Warning: The reviewed webcomic is disturbing.

When you hear of a mashup webcomic with licensed characters, you might expect a fan-work produced by someone too young to have a web presence. You might not expect a professional artist in his forties who outsources his writing and coloring. The internet has all kinds.

Rather than leave the Powerpuff Girls to Cartoon Network’s slow process of seasonal rot, artist Bleedman (Vinson Ngo) has made them the main characters in a mashup webcomic featuring others CN IPs such as Dexter and Samurai Jack in the setting of a town called Megaville. Bleedman inserts some of his own OCs as well, and if you aren’t familiar with the many CN characters depicted, you might have a hard time telling which is which.

One pleasant surprise that is noticed right away is that the art is actually mostly quality. Noteworthy is that some of the characters, such as Dexter and the girls themselves, were stylized to make them conflict less with the style of the comic. This means that the characters were effectively redesigned, so some amount of creative work was involved in what is otherwise an appropriation of characters not Vinson’s own. Yet, this contributes all the more to a strange suspicion that the artist could probably benefit from directing more of his talents elsewhere.

Considering that Bleedman is competent at designing characters, it’s kinda wasted potential that he didn’t go all the way by developing a cast of his own original characters to tell a story of his own, and in so doing allowing himself the possibility of going professional with this comic by not tying it firmly to intellectual properties that he doesn’t have rights to. I hear he has other comics, but still, he put a disproportionate amount of effort into what is basically a mashup. To what end? I dunno, maybe the ad revenue from his page has been kind to him.

But when we get into the story itself, it starts to become apparent why the comic benefits so well from the familiarity of its characters. The story isn’t that great.

The comic sees the Powerpuff Girls, slightly older, attending a new school. It’s there that they meet other CN characters, such as Dexter, whom Blossom has a budding relationship with (whatever dude, it’s your fantasy). They end up in a revenge-driven conflict with Mandark who’s still obsessed with Deedee whom he had accidentally slain. It actually got pretty dark at times, but the comic would later tone it down. Still, the emotional ante is brought up by the fact that these characters could be killed off, regardless of anyone’s fond memories of them in their respective shows. Kinda messed-up.

After the Mandark story arc concludes, the comic starts to grow dull, and with panel after panel laboring to describe Blossom’s emotional state in light of Dexter’s guilt, it takes a while for the momentum to build up again.

There is a jump-the-shark moment, and that happens when a character is spared being killed off because the grim reaper (yes, it’s Grim) decides not to take her, so a fatal wound is reversed. While a compelling explanation for this decision could play out in a future page, when you know that the heroes have an angel, a grim reaper, and the servant of a celestial dragon working to prevent the heroes from dying, it tends to eliminate much of the tension.

The best armor in all of fictional media is plot armor.

At times, it seems like it’s all Bleedman could do to ensure that the CN assets stay in character, which occurs to various degrees of success. At least with the PPG, he largely gets it, with the exception of Blossom. Considering that she had a leadership role in the original show, her relative lack of confidence makes her seem much less like the same character. While a similar complaint can be made about other (borrowed) characters, it stands out more when it’s what’s arguably the main character.

Another problem with this comic is the psyche-out pages, which are gag pages that make it appear that the story is taking a bizarre direction, but the next page makes it clear that they weren’t really a part of the story. I get the idea that Bleedman is the kind of guy who can drop some disturbing news with a straight face, then say that he’s only kidding. There are also special pages for holidays, which adds little to the comic. They can pretty-much be skipped.

I get the idea that PPGD can be better appreciated in the frame of mind that one would have when they discover anime and manga for the first time, when one might observe that “they’re like those other cartoons, but edgier!” The point is driven home by the fact that “doujinshi” is in the title, but how many people outside of Japan even know what a “doujinshi” is?

