Owen: I got an RSS subscription to this comic like two weeks ago, and I really can't believe how stupid it is every day. It never makes any sense, and I think it's just about how this dude has a pregnant girlfriend but he's an asshole or something. Drawings=Terrible. Writing=Terrible.
Victor: I'm going to have to go ahead and agree with you on this one, Owen. What the fuck is going on here? I read some other ones dude did that also don't make sense but this is on some late Godard type WTF shit. The drawings are like dude went to SCAD cartooning school and sucked his own dick for two years. I don't even know what that means I just said it.
Owen: I think it's like a pastiche where in the first panel, the dude, Anders, is having sex with some chick who isn't pregnant, and then on the other side his pregnant girlfriend is alone, and in the middle some crazy lady is calling some other chick, and they're all held together by the sound of the daily newspaper hitting the curb outside of their apartments. It's like William Carlos Williams or something. But I think to understand all of the pathos in this particular scene you would have to go back and read this whole fucking comic, which would be worse than reading Mein Kampf like ten times without a break.
Victor: I know you don't smoke weed but are you HELLA HIGH RIGHT NOW? No, but actually thanks for the explanation, I think I get it now: it's poignant. Like Garden State. I really am seeing Carlos Williams too now. And Mein Kampf. All valid reference points. This dude's shit should be on SparkNotes. You remember in college when you would see pretty girls walking around with Ulysses and "The Ulysses Reader" and you were like, "I bet she's smart" and maybe it was true and maybe it wasn't? Or like everyone is smart in their own way?
Owen: Or like a pretty girl reading Discipline and Punish? Or Meditations in an Emergency? Or Thus Spake Zarathustra? Or Orlando? Or S/Z? Or The Man Who Was Thursday? Or Venus in Furs? Or Djinn? Or Summa Theologica? Or Expositio aurea super artem veterem Aristotelis? Fuck you.
Victor: Oh yeah that unauthorized Orlando Bloom biography is pretty dope.
Owen: Virginia Woolf.
Victor: I believe it's spelled: Wolf. Virginia Wolf.
Owen: Neil Gotanda.
Victor: Edward Said.
Owen: Roger Cohen. Sucks.
Victor: Which Cohen brother is he? The one that is now a biological female?
Owen: What? Is that true?
Victor: No, it's a joke. One of the Wachowski brothers is a biological female now though. I think that's what Speed Racer is about.
Owen: I didn't see that. I guess I will have to. You and my friend Bethany both like it. She wrote about it.
Victor: Shit, I'll have to read that later. I know Bethany, she's a nice lady. Speed Racer and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker are tied for Craziest Fucking Movie Ever. Oh, also, this web comic sucks.
Owen: Coda.
19 comments:
This is one of my favorite comics.. you just have to read the whole thing. Anyways in this one Anders, who has a pregnant girlfriend that he loves but cheated on so they are seperated, is sleeping w/ his friend lena's 16 year old daughter. So it is showing them in bed and then showing lena... just part of a bigger story line that is kind of fucked up but beautiful because it is true to human emotion. So ya.. i would give this one another chance.
You can't read the comic as if it were a comic from the Anglosphere. To enjoy it, you have to accept that some elements come from Scandinavian culture. Like that it's okay for a 16-year-old girl to aggressively pursue a 29-year-old man for sex. Or that some straight men find women squishing their genitalia on them is unpleasant, and that happens often enough to have a word for it. Think of it as William Gibson, but with a real culture instead of a fictional one.
Oh, I think you don't need to be immersed in Scandinavian culture to understand it-- you do have to start at the beginning, and you do have to appreciate stories that don't culminate within four panels. And occasionally, you have to mentally slap Anders upside the head, but that's another story. All of these things are things that I enjoy and appreciate in web comics (except, perhaps, for the urge to smack the main character around a little, but there ya go...)
Do you guys even know who William Carlos Williams is?
Wait, so you're saying you've read the 220th page of the comic out of context and it makes no sense? Yeh, I guess that means it's poorly written...
The writer is not a Scandinavian. She's from a redneck town in Northern Canada and moved to Sweden. She now speaks in a fake accent and tries to pretend she's something she's not. Anders Loves Maria is a tremendous insight into the waste of enormous talent.
bunch of prick for critics. i stopped midway into your rant. it sucked ass. you should think or actually give something a chance before you blog about some other persons hardwork and passion. get a life outside of picking random people off the internet to insult.
