Better Days, Part Deux

Well, here we are again. We aren't moving on to a new comic, that's coming next week. For now, we're revisiting one we've already done. We're going from chapters 14 to 25, hold on to your asses, because from here on shit is going to get *everywhere*.

Jay Naylor is not a smart man. He is can't seperate his own views from his characters. As such, any time any character of any intelligence is faced with a choice, they respond by asking "what would naylor do", and proceeding to lay out the same fucking line every time.

At this point in the comic, Naylor stops pretending Better Days is anything but his soapbox, and by that I mean Ayn Rand's soapbox. Everyone who visibly doesn't fit the Objectivist mould is a complete fucking strawman, with no ambiguity whatsoever.

You Catholic? Never date outside your religion. Also, religion is for retards. Also your overbearing mother is a bitch.

You Jewish? Well you're obviously uncut and never visibly practice your faith. Also your overbearing mother is a bitch.

Black? Or Asian? Or anoyone who isn't visibly white? Just let the magical white man take away all your problems. Also never expect to be a main character. Also your overbearing mother is a terrorist.

An artist? Never do anything but the obvious.

Female? Don't say one thing and do another. WOMEN! Amiritefellas!?!

But if you're a white, randian male? You can get away with fucking anything. You get to be a super spy. The government can't touch you because they suck. You can fire live ammo with no one noticing, beat up all the brown people you want, and win at everything the stupid government failed at!

The comic ends with ...well it just kind of ends. Every character gets a happy ending(unless Naylor forgot they exist), even if it involves a powerless victim gaining an extra two million dollars. FiskNaylor gets the girl and has babbies and they proceed to have inspid little adventures too dull to cover here.

There, now that the actual comic part is over, we can get to the fun bits and make petty personal attacks on the author.

Originally this bit was going to be about 75% of the article, but the evidence I had kind of dissapeared for most of Naylor's bullshit. The time Naylor admits to fucking a dude while claiming to be straight, the information about his horrible foreskin machine, and a thousand little idiocies are all gone forever.

However, I don't need any of that to tell you Naylor is a lying, cheating, cock obsessed scavanger. Jay Nayor is so pathetic he gives E. Coli something to look down on. I don't mean the disease, I mean the boring version. Jay Naylor is the guy literal shit eating specks can't bring themselves to pity.

Jay Naylor saw that a bunch of thirtysomething men were getting into My Little Pony(To each his own, I can't judge or else half my friends list will tear my ribs out). He, in a flash of cosmic irony so perfect that Loki, God of Bullshit and Lies, must have suffered a mild stroke, decided that drawing cartoon ponies was *too furry* and drew them as actual humans.

Then it got posted to 4chan, and every single one of them talked about nothing but how pathetic Naylor was and how even anons that do nothing but talk about which pony looks best in thighhighs were better than him. Even people Naylor seems to think are too furry hate the fuck out of him.

Before my primary reading group decides to cut my fingers off, lets move on to some other stupid things Naylor does. For one thing, he rips off other people's characters. I don't mean internet dick sucking like hopkins, I mean full on bitchfest ripoff stole. To show no hard feelings, he proceeded to rip off another one and make her a love intrest later. And then he makes you pay to watch her get pounded by his uncut randian cock.

As you may have gotten from this, Naylor is an opprotunistic vulture who'll do anything for a quick buck. A quick look to the top of his site show's he doesn't fuck around. Buy his porn, stroke his e-dick, or get the fuck out. His name is in big white letters, framed with cat asses, and a porn ad a quarter the actual page size right next to it. That placement isn't random either, any web design class will tell you the eye follows a specific pattern, which in this case takes you across the cat asses, to his big poofy name, then the porn ad, and only after this gauntlet can you finally find out which cat is fucking which. The only thing he loves more than Ayn Rand is Benjamin Franklin, and it has to be a lot of him.

Also, Objectevist Batman is a fucking terrible superhero.

Better Days

     Some of you may consider me without a heart. Not true. During my freshman year of college, my first love was a Scottish girl in my philosophy class. Day after day, I would attend that course just so I could hear that wonderful lilt in all her words. One time she asked me, "Who are yew?" I had to excuse myself to the bathroom for 15 minutes. Fuck me.

