Saturday, March 1, 2014

Welcome to Webcomic Review Month the Fourth

So it's that time of year again, the time of year when I toss my regular review schedule to the wind and spend the entire month focusing on webcomics (partially to give me a chance to catch up with everything for my regular reviews, it's hard finding the time to consume that much media every single week!). And this might be the last year I do this, each time I've done this the month has gotten smaller and smaller because, well, webcomics! While I do find new series every year that I enjoy it simply takes a lot of time for a story to really get going and show what it's all about. Outside of this month a lot of my reviews are "manga-sized", ie comic books of 120-180 pages in length and people may have noticed that I don't even like reviewing a single volume at a time, I much prefer to review things in larger chunks (oh right, I need to post another Basara review soon then.....). Yet for a webcomic 120-180 pages is one to three years worth of updates, I'm not kidding when I say that some of the webcomics I review I started reading 14 or 16 months earlier but have to hold off until the following year just so I can tell everyone what the plot is about.

I've already decided to do away with the "finished webcomics" set of reviews in and in the future I'll just review them as they finish (the same way that I do with manga, although that reminds me that I have one of those I need to get to soonish...) and I think that might work better for webcomics. Say, I review books once I get them from Kickstarter or the like (so I can also talk a little bit about how the physical product looks like) and hopefully that would let me review the books they way I prefer and really give me a chance to dive into the story. Also, there have also been a number of times when I've talked about a really promising new story and it's died quite soon afterwards (I count that out of the  124 webcomic reviews I've done about 30 update so erratically we're lucky to get 20 pages in a year and 15 are flat out dead, it doesn't sound like much but I think I may have missed some) which is another reason I'm hesitant to review a comic that's rather new. If anyone here has a really strong opinion either way about this let me know in the comments, otherwise, hopefully everyone finds at least one cool thing to try out this month. Expect a post every third day or so, think I have just enough comics for that!