If you’re sincere in your belief that blood, angst, fatalities, and pantyshots make for a more entertaining comic, here you go. But much of that was toned down after the Mandark arc, after which other aspects of the comic got dull. Maybe Bleedman’s mom discovered these comics, so he decided to tone them down.

Now for the score. Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi gets a score of 6 out of 10.

The art quality plays a huge part in that score. There are problems with this comic, but the redeeming qualities are there. But personally, I suspect that the artist’s efforts would be better spent on something he has a chance of going professional with.

Main character on left, title character on right.

Here we go, it’s a review of Sonichu.

Sonichu is a terrible webcomic. It’s famous for being bad, and it’s the deuce in all categories in which something can fail. But I’m not likely telling you anything you don’t already know. At this point, we know that Sonichu is the worst webcomic ever made. You might have guessed that I’m going to give this a score of 0 out of 10. You might have even heard about how bad it was from a friend. You might remember how he went on and on for what seemed like hours about how bad it was, like he’d continually find something wrong about it. His description may even have made you so curious that you decided to check it out for yourself. At that point, you’ll have discovered that not only was everything he said about the comic true, he was only scraping shavings off the tip of the iceberg.

That Sonichu is bad is public knowledge. It’s so infamous that it’s even caught the attention of some of Sega’s staff (and it likely horrified them). As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone who has heard of Sonichu knows its bad, which renders a review superfluous.

Yet, I’ve decided to write one. I’ve read the webcomic, and perhaps I’ll feel a lot better for having reviewed it.

If you’re planning on reading Sonichu, be warned that it’s weapons-grade terrible. Sonichu is so bad that your brain may interpret the comic as an attack against it. Sonichu is so dreadful that it integer underflows and somehow becomes strangely great. It’s still a bad webcomic, but it’s bad in a way that only a total mistake can be. A grand assembly of sadistic minds have conspired to develop inhumanity to their fellow man, resulting in the likes of MKUltra, and an autistic man-child with his head in the clouds outdid them without any effort.

Sonichu is such an immense beast of a webcomic that it’s hard to get through a review of it without breaking it down into sections.

Art

Can you find anything right with this picture?

Sonichu has the worst art in the universe.

What the author Christian Weston Chandler draws wouldn’t even be accepted on the amateur level as rough sketches, yet it’s what he decides to go with for his comic. It’s painful to look at. The crooked line art, the garish bright colors, his insistence on using Crayola markers to color, Chris doesn’t bother to get anything right.

The line art in Sonichu is jagged and unrefined. Mistakes he makes are not properly corrected; instead, he attempts to compensate for them by doing things like drawing over them and hoping his readership won’t notice. That’s assuming that he does attempt to correct his mistakes at all.

It’s tempting to say that one should not color their work using Crayola markers, but there are some artists out there that can masterfully employ them to make some pretty outstanding work. Chris is not one of those artists. It seems like Chris lacks the coordination to color within the lines. Not only that, Chris is not skilled enough with Crayola markers to avoid their key flaw: that overlapping strokes result in streaks of darker color than what is intended.

Chris is inconsistent in how he draws his own characters. If he wasn’t so easily identifiable by the shirt he is depicted as wearing, one might assume that different occurrences of Chris’ self-insert were actually different characters, as their body shape, facial structure, and proportions can radically change from one instance to the next.

At one point, Chris decided to adopt a more anime style for the comic. What this amounted to was drawing the eyes differently. That’s pretty much it, and it’s hard to notice considering the difficulty Chris has with consistency.

Chris simply doesn’t have artistic talent, and if he did, he didn’t use any of it to make Sonichu.

Characters

Sonichu has the worst characters in the universe.

The characters in Sonichu generally fall into one of just a few categories:

The male heroes
The male heroes are mainly the same as each other, just with different colors and slight variation in physical features. Each of them, including the title character Sonichu, have exactly the same motives: To shack up with a female and to help Chris with whatever it is that he’s trying to do, which is usually attempting to shack up with a female. Even Blake, when he heel-turns from being a bad guy to a good guy, quickly becomes indistinguishable from the other males except his color.