    I had finally gotten up the courage to ask her out for coffee. We had a lovely conversation about how confused Ayn Rand was, and I will admit, most of what I had learned was from second-hand accounts of her books as well as Bioshock. Regardless, I was hooked. I asked her out on a second date, and unfortunately, she declined, saying she doesn't "do that with students." I called her a stuck-up bitch and promptly left her office. True story.

    However, you cannot know love without hate. Just like love, the object you hate becomes your obsession. Just as the object of your love fills you with joy when they are happy, the object you hate fills you with joy when they are unhappy.

    My first hate was a horrendous furry fetish comic known as Better Days, written by ex-Kinko's manager, full-time second object of Skallagrimsson's hate, Jay Naylor. If  you're wondering where you have heard of him before, it's because everytime you vomit uncontrollably, you are subconsciously trying to associate it with his name.

    The first comic begins with the main character, Fisk talking to his sister, Female Fisk. The following strips have humor that is greeting card-worthy at best and Family Guy-worthy at worst. All in all, just your average, humorless furry comic, but then Fis-I mean, Naylor gives us a glimpse into his character.

    When I was rejected by my bonnie lass, I was upset, sure, but I didn't create a webcomic where I attempted to hamfistedly dissect her personality and explain the reason she rejected me was because she was a conniving, malicious, manipulative, deceitful harpy who unzips men's pants to merely devour their testicles, if only because the combination of fear, disappointment, loathing, and shock is the only thing that can get her off. Meanwhile, I'm sure Naylor is screaming into his pillow, "Why couldn't she just adore me for the beautiful, Randian, bestiality-drawing, humanity-loathing soul that I am?! CIIIIIINDY!"

    Next chapter once again shows us how much Naylor completely understands you wacky broads. These next few strips may seem benign, but go into Naylor's sketch blog or adult catalog, and you will learn his knowledge of the human foreskin encompasses that of an actual woman. As a side note, in this strip, Fisk is apparently being attacked by a couple of rabid dogs. However, later in the comic, we learn there are dog people as well as cat people, so the only two ways this strip can make sense are:

1. Naylor is a goddamn moron.

    or

2. Fisk was assaulted by a couple of naked, rabid homeless men.

    I won't tell you which one is true, because I don't know for certain, but if I had to guess, Naylor is too stupid to come up with something that awesome.

    The art, well... it gets the job done... for the most part, in that I'm able to easily identify which character is which, but only because Naylor had the decency to color each one different. If he hadn't bothered to do a pallette swap of Fisk and Female Fisk for each character, I'd be wondering why Fisk is fucking his doppel-ganger until I remember I'm reading a furry comic.

    It reminds me of the original Mortal Kombat games where the developers were too lazy to create new characters, so they just did a couple dozen characters based off the same ninja sprite. However, Naylor has an entire chapter dedicated to Fisk playing chess, espousing views that are obviously Naylor's. If Naylor designed Mortal Kombat, when "FINISH HIM!" would appear on the screen, Scorpion would tell Sub-Zero how his point of view is only wrong from the perspective of his opponent, and how God is an opiate of man designed to placate and control the brilliant... and then he would pull out his throbbing, uncircumcised dick.

    But back to the art, if you'll notice, there is literally no difference between the art from the first strip to the last. It hasn't gotten worse, it hasn't improved, it's remained completely static over the course of six fucking years. Every character's face looks the same (as each other), they all still have stupid anime hairstyles, and even when Naylor draws humans, the eyes take up half their friggin' skull.

    So, I believe the central question to this diatribe is: Naylor, if you haven't taken those six years to improve your art style, then what the fuck have you been doing? You obviously haven't taken that time for character development, since the only thing required for that is regurgitating the pseudo-intellectual prose on your own Livejournal.

    You haven't been working on plot, since the only things that happen in this vapid saga of unenjoyment are plot points I came up with when I was 13, 'Okay, yeah, so then Christopher Skallagrumsson sees his mom getting raped, and Christina is all, 'We should call the cops,' and he's all, 'Fuck that shit!' and stops it with his baseball bat, then he has sex with a black girl, thus losing his virginity at age 10, and then all the girls in his school have the hots for him, and he has a huge dick, and he fights terrorists, and he inherits his father's legacy, and he becomes rich somehow, and he steals some dude's wife and fucks the shit out of her until he makes her realize that he's the only one who can make her happy, and he becomes *The* American Hero."

