Guest Review: "Questionable Content"

many months ago, Ann Apolis decide to wade into dangerous waters by reading the archives of Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques. The content proved so questionable that she had to divide her review into multiple parts. Here is part one. I have never read QC so I absolve myself of all responsibility for the accuracy of this post. Enjoy --Carl

Hello, compatriots! My name is Ann Apolis, medical doctor and doctor of humour, able to observe comedy with the detached air that comes of living in Actual England instead of New England.

It so happens that one day on the #xkcd-sucks IRC channel Kirk suggested (nay, demanded) that I read the webcomic Questionable Content. And I did. And, mindful of the common criticism of this blog ("Why do you spend all your time whining about xkcd when there are worse things in the world, like genocide and war and Questionable Content?") I decided to write up my experience for Carl 'Ugly' Wheeler to display on his popular pictoblag.

So.

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Here is a song. It's "Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh. Go listen to it.

Did you like it? Of course you didn't, it's "Lady in Red" by Chris de Burgh: reheated cabbage with a dodgy backing track that would elicit sneers at the Eurovision Song Contest. I hate it. And yet... and yet I rather enjoy listening to it, because its utter detestability fails to outweigh how pleasurable it is detest it, what joy there is in mocking every facet of its carefully constructed awfulness.

And it was much the same emotion that got me through reading the first 507 strips of Questionable Content. There is a lot to mock.

I shall go easy on the art; it is only the first 507 strips after all (looking at the latest ones it seems to improve a lot) and given that it's a webcomic on the internet nitpicking the art seems petty; suffice to say, the canonically fat Faye doesn't look particularly fat and the canonically well-endowed Faye doesn't really look bigger than the other two ["Ann Apolis, why are you staring at boobs on the Internet?" "It's research for an article!"]. But as I said, picking on the art is a little unfair.

Picking on the writing isn't. Again I imagine it probably improves (or at the very least changes) over time, but the writing in these strips is pretty bad. For one thing, Faye (who is over this period of time pretty much The Main Character - Marten exists to facilitate plot and conversations with Faye) is kind of a jerk. She punches people a lot and is generally rather nasty. (Aside: I can't find it cos there's no search function, but there's also that comic where she punches the dude in the music shop for being judgmental about other people's taste in music. Despite the fact that QC seems to be The Official Webcomic Of Being Judgmental About Other People's Taste In Music: uno, dos, tres...) And I don't like media where the main character is a jerk because I don't like hanging around with jerks, even if they're meant to be jerks (and Faye is meant to be a jerk, and Jeff has crafted her very well as a jerk).

Thankfully (SPOILERZ) she does get called on it, although (EVEN MORE SPOILERZ) she gets given a Freudian Excuse for it later on, and I can't really tell whether her character changed in the long-term, because I'VE ONLY READ UP TO STRIP 507 jesus people.

Characters are all yer generic wisecracker, pretty interchangeable as long as you're careful. One particularly annoying tic with the writing is the attempt to make every joke a Brilliant Social Observation, and the result is that the girls all say things like "Remember that all girls like going to the park!" and the boys say "Ah but as a boy I want to get into your pants" and then someone will say "Indie rockers [like us!]; why are we so obsessed with", er, I dunno, "indie rock", and it all devolves into that awful As You Know stuff. And it does happen. All the bleeding time.

What else? Oh yeah, there's that strip (again I can't find it) where Dora the goth comes out of her house wearing a pink shirt and you think "OH WELL THAT'S NOT A METAPHOR FOR HOW SHE'S ABANDONING GOTHHOOD AT ALL" and it's a bit clunky and obvious to be frank (although maybe this is just my superior literary ability ruining things for me).

Wow, some of the guest strips are pretty harsh (I include the last one only because of panel one).

Nice things! Let me say some nice things. Well the art is sure as hell better than some comics I could name (hint: look at the blog name!), and for someone who's admitted to using copy-and-paste sometimes he sure manages to conceal it well. Also Jeff usually tries to make humour flow from the conversation rather than shoehorning a punchline in somewhere. That's commendable. Marten is actually quite a good character, really; he works as Punchline Vehicle #3, as a sort of blank slate character for the action to revolve around, and it's also pretty easy to get a handle on who he is.

Why did I only read up to strip 507? Well (SPOILERZ) it drops a pretty big drama bomb so that seemed like a good time to stop. Also I suspect it changes quite a bit after that strip so it was best if I got my insights on strips 1-507 done before thinking about the rest.

Right, I think that's everything. There we are then, Questionable Content: a webcomic of indie snobbery, jerks, "as you know..."s and bewbs. Do your worst, Internet.

P.S. I am myself an indie snob so don't be all "well maybe you'd appreciate it if you had actually heard of The Arcade Fire".