The female heroes
The female characters are basically similar in motivation to the male characters, but the main difference is their primary sexual characteristics, and the males are their targets of their affection.

The bad guys
An assembly of copyrighted characters that Chris doesn’t have the rights to, and people Chris knows about in real life that caught his ire, with at least one OC thrown in (Count Graduon). All have pretty much the same motivation: to prevent Chris from finding a girlfriend. Too bad Chris never bothered to establish what exactly they’d have to gain from this endeavor when they could instead try to take over the world or something.

The various permutations of Chris
Chris’ self-insert. His goal is to shack up with a woman. It’s considered a sign of lazy writing when an author uses a self-insert for a main character, but in later issues of Sonichu, Chris installs several self-inserts. I’ve actually lost track of them all.

The heroes in Sonichu are actually morally worse than the enemies that they fight. Disproportionate retribution is a recurring theme in Sonichu. For example, Chris feels justified in cursing a man, causing him to lose his family, just because he was doing his job as a security guard in asking Chris to leave a store he was staying in for too long. Another man had his face raped because a company he ran posted drawings of Rosechu (one of the female heroes) with a penis. In a special episode, Chris shot a man in both kneecaps because in real life he impersonated Chris and Chris was interested in his girlfriend. Chris stages a mock trial so he can sentence to death four men that he didn’t like, and had himself and his characters personally attend to the executions. And there’s more. So much more. The hero-centered morality in this story isn’t just awry, it’s perverse.

It’s bad enough that the characters in Sonichu are so horrible, they were also stolen. Nearly every character owes more than simply inspiration to existing copyrighted characters. Most of the hero characters are obvious recolors of characters from Sonic the Hedgehog, a brand that’s already famous for its recolors and template-driven designs. These characters also have elements of design from Pokemon characters. As if that weren’t enough, he pretty much used pokemon as characters outright, such as Reginald Sneasel.

There are OCs invented by people other than Chris that have been included in this comic, such as Jiggliami and Megagi, whether or not they were used with permission, some of which belonged to people who were trolling Chris in an attempt to influence his webcomic while it was ongoing. What personalities and goals that these characters had depends on whether they aligned with Chris, meaning that they too fell into one of the categories outlined above.

Every character in Sonichu are objects in Chris’ power fantasies, and Chris does jack all to develop them beyond this end.

Story

Notice how even they look bored to tears.

Sonichu has the worst story in the universe.

When one would hear the characters and their abilities described, one would assume that Sonichu is an action comic. After all, what else would a writer do with super speed and commanding electricity for attack? But while there are action scenes employing these abilities, Sonichu is primarily a relationship comic, with the main point of the comic being whether his electric hedgehog pokemon characters find partners, which they quickly do. But Chris doesn’t find his girlfriend as quickly, so much of the story focuses on that.

The narrative flow is dictated by Chris discovering concepts that he finds interesting in anime, video games, or whatever, which he then implements into his comic. Then, when he later loses interest in the concepts, they are quickly and quietly dropped, not likely to be brought up again until the readership reminds Chris that it seemed as though he might have been going somewhere with them. Then maybe Chris reintroduces them, likely to try to conclude that particular story arc because he’d rather be working on another concept that he found out about from some other media franchise.

Sonichu’s story as it is today can be broken down into four main parts:

The Sonichu Episodes
The first episodes focused mainly on Sonichu and his adventures with his recolor friends, including Sonic the Hedgehog. It largely reads as an insipid crossover fanfic written by a five-year-old, except it was written by a man in his twenties.

The Chris-Chan Episodes
The self-insert takes over, and from here on out, the comic is mostly about him and his love quest.

The To-the-Hilt Insane Episodes
Wow. When did it seem like a good idea to Chris to include in a comic intended for kids a sex scene between his cartoon hedgehogs, complete with an explanation for how their genitals worked? Or to commit mass-murder against a bunch of people who were merely hypnotized? Or to off one of the characters with a bomb behind a toilet? There’s so much more, too. Chris would later retcon huge chunks of these episodes.