    Speaking of black people, did I mention there are black people in this comic? You may be thinking to yourself, "There's nothing wrong with that," and you are right, but the way Naylor portrays it is the equivalent of having Nas on your iPod and telling a random black guy you enjoy "his kind of music." In this universe, different ethnicities are portrayed as different kinds of animals. White people are dogs and cats, black people are hyenas (because they're from Africa), and Jews are short, disgusting, worm-tailed rodents who steal food from hard-working, honest cats and dogs and leave shit everywhere else. I mean, geez, Naylor. If you're going for offensive stereotypes, you might as well go all out.

    The racism gets worse. The predominant hairdo for the hyena girls are just the same anime dreadlocks, and while I'm sure the fact they all look the same is simply displaying Naylor's incompetence, I can't help but feel there are ulterior motives to this endeavor. Then again, Naylor is probably too stupid to know how to intentionally offend people.

    ...Still, the name of the first black girl in the story is "Shanikwa," for fuck's sake.
 
     Overall, Better Days is bad, most definitely, but it's certainly not the absolute worst furry comic out there (my associate has already covered that). If you can get past the objectivist preaching, the repetitive art, the completely interchangeable characters, the obvious self-insert/wish fulfillment, and the excruciating pace, then one of your hobbies most likely includes fucking dudes in fox suits, in which case, I kindly request you do what it is you do best and get fucked.

    This is the part where I click "post," you read it, and respond with a melting pot of emotions. So, without further ado, "Goodnight, all. Have many pleasant, degenerate dreams..."


    ... Is what I would have said, had Naylor not chosen to show us some good old-fashioned, Sweet Home Georgia traditions. I refuse to cry, "Oh, dear Lord," for I know he has abandoned me. Naylor, I refuse to address you as a rational human being. I am going to stop giving you proper criticism, because you have probably long ago forsaken any human language, since anytime you step into sunlight, the only time people address you is when they cry, "pervert," or when they're lynching you.

    You are such an imbecile, your mother couldn't even figure out how to give you Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I am going to make sure my children and all my friends' children are circumcised so they can't be used as your masturbation aides, and then I am going to give up all my sons for adoption just in case.

    Seriously, dude. What are your first dates like? Do you try your best to masquerade as a normal person, then you show her your handiwork, hoping her self-esteem will do a nose-dive once she realizes what kind of person she is for even considering you? I have half a mind to hook you up with Wocgirl. She has so many traits you would love:

1. She has a creepy, unnatural admiration for her own gender.

2. She is covered in a thick mat of animal-like hair.
 
     Karl was worried you two would figure out how to breed, but I know Wocgirl reproduces asexually, and you're so confused about your own sexuality, that you're still baffled why there isn't shit on your dick when you pull out of your girlfriend. For fuck's sake, the copy machines at your last place of employment knew more about writing than you. At least they admitted they were just making copies of the same characters.
 
     The anger I feel for you has usurped many of the emotions I used to feel. Now I won't even be able to feel happy when you develop carpal tunnel syndrome from years of jerking it while drawing. My anger will just continue to grow until I realize inflating your ego and complimenting your sordid assterpieces will just make it that much more satisfying if you were ever to climb to the height where you could crumble and fall.
 
     I have made more profound social commentary by taking a shit in public. The only thing coloring the images of your comics has accomplished is making my optic nerves send signals to my central nervous system, saying it's more harmful being able to comprehend your godawful pictures. If my readers haven't clicked on any links yet, I would strongly advise against it, unless they are certain they don't need their eyes anymore.  

     I'm honestly surprised your girlfriend hasn't said anything about the retardate that you consider story arcs, but then I remember her mom probably told her a while ago not to make fun of her brother.
I would like to continue, but this is all too much. The complexity of idiotic things that happen in the course of this story is on an epic scale. We are not finished, here, Naylor. Karl will see to that.

(Image courtesy of Chance Svavarsson)

Chapters: 1-13



-Kris

Jack

Sometimes good people do bad, bad things. Sometimes the best of us make choices we regret for the rest of our lives. This is not one of those times, because dave hopkins is a fucking idiot.

History, Geography, Mythology, and Anatomy are all kinds of necessary for a fantasy comic, even if the main characters are some kind of blue rabbit or red wolf or any other afront to god drawn by hopkins.

