http://www.comicspage.com/brewster/brewster.html

6/14/05

Foreword: Brewster Rockit is hosted on comicspage.com, an outlet of Tribune Media. In short, it’s technically a syndicated strip, and thus is arguably not a webcomic. However, given that many popular webcomics do appear in newspapers, and Brewster Rockit does not appear to have been sold by Tribune to any papers yet (correct me if I'm wrong), I’ll call it close enough, particularly since it’s worth your time to read.

Plot: Brewster Rockit is captian of the spaceship R.U. Serious. Along with the typical small crew (the techie, the scientist, the woman, you know) he does the typical space captain things (kill aliens, do weird science, you know). The tone is very obviously a take on the cheesy beginnings of pop sci-fi. The plot structure is mostly single-shot strips, with a few story arcs that last for 5-8 strips. Sunday strips are always not part of any story arc and will interrupt an ongoing arc on occasion.
The plot draws on a lot of story element that are just to overused to impress me. There are enough incompetent space villains or Lord of the Rings parodies in the world of webcomics to have a convention for them. Besides these rather uninspiring story arcs, there really isn’t much attempt at a plot to speak of, so Brewster Rockit doesn’t win any points for having a good plot.

Humor: A fair amount of character jokes, with the dumb captain, the gross techie, the disturbed scientist, the abused lab assistant, yadda yadda. There are also some parodies, not just of science fiction pop culture, but across the board of the best known bits of pop fiction.
We’re not talking real hilarity here, but the jokes can be very clever. The parodies typically fall flat, and not every character is funny, but at least once a week there’s a punch line that makes me glad I read the comic just for that good joke. The jokes are never forced, either. The good jokes just pop up so naturally that you can’t imagine that setup turning out as anything but very funny, and there aren’t any annoying attempts to make bad jokes funny.

Art: Cartoon realistic, black and white. The art is stylish, but very simple. The Sunday strips are in full color and much more detailed, and most of the following criticism doesn’t apply to these color strips. The character design fits perfectly with the cheesy retro sci-fi theme, but this is the only real draw of the black and white art. In the B&W art, there’s a lot of what appears to copying and pasting; if in fact the art isn’t copy-pasted, it at least looks that way. The B&W shading is functional, but it doesn’t have the depth that many comics add with crosshatching, variable line widths, or other techniques. The color art is much nicer, with both line shading and color shading. The comic still isn’t really notable for the art, but it can legitimately be called visually pleasing on Sundays. However, the color strips are much larger, but compressed into the same size as the B&W strips, making the color strips very difficult to read--not the author’s fault, but still annoying.

so Bad: Amazingly, truly amazingly funny and interesting, all because Brewster Rockit really knows how to work with its style. Yes, the plot can be bad, and so can a fair number of the jokes, but all of this is just great when combined with a style that really makes all these pieces fit together. What makes this comic so wonderful is that, in making fun of the whole cheesy sci-fi genre, it doesn’t overshoot things. The best way I can put this is to look at Brewster’s chin. It’s just square enough to be authentically bad, not some jutting monstrosity half as long as his face. A ridiculous chin would be ludicrous, but ludicrous gets old, fast, since anyone and their brother can exaggerate. Brewster’s chin, and each other part of the comic, isn’t ludicrous but instead stylishly bad. The comic doesn’t make fun of early pop sci-fi by being worse; the comic convinces the reader that it is exactly as bad, which is much more effective and funny. The art is often poor, the personalities flat, but it’s all a very believable re-creation of the failings of the genre, and wildly funny. The real mark of excellence is that Brewster Rockit doesn’t even rely on the reader having experience with actual cheesy sci-fi. It is so convincing in its portrayal that the reader can imagine without any experience exactly the earnestly awful sci-fi that the comic makes fun of.
That being said, there are also the reassuring touches that demonstrate that the author is in control of his comic and is precisely controlling how bad it is. There are some jokes, my favorite of which is the abuse of the lab assistant, which show some rebellion against the strictures I associate both with cheesy sci-fi and syndicated comics. The occasional self-referential joke also adds to the pleasure of reading a comic that is not just bad, but so precisely bad that it shows real genius.

Updates: Daily, spot-on consistent. The strips are standard syndicate size, with the color strips being larger, but then shrunk down, as mentioned above.

Overall: A comic that would be not completely awful, but pretty close, if it were not for the careful touches that transform it from a bad sci-fi comic to an amazingly funny re-creation of the best faults it can find.