The Boring Episodes
After a years-long hiatus, Chris continues Sonichu by shifting the attention to other characters, including a bunch of new obvious self-inserts. What’s worse than a comic starring Chris? How about a comic starring a whole bunch of Chris? Even though Chris really unleashes the plagiarized concepts, this set of comics is horribly boring.

Chris is so lazy with storytelling that he often leans on long walls of exposition, some of which nearly the whole page long, instead of breaking down what is being spoken to a number of different panels with accompanying visuals. Comics are a visual medium; as such, a rule of storytelling in comics is “show, don’t tell”. When Chris gets into long walls of exposition, it’s obviously an attempt to move the story along to the point that Chris would prefer to be working on by fast-forwarding past this thing called “developing the plot”. If you’re using dialog to convey the gravity of the situation in a visual medium, then you’re not likely using the medium to its full potential.

But hey, it was obvious to begin with that Chris wasn’t using the comic medium to its full potential. There was a point in which the dialog was numbered so the reader would know what order to read it in.

Saying that you read Sonichu for the story is like saying that you eat muffin bottoms to fight communism; the endeavor and the cause just don’t go together at all.

Verdict

Sonichu is the worst webcomic in the universe. Do not attempt to write a webcomic that’s worse than Sonichu. You wouldn’t be funny, and you’d be committing a crime against humanity.

Sonichu gets a score of Sonichu-itself-out-of-ten:

Which would be a zero. It’s the worst there is.

But as bad as Sonichu is, it’s actually quite interesting. It’s a window into a mind that is distressed. Because of Sonichu, we all know Chris-Chan like we would know a brother. A beloved brother who is truly disturbingly fascinating.

Sonichu truly does zap to an extreme.

One of my favorite comics while growing up was Calvin and Hobbes. It was about a boy, a stuffed tiger that seemed real to him, and it had tons of social commentary.

Being a kid, I didn’t immediately understand what Calvin and Hobbes was about. To me, it seemed to be about what a bad kid Calvin was in spite of his intelligence, and the misadventures he could get into when his imagination would run away with him. It wasn’t until later, when I had grown up and long after the comic had concluded that I realized just how much of it was clever criticism of commercialism and syndication of the comic industry in particular.

Of course, I was a kid, so there wasn’t much expectation that I’d understand just what Calvin and Hobbes was really about. But imagine if someone not only missed the point of the comic, they made a comic that attempted homage, claimed the original as its inspiration, did everything that the author of the original pined against, and failed in just about every way imaginable.

You really don’t have to imagine such a thing, because Addanac City exists.

Addanac City features Hank (pictured above), the worst possible thing that could happen after a night of drunken sex that you don’t remember. But while Calvin misbehaved but was generally relatable, George Ford (the author of Addanac City) went well out of his way to make Hank out to be a horrendous child with no redeemable qualities. So yeah, Addanac City goes the Allen Gregory route in storytelling where the main character is so abrasive and rancid that it befouls just about everything else that the comic is attempting to do. Not that it was doing any of it particularly well to begin with.

Addanac City is supposed to be a gag-a-day strip. It fails every single time because the jokes are so horribly repugnant that it’s almost as though someone were struggling to make something bad on purpose.

I was going to post an example here, but I decided to instead post a link to the archive. Go ahead and pick any one at random. There isn’t a single one that won’t prove my point.

Speaking of the “bad on purpose” thing, people can quit it with the whole “make-something-that’s-only-ironically-likable” dealie. I know that it seems easier to win a race to the bottom, and thus stand out as being the worst at something. But there are so many people running that race that it’s an actual challenge now and takes some effort to “win”. Because of this, it’s harder than it’s ever been to plod along with a minimum of effort. So, why not put some effort into making something that’s actually a positive contribution? Besides, Sonichu exists, so you’d already be beat, anyway.

