by Michael Whitney
The difficulty in writing about a webcomic like The Unfeasible Adventures of Beaver and Steve is that fun almost always dies on the operating table of a review.
Beaver and Steve is just a silly, fresh strip about a vaguely reptilian character and a vaguely beaver-ish character who live in a Crayola-colored world brimming over with non-sequiturs like lobster bees and derby-wearing cockroaches. James Turner isn't clutching Yorick's skull here. This isn't heavy stuff. It's just ridiculous and a lot of fun.
The title characters are two scoundrels in the classic comic tradition. They pursue their own needs through any obstacle -- including, if necessary, each other -- without regard for consequences. It's the kind of tunnel vision initiative that leads them to use the Ark of the Covenant to incinerate a romantic rival and accidentally destroy the girl in question with him.
Even though he gets first billing, Beaver is mostly a straight man to Steve (the reptile/dinosaur), who's the emotional and impulsive comic relief. Like a troublesome older brother, Beaver offers bad advice or just points out the facts. Steve is the one who drives the strip: building time machines and robots, assaulting pandas or taking abuse from a bizarre cast of cruel minor characters that includes shoe goblins and aggressive turnips.
Like a lot of comic characters, they're more iconic stand-ins for people than they are actual animals. The strip has some fun with their animal sides by taking them to the zoo, where they run into "actual" beavers, which Turner draws differently. Steve doesn't recognize the family resemblance between Beaver and the beavers, so he makes a few comments that get him pushed into the cage to take a beating.
The strip as a whole has an endearing, childlike personality. The art is skillful, but the main characters' designs look like they're a few evolutionary steps up from kindergarten stick figures. They're not rough in the sense that they're poorly drawn. They're obviously stylized. When they're paired with jagged panel borders and pastel backgrounds, you get the feeling that you're peeking into a notebook of childhood drawings that has somehow stayed alive and sampled the adult world's nastiness.
The characters' innocent-looking designs are part of the humor, which often has them reveal a comic dark side. When they're confronted by (what seems to be) a murderous alien, Steve offers his last words to his friend: "I've always secretly hated you, Beaver." Casual cruelties like that are a staple of the strip that plays against their endearing appearance. It's a lot funnier when a cute dinosaur drawing calls a guy a sissy because he's complaining about being mauled by a bear.
Beaver and Steve's world can also get mean. There's quicksand, possessed toasters and backyard spiders that will eat right through your skull. Again, the tragedies befall characters who remind you of a refrigerator drawing.
Of course, the Internet, animation and print are rife with anthropomorphic characters with dark sides who face an unkind world and suffer comically unkind fates. You can trace it right back to Daffy Duck taking a rifle shot to the face. But when a strip is executed this well, its creator can be forgiven for mixing his own talents in a formula that works.
If the archives are complete, then The Unfeasible Adventures of Beaver and Steve is still a young webcomic. The oldest strip dates back to September 2004. Turner snapped into a signature style quickly. There are just a few strips between the small black and white debut and the large, pastel-background strips. By the end of the first month, it begins to take a form that is, if not wholly original, then at least a distinctive voice of a creator. That's a pretty amazing evolution, and hopefully we'll continue to see Turner tweak his style.
I won't argue for a deeper meaning in Beaver and Steve. I won't try to find a way that it's a ground-breaking strip. It's not. It's just silly and fun. And that's often harder to get across in a review than those other qualities.
