by Michael Whitney
One of the unique experiences offered by online comics is the opportunity to witness the progression of raw talent into sophisticated style and form. Most artists develop as they work, but, in the past, readers didn't see the early stages because they were shelved by an editor. On the Web, though, comics are posted as laboratory and obsession. Continuing online strips usually have an archive that gets cruder and cruder as you move back in time, as if you're watching the strips dissolve back into imagination.
It's inspiring to see how much the rigor of a regular schedule can do for artistic abilities. Even the ones who start out good get exponentially better over the first few months. And every once in a while -- just rarely -- they end up in totally different worlds than where they started, with a comic that couldn't have been forecast from their first update. John Allison is one of those rare creators. His earliest archived strip is "Bobbins," a hand-drawn, sitcom-styled strip when it debuted. Today, he does the quirky, digitally-produced "Scary Go Round."
For the past 4 years, Allison has periodically tweaked and re-thought his art. The thing is: unlike most primordial webcomics, it's never been really bad. The early "Bobbins" strips suffered some typical faults of a young offering, but were still well drawn. Over time, Allison scrubbed out the flaws into a consistent style that would satisfy anyone. In June of 2000, after a hiatus, he switched to digital lettering. Then digital finishing started creeping into the strip with lines that were obviously sharpened on a computer. In January of 2001, he started producing "Bobbins" using vector art. The characters became essentially digital paper dolls: a little stiff and straight-limbed, but visually clean and interesting.
That style underwent some minor tweaks, but was basically unchanged until he launched "Scary Go Round" in 2002 with some major touch-ups. The paper dolls loosened up. The figures were squashed and stretched to make them feel more natural. His influences for the new look seem to be drawn primarily from commercial cartoonists of the 50's and 60's, who have come back into vogue in cycles over the years. And even since the launch, he's tweaked the style twice.
That's a lot of visual changes for a strip with a steady following. Most webcomics that earn an audience freeze on the winning formula to try to hold the momentum. Changing the whole look and feel so often would be either unthinkable or impossible. But Allison's popularity has never suffered -- except after the hiatus between "Bobbins" and "Scary Go Round" -- possibly because each new iteration has been more interesting than the last. So much so, in fact, that he's also bred a small field of imitators, though no one online has been able to quite match him.
The progression is not just in art. The original "Bobbins" fit in the sitcom-inspired family of strips: comics that crib their jokes from prime time. It was about people who worked together, put each other down for laughs and fretted about relationships. Reading the archives, though, you can see things taking a slow turn toward the bizarre. Aliens visit Shelley in the night. A new character, Fallon, is an international superspy a la the Avengers. Tim builds a life-like robot woman and then cheats on his girlfriend with it. Later, he fights a killing machine named Red Robot over her. The center was losing hold when Allison ended the "Bobbins," at least in name.
"Scary Go Round" has most of the same characters decoupled from gag humor, relationship obsession and reality. They meander into stories full of zombies, witches and inter-dimensional doorways. It gets stronger and stranger with almost every story line, and you get the sense that Allison is stretching out now that's he's freed his work from genre.
What kind of comic is "Scary Go Round," after all? The sitcom relationship "why-didn't-he-call," "can't-get-a-date" gags are gone, as is the office humor. Since "Bobbins," Allison's jokes have begun to rely increasingly on syntax. Allison will play up a punch line by putting it in the character's mouth awkwardly. Often it's phrased backwards or without contractions. The style is hard to describe, and examples wouldn't work out of context, but it's a kind of hyper-ironic faux naive dialog in which the characters seem to be ironically aware that they're speaking awkwardly to be funny, but that's funny. Anyway, it's how you talk for a few hours after reading through the full archives; it's incredibly infectious.
Despite the horror elements in "Scary Go Round" -- Bible-thumping witches, shy zombies and uber-polite biker gangs -- the characters take their circumstances too well to let us feel that they're facing a genuine threat in a horror story sense. Even when they're transported to an alien dimension, Tessa and Rachel are comfortable enough to keep ribbing each other. The tone is too silly for genuinely dire consequences, which may be why Allison fielded some angry response when he killed off a popular character, Shelley, early in the strip. (He chose to resurrect her later in the comic's best story line, a move that re-asserted the strip's capricious personality.)
There's some light parody of horror films, but a lot of the supernatural characters are either originals or very obscure references. "Scary Go Round" isn't a comic about horror movies, though; that's just not its focus. The supernatural is a big part of the strip, but it seems to enter the story to add color and raise the stakes for the characters. It's so non-threatening and whimsical that it makes "Scary Go Round" something like a children's book for 20-somethings. The characters have adventures, they go to the Wild Things' island, they take in the strangeness with good humor, join the dance and come out all right on the other side.
The comparison to "Where the Wild Things Are" is literally true for the chapter mentioned above where Tessa and Rachel fall through a wall into an alien world full of strange creatures that resemble a child's monster from under the bed, if the child was a commercial illustrator. They come through it all unfazed, and even end up back in a bedroom at the end.
Shelley has suffered more damage in "Scary Go Round" than any other character so far. She's also the sweetest character in the strip, everybody's Internet girlfriend, who's written with a childlike innocence. So far, she's been murdered by a mad scientist's lab assistant, she's been turned into a zombie and brought back to life, she's had a plane crash on her and she's been shot by a biker gang. Through all that, she's stayed sweet. She's not a static character; she's just too good-hearted to be embittered by, say, death.
It's been interesting over the years to watch Allison develop a style of his own and break away from comic page conventions. Like a lot of creators, he started out wanting to draw a syndicated black and white strip for the newspapers, and gradually let loose of that idea with fantastic results. He's still somewhere in the middle of the pack between the creators holding onto the newspaper comic chestnuts and the new media experimenters, but that makes him one of the ones to watch for an idea of where the medium is likely to go in a few years. Not everyone is going to be drawing vector art or doing his kind of humor, but that's the point. Already, fewer and fewer new creators are starting out by drawing imitations: "Bloom County" recast or "Friends" in ink. They're leaving behind those ideas and wandering into the wild.
