about the comic. It's a fun, quick read. This comics shows that you can get away with quantity over quality.

Of course, if you're not a Mega Man fan, forget what I said. You probably won't care about it.