Sunday, August 31, 2008

Eight Reasons to Read "Ant Guy"





Ant Guy is by Adam Rutten.


- This is the ant story Pixar and brethren couldn't make: weird and amoral and subtle. 
- The creator gets the plot moving quickly -- in frame four of the first strip.
- The characters are interesting. The frame introducing Wang is a hilarious spoof of pompous self-declarations.
- The art is compelling and strong.
- The black and white contrast is usually very good. Unbalanced tones are the downfall of many black and white comics for me. Artists working in black and white might consult the strip as a useful model of one successful approach. A more advanced approach to daytime forest scenes would enhance it.
- It's not a comedy strip, but there is humor.
- The artist's gallery has some entertaining stuff, like a completed Art Instruction School application.
- There are only eleven strips so far, so you can get in on the ground floor without a big investment of time. It feels like more: I am already caught up in the story.

Needs improvement: The protagonist's personality and speech are still a little too familiar. Site navigation's a bit wonky and the update schedule appears unplanned. (My advice for people using Wordpress is to make sure you understand the ways in which it is not user-neutral and compensate for them. By "not user neutral" I mean the ways it can annoy non-Wordpress users. We might say it needs its own distinct set of optimizations.)

Anyway...  Ant Guy. Fascinating.