• Comic: The Forgotten Order (1st page) by Christy Bontrager
• Reviewer: Tom Speelman
• Status: Ongoing; 1 new page every Monday; 194 pages as of March 26, 2016.
• Art style: Digital, full color

In today’s literary world, where YA Paranormal Romance is a shelving category at Barnes & Noble and fantasy fills movie and TV screens everywhere—there’s a damn Shannara show on MTV now, if you want proof that nerds rule the world—it’s easy to forget that, for most of history, anything containing magic or monsters was consigned to fairy tales for children. Same with comics.

But given that most modern comics are created by fans for fans—the medium as a whole, not just superheroes, though that’s the biggest example—it’s hard to find work appropriate for younger readers. Particularly with webcomics which exploded in part due to creators being able to do whatever they want, however explicitly they wanted.

Thankfully, we have comics like Christy Bontrager’s The Forgotten Order which embody the best kind of storytelling: appealing to all ages while talking down to none. Adult connoisseurs of fantasy will appreciate Bontrager’s immense talent for worldbuilding and detail while kids and teens will find themselves relating to the struggles the heroines face.

Story

The plot revolves around Trystan Wicker–a sickly fauni child who, unlike the rest of her race and particular her triplets Mariwen and Merrick, has no aptitude for magic or spellcasting—and a “bone doll”—a sort of voodoo doll like talisman—who’s been alive for centuries but can’t recall anything about her past and frequently wanders through the mystical dreamscape while sleeping in search of answers. When Trystan comes across the bone doll in her uncle’s shop, she names her “Kay.”

Both Trystan and Kay have mysteries to unravel. Trystan wants to discover why she can’t do magic as well as every other fauni, which has led her siblings and mother to ignore her and her herbalist father to withdraw. Kay’s crisis is twofold. In addition to trying to figure out her own past, she keeps getting tangled up with a strange blue figure in the dreamscape who is more—and more sinister—than he seems.

Bontrager states in the “about” section of her website that the completed story will consist of 3 multi-chapter books with the first book being almost completed as of this writing. The commitment to structure is evident from the beginning; like the best ongoing stories, this reads with the skill of knowing there’s an end but being surprised along the way. Of course, there are pacing problems early on; the first chapter is very long and could have been condensed.

Artwork

While most webcomics tend to show the artist’s skill greatly evolving over time (compare Faith Erin Hick’s Demonology 101 with her more recent work), The Forgotten Order has its style, look and tone down from the beginning (the comic has been running since 2011). Bontrager draws her world and characters with the vibrancy of Nintendo games and the depth of artists like Hiromu Arakawa or Erica Henderson.

Unsurprisingly, given Bontrager’s day job as an artist in the games industry, a lot of the story recalls video games. In her longing for acceptance, Trystan resonates the same way Sora did in Kingdom Hearts. The surreal dream world Kay ventures through recalls stuff like the opening of Ocarina of Time and the fantastical side of the Persona series. If anyone’s looking how to take the simple success of good video game storytelling and apply it to comics, this is a fine template.

Website

The Forgotten Order’s website is very simple to navigate. Built in a Comicspress-like format (although the site doesn’t say explicitly it’s built on the platform), the site has comments enabled through Disqus and a purple backdrop to evoke the owl that follows Kay around in the dreamscape. There’s also a drop-down archive for each page as well as links to the start of each chapter.

Conclusion

Because of the comic’s weekly schedule, it’s easy to catch up on. Furthermore, during chapter breaks, Bontrager does the traditional webcomic things like fan art contests and so on but has also serialized a couple of prose stories that flesh out the fascinating backstory of the Fauni people from both their perspective and that of humans. There’s a lot more going on than it appears and it’s entertaining and engrossing to watch Trystan and Kay navigate it. It’s a series worth diving into and sharing around.

Strengths:

• An engrossing, compelling story with empathetic characters
• A well fleshed-out fantasy world that has a lot of depth

Weaknesses:

• Pacing problems in the early going

Rating:

• Story:   ★★★★☆
• Artwork: ★★★★★
• Website: ★★★
• Overall: ★★★★½

* Note that our rating system is much more strict than most and 4 stars are already reserved for comics which are significantly above the average in the specific regard.
* Note that the overall rating is not the average of the other three ratings, but represents the overall impression of the comic.

So I got around to watch Zootopia today. And it is a fantastic movie that you should not miss. I loved the story, the setting, the beautiful animations, the funny jokes, and especially the endearing characters.

I’m only sad that I haven’t found out Judy Hopps’ mail address yet since I plan to send her a letter asking for an autograph. Allegations that my letter will also include a marriage proposal are completely unjustified, of course. Because we all know that Judy…

<SPOILER>

</SPOILER>

I’m going to buy a Judy plush now…

Here are two diagrams that show how often the main and supporting characters of Sandra and Woo appeared in each year. Note that there were only 20 strips in 2008. This year was really dominated by Sandra who also had a prominent role in almost all strips she appeared in. It’s also interesting to see that all supporting characters always get featured in at least a couple of strips every year.

You can click on the images for larger versions.

Number of new strips per year:

• 2008: 20
• 2009: 105
• 2010: 107
• 2011: 106
• 2012: 104
• 2013: 100
• 2014: 104
• 2015: 104

• Comic: Chirault (1st page) by Ally Rom Colthoff (Varethane)
• Reviewer: Robert Howard
• Status: Ongoing; updates on Monday, Wednesday, Friday; 930 pages as of 29 December 2015
• Art style: Markers, Grayscale with occasional color

There is an old saying that authors need to hook readers with the story’s first sentence or risk losing the audience entirely. This is a bit of an oversimplification, especially as the majority of readers will stumble across a comic after it had been updating for some time. As such, many webcartoonists will go for a slow build rather than rely on that first page to hook the reader. With Chirault, cartoonist Ally Rom Colthoff (Varethane) has gone for a more cinematic feel to help introduce the story’s underlying plot. This may not have been the best choice, however, as readers who do jump to the prologue end up going from a dozen pages with magitek, shielded cities, and efforts to deal with overcrowding before plunging into the middle of a forest with a young tailed girl getting shrunk to the size of a mouse.

At its core, Chirault is an