Jack, the melty freakshow drawn by Dave, is a lot like an abortion. You get a mix of hope and fear near the beginning, and by the end it's all just this melty fleshy smelly mess that leaves grown men in tears.

On the note of abortion, lets get to the comic. Take a look at page one, and you get a good idea of the other three thousand or so pages, even if you shouldn't. There are no proper straight lines, not even on machinery or geometric shapes. Everything looks soggy and half formed. It's filled with faces that look ready to melt off the head at any given moment.

Not to mention the half assed plot lines. Dave Hopkins has three hooks: Child Molestation, School Shootings, and Serial Killers. With a lineup like that, he probably had to turn down jobs from fox news no less than six times to start his comic. This would be bad in and of itself, but somehow they always manage to always wring out what's supposed to be a happy ending. Everyone who dies goes to heaven or purgatory, and if you do go to hell it's piss easy to try again.

Of course, the whole afterlife punishment is broken as fuck. If you kill a few hundred million people, you get a palace and a bunch of slaves and everything you could ever want exactly how you want it. If you live your life as a shining example of all that is good and forgiving in the world, your wants get twisted into a pack of serial rapists several times bigger than the ones in hell. If you live as an ok guy with a few outbursts, you get to live in the suburbs with a bunch of celestial Jehovah's witnesses coming in to bug you every day forever.

Then there's the big one's, the ones this comic has to adress: God and Satan. According to Dave, god is a thirtysomething anthropomorphic ewe with the personality of a mother as seen by someone who's clearly been raised by negligent farm animals. Then there's Satan, who draws the comic and gets to be Dave's backup fursona. You know, for when an obese, hateful mammal thing that shits itself doesn't cut it. Because nothing says "I want people to respect me" quite like a racoon thing in enough black makeup to make every fourteen year old in the midwest green with envy.

Satan gets to draw the comic, effectivley making his "punishment" the ability to have more effect on creation than god itself. This is probably to make up for the fact that he doesn't seem to have much of an extravagant super palace. Because nothing says "eternal damnation" like "Everlasting wealth and influence".

All in all, the comic has a lot of failings. Character inconsistency, bad logic, predictable plot twists, shitty art. All of them stem from the aformentioned stupidity of the author. Hopkins doesn't know dick all about faces, island chains, warfare, or weapon design, plain bad taste.

Why is he popular? He'll cram your character in the comic with no regard for any sort of consistency. You *could* spend years practicing art, or you could just shout "hey look everybody, it's Fisk Black!"

Speaking of Fisk Black...

Gloom over June

Moon over June

  
     Warning, this comic is very NSFW, unless you work someplace that allows for the viewing of poorly-drawn tits, pussy, and ass, in which case, you're probably Wocgirl and should stop reading now before your feelings get hurt.

     Raised as a Turkish man, I have had plenty of horrible experiences involving sex and sexuality. We Turks are taught to revile ourselves, and place family above all else. As a result, it makes for a fucked-up sex life. When I was at the dinner table, my aunt once called me sexy, and no one in the vicinity had a problem with that. However, one thing that never happened was me getting revenge against my family and the opposite sex by doing gay porn or fingering all the boys at my Catholic school.

     What's that? 'That sounds vile!' you say? Well, if you're one of the many readers of my blog *and* the "pornographic" webcomic "Moon over June," I have some bad news, you're a sexist! Of course, if you read "Moon over June," you probably wouldn't consider that a bad thing.

     For those of you who like pornographic comics, you'll find 'Wocgirl' has paid homage to pornography in the same way your body creates a bowel movement to pay homage to food. What tries to be a fusion between hentai and the "two roommates genre" of comedy  fails at everything it does, disappoints both its parents, curses the world in which it lives, and finally hangs itself before receiving a small funeral with an unmarked grave underneath its father's mausoleum.

     The actual comic itself begins introducing its characters not in the way a traditional story might. Wocgirl instead chooses to set the tone with this story by giving us not one... not two... but 23 pages of exposition! Yes, twenty-three. I wish that was a fucking typo. A bit of advice: a story shouldn't stop dead in its tracks just to reveal something about its characters. Things about the character should be revealed as the plot goes along, especially if it's something as frivolous as what kind of car they drive. If Wocgirl wrote the original Star Wars trilogy, the first movie would be entirely about Luke's landspeeder, clothes, and favorite foods, and the other two movies would be him freaking out to Han about how he kissed his sister and liked it. Oh, and they would be lesbians. And everyone would be fisting each other.