Because it’s classified as a gag-a-day strip, George doesn’t have to bother with something called “plot”, freeing up his precious little effort for characterization. But he didn’t bother with this either, because the personalities of each of his characters are various degrees of fulminating rectum. Even Susie Derkins Christie, one of the victims of Hank’s antics, has her moments.

As far as art goes, each of the characters are to the eyes as farts are to the nostrils. It takes someone with some funny preferences to not be totally disgusted. George takes the concept of cartooning to mean that there’s no need to consider either anatomy or consistency. While it’s acceptable for cartoons to have colors that are vivid, George makes them so stark that they’re an attack on the eyes of the person who views them.

Another example is not being posted here. Here’s another link to the archives. You can pick any one; the art hasn’t improved at all since the comic’s inception.

There is an inconsistent use of gradients for shading, which makes everything that’s not shaded look flat, and in some cases, clothing textures are Photoshopped in for some outfits, but not for others. It’s as though George wanted to use some Photoshop effects for his comic, but neither knew how to use them properly or consistently. The result is a comic with a mish-mash of improperly applied effects with bright, painful colors.

Okay, fine. Here’s an example:

See all the problems? Now you know why I don’t want them on my blog. I don’t want George Ford’s content dragging mine down. I also don’t want men blaming me for erectile dysfunction or women blaming me for not self-lubricating.

Everything about this comic conspires to make it terrible. What makes it even more of an insult that he’s comparing his work to Calvin and Hobbes. If any humorous irony can be had from this, it’s that the author is so inept that he doesn’t recognize his comic as being the very thing that his source of inspiration warned against comics becoming: a bunch of illustrations for bad jokes that can be completed to the author’s satisfaction before lunch.

If you want to see something really interesting, here’s a YouTube video of George having one of his comics read aloud:

What’s interesting about it? That he got a woman to read it with him. And that woman is his wife. HIS WIFE. Something to think about if you’re one of those lonely men who find themselves wishing for a woman with low enough standards.

Now for a score that reflects how this comic holds up against my own standards:

0.2 / 10

You know how I usually find something funny in the comic to use as it’s score? Not this time. I just don’t want to go back there. Jack was a better webcomic than this. Vegan Artbook was a better webcomic. Even Boss Rush Society holds up as a better webcomic. Addanac City is just a mess.

I’m aware that there is another webcomic by the same name that came before, and that it’s somewhat stylistically similar. But that’s not the strangest thing about Jack.

This webcomic is classified as “horror” on The Duck, but I really don’t know how to classify it because most horror comics demand that it be taken seriously. Otherwise, it’s a particularly sick comedy. But hey, it doesn’t do particularly well at either, so whatever frame of mind you get into as you read this, you’re not bound to enjoy Jack very much.

Jack stars the title character, who is a man in a hockey mask who was supposedly a fugitive of some sort. Jason Voorhees would find this lame. The comic starts out with Jack on a stake, being threatened by a man leading a lynch mob, with Jack and the lynch mob trying to talk the man out of killing Jack. There is a highly unrealistic conversation about the legal consequences of killing Jack coming from Jack himself, because apparently it’s completely realistic to expect that a raving lunatic with a lynch mob at his side would be dissuaded by the legal repercussions of what he’s doing. From then on, Jack is released and sets out to avenge his kidnapping with homicide. But, as it turns out, Jack was actually killed, and Jack was telepathically tasked with rescuing the corpse of the alligator that ate him from the guy who left him to drown by the alligator itself.

Confusing? This comic is only getting started.

In the next story arc, Jack goes to a bar. A prostitute offers him some fun for some money, and Jack refuses. The prostitute does not take this well, so her pimp has him kidnapped in retaliation.

Fast fact: generally speaking, prostitutes don’t get upset if you don’t feel like having sex with them. They’re in it for the money. If they have bills to pay, and you don’t want their services, they’ll just move along and find someone who does.

So, what does the couple do with Jack? They rape him. No really, that’s what they do. We’re already past the point of “what-am-I-even-reading”, so it’s amazing that this comic can further continue its plunge downhill. But it does, and the hero is rescued by some random furry who happened to be walking by.

You read that right. This comic has furries. The author wants you to take it seriously as a horror comic, and it has furries. And you’re supposed to take it seriously. And it has furries.

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Where was I? Oh yeah, after this, Jack goes to jail, where he’s allowed to keep his mask, because it seems like standard procedures are suspended in this comic that you’re supposed to take seriously. It’s there that Jack meets someone who knows the people he just killed, and he somehow cuts his ears off when they’re behind the straps of his mask, and Jack does nothing to stop it, even though no one is holding his arms down.

Is it too much to ask that he struggles or does something more than look slightly peeved that he’s being disfigured with a knife?

That’s not an anomaly, either. That’s just how fighting is handled in Jack. Every blow is taken directly with usually no effort on the part of the assailed to practice basic self-preservation. An enemy can be completely upon his victim, with every perceivable advantage, but it’s still the victim’s turn to attack, and the assailant won’t so much as resist until their opponent has finished their attack. Because of this, the fighting in Jack is so stupid that it’s fun to read in a way the author probably didn’t intend.

Yes, I know that the point of all this suffering on the part of Jack is to show how he’s breaking down to the point that he’s the psychopath that he ends up becoming. I know, but I don’t care. This comic is so stupid and poorly-executed that what’s supposed to be tragic instead comes off as funny.

In Jack, there isn’t really one consistent art style. Jack comes off as an experimental comic in which numerous artistic styles are tried, but nothing is really stuck with. The result comes off as something that some high school student drew to show his friends how crazy he/she is so they don’t mess with him/her. Then they honestly don’t understand why they’re still being relentlessly made fun of.

There are parts that are mostly monochrome. The exception would be the blood, which is colored in red, as though we’re supposed to have our attention drawn to it. Aside from this indulgence, this is easily Jack at its best-looking, as it shows that the artist is competent at shading.

Other parts of the comic are full-color, but the colors are bright and garish, and appear to be colored with Crayola markers or an equivalent. Crayola markers are terrible for coloring, and are usually only used by children who don’t have a more sophisticated option available. It’s super-easy for strokes to overlap, which in the case of Crayola markers, results in darker colors where it happens. Someone who is masterful can take advantage of this to create depth, but this isn’t a skill that the author of Jack appears to have.

Then there’s the anatomy. Most humans are skeletal in appearance, which can probably be sold as being stylistic to go with the punk-metal horror style. However, you also notice how muscle tissue is misplaced in such a way as to interfere with a sense of depth, and you know that this comic is drawn by someone who is terrible with anatomy.

Being a furry doesn’t get you off Scott-free. The author only knows how to draw wolf snouts, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t still attempt to put other animals, such as rabbits, into her comics. Behold:

Is it a rabbit? Is it a dog? No! It’s just ugly.

This comic starts out confusing, and then descends into unintentional sick humor. Or was it intentional? It’s hard to tell. Maybe the artist is some kind of super troll, and everyone who points out this comics numerous flaws is playing into her hands in some way that can only be done by making a hilariously bad webcomic. Sounds like an airtight explanation, until you figure that there’s no perceivable benefit to doing such a thing. It’s just easier to say that she’s a bad webcomic artist. Hanlon’s razor and such.

Anyhow, on to the score, which is a there-there out of ten:

Which would be a 3.3. Because it’s not all bad, right?

I get the idea that this comic is intended to be enjoyed when in a certain frame of mind, which would be achieved by playing heavy metal from your speakers, drinking Kentucky bourbon, and banging your head while making a goat sign. But you could enjoy all that even more by not having this comic have anything to do with it.