Jesus Christ I can't believe you shmucks had the audacity to review an entire webcomic based purely on one fucking page! Fucking amateur blowhards, you should read the whole series. The fact that you didn't know the author was a woman should be grounds for sending you pricks to the stockades.
in response to folks who didn't dig this and other entries, i'd like to clear up that this blog is more about the futility of criticism as an exercise than about any of the shitty web comics we review. we have never claimed to have any journalistic standards or sense of well-reasoned objectivity at all. this blog is about kneejerk haters delighting at the chance to shit on something they don't care about enough to even bother to understand/investigate/research and about casually musing as to why we might not care to do so. it's also about using the medium of a critical blog to really just talk shit about anything that comes to mind.
that said, if the comic needs to be read all at once, what is the purpose of making it a serial? ideally shouldn't a serial be easy to understand and easy to get into at any given point in the story? isn't that what makes shit like lost or the wire so popular?
Wow, so you see one page and poorly critique it? I'll have you know, its a woman who actually draws this comic, so sucking HER own dick while drawing, is a little impossible. Maybe its you who is sucking your own dick. (If thats the case, then hats off to you).
Not all web comics are on a one page basis. Some actually have a story, and if you don't have time to read the 220 pages she's written, then you shouldn't take the time to judge one comic off one panel.
Ugh this comic does suck ass..it loses all of its appeal as soon as you're done with the archive... it's like Entourage...not worth waiting for until the whole thing comes out on DVD and then you're still "meh" ... The "artist" is also AWFUL at updating regularly... I don't think she has ever gone a full week on schedule... there is always some excuse and on top of that, she begs for money from her readers under the guise of "selling" some prints to make sure she doesn't have to go back to work.
looks like a blog where a couple of dudebros share their Very Important Opinions.
toot too, here comes the clue train. being a white guy with a pretentious name doesn't necessitate that your opinion is right or matters.
I have read the whole comic, mainly because I like the art actually - though not in the early strips. I have a huge gripe with the writing however, which really stems from the authors attitude. She is presumably a well educated woman, yet she depicts almost all her female characters to be content to have sex without a condom - either during random hookups, affairs or long term monagamous relationships who have not yet decided properly if they could handle having a baby. Funnily enough this seems to extend into the authors own life - she seems to promote abortion as a form of contraception...(I'm pro choice, but if you haven't worked out that the logistics of having a baby together would work - use a frakking condom!)
I've also read the comic. The whole. Way. Through. It is infuriating, and I don't think the artist understands that her guest comics(or the majority of them), are people making fun of her comics.
I'd also like to add that her 'donation and get a comic!' thing is broken, so I donated and didn't get a darn thing.
Owen: I got an RSS subscription to this comic like two weeks ago, and I really can't believe how stupid it is every day. It never makes any sense, and I think it's just about how this dude has a pregnant girlfriend but he's an asshole or something.
Lets rephrase that into a useful review instead of intellectual masturbation --
"I got an RSS subscription to this comic two weeks ago, and it still doesn't make sense to me. I think it's about a dude who is an asshole or something, and who has a pregnant girlfriend."
See... now it's factual without a lot of personal self justification thrown in. You don't understand it. Hardly surprising considering that it's a long story arc over 3 years. The drawing style isn't to your taste? FINE. But your taste isn't the touchstone for all taste the world around -- personally, I prefer eccentric styles to the Stan Lee style. Is the story convoluted, perhaps even confusing at times? Yes... just like real life. Hell, I'm the main character in my own story and sometimes I don't know what just happened.
Bottom line - if you don't like it, just say so without pretense to some exalted throne of critical majesty. Present the facts, and let us decide for ourselves.
Your excuse as to why it is OK to write a crappy review without the needed information to write one to begin with is almost as shitty as the review was itself.
I personally loved this comics ability to relate to real life, I found the artwork to be captivating, but I was more than annoyed by Rene's lack of updates and constant excuses as to why she was late with updating them, and her subsequent whining to her loyal fan-base whenever one of us so much as expressed a tiny bit of anger at her professionalism in the world of online comics.
Does her professionalism (or lack of) make me hate the comic? Absolutely not, though it did make it hard to wait the 2+ months for the finale.
i rarely bother to answer an idiot critic like yours, it adds nothing to you and makes me less, but i'm making an exception on this... just because you cannot understand it, you don't have to call it shit, or wtv.
Good thing about this, is once i close this post i will forget you immediately, but i will remember Renes drawings al my life <3
Lol, do people really not understand satire? or was this just a 2010 fad?
I'm kinda proud to see that I'm more perceptive than most of the other commenters, modesty forgotten. Also, a bit scared at what the internet can do to us...
Cheers!
Anon
And here is me in 2013 coming to answer the last dipshit from 2011. A satire is constructed with intellectual investment. This... this is as funny as dog crap on the street. And nothing justifies this putrefied brain leak.
Just asswholes being asswholes.
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