     Even if you can't get past the unbelievably tedious and ultimately irrelevant introduction saga, you'll learn the author hasn't placed a self-insert character in the story. Instead, there's two. The first is self-loathing Japanese porn star, Hatsuki who is a lesbian, and the other, Summer is an Irish-Catholic gynecologist from Boston, who is also a lesbian. There, I have saved you the trouble of reading this atrocious comic. I have literally explained everything you need to know about the plot, premise, and characters. Now, I realize I may have skipped over the conflict in this story... just kidding! There is no conflict, not in Wocgirl's land of wondrous, promiscuous sex, where people flip a double-headed coin to choose whether or not to have sex, and the majority of people who treat women like objects are other women. Also, "Summer Winters" is the dumbest name ever.

     Aside from that, there is nothing redeeming about either of these characters. Hatsuki hates her wicked parents for pronouncing her name wrong, and Summer's misandry goes as far as an intense loathing of her boss who constantly showers her with kindness. Summer's hatred of men stems from when, her father and brothers did... something to make her hate them, and Hatsuki hates anything Japanese, yet still finds herself drawn to Japanese things. Wocgirl is the closest you will ever get to finding a weeaboo who admits they don't know much about Japan. Did I mention both characters are lesbians?

     Let's discuss the art. From what I can tell, 'Wocgirl' knows as much about anatomy as Ed Gein, as every single person in her comic looks like the result of body parts being sewn together to make an entity fit for a CSI's nightmares. She also loves the ladies. Check out these hotties! Also, I assume 'Wocgirl' doesn't get out much, as she seems to only be able to competently draw white people. Any attempt at her drawing Hatsuki looking forward just makes her look cross-eyed.

     The preceding analogy can also be applied to people's personalities in this comic, as it appears our two lovely flagship ladies seem to possess such a divine beauty that they have become sex symbols to just about everyone in this comic's universe.

     What's that, you cry? 'It's just porn!' you cry? 'Who cares about the story?' you cry? 'The author,' I cry.

     If the author doesn't care about character development or story, then why does she take great lengths to painstakingly drive home each and every unimportant tidbit for her ideal life? If she truly has no interest in telling a story, why even bring up the subplots of the characters having children? As an excuse for her to draw pregger porn? Oh... oh...

     Speaking of her characters not having any depth, you could also interpret that literally, as the lack of any real depth perception makes all of her characters look like paper dolls; horrifying, slightly racist paper dolls.

     With all these things going for it, I believe "Moon over June" is a bad webcomic. Unfortunately, it's not so bad it's good, and it's not so bad it's the worst. It's merely a mediocre bad webcomic with a crappy story, crappy characters, crappy writing, and an otherwise awesome premise that totally emits a vibe of wish fulfillment.

     I think that about wraps it up. Before I sign off, I do want to make several personal attacks on Wocgirl's character so she can glean every other part of criticism in this review and fool herself into thinking the problem I have is with her and not her writing:

     Things could be worse. Wocgirl could be given some sort of credibility, luckily that will never happen because nobody knows what she looks like; not even her parents. Her cells have been genetically engineered to not reflect light, for if they did, anyone who would gaze upon her would have her image so horrifically burned into their memory, that as a mental defense, their brain would repress the image to transcend space and time into the memory of all their ancestors who would then inherit that fear of sex and stop mating altogether, and who knows what kind of havoc that could wreak upon the timeline?!

     Wocgirl's venereal diseases are so plentiful, they are simply known as "diseases." Fire would be a preferable companion to Wocgirl. I'm certain my own burning flesh would smell much better than anything in her vicinity. Wocgirl has left so much pubic hair on everything in her home, that when she needs pest control, she calls an STD clinic.

     "Moon over June" is a Lovecraftian tome of webcomics, and not in the awesome sense where it exchanges infernal wisdom for your sanity, but that it regularly hungers for a sacrifice of 10 foreskins every new moon. And when its followers fail to deliver that sacrifice? Well... let's just say there's a reason Wocgirl had to change her online handle and shave all her body hair.
  
     "Moon over June" is what happens when a Mary Sue walks into an adult video store. Her head is still full of shit, only now she's sticky.

What does "Moon over June" and a Def Leppard drum solo have in common?

They're both done one-handed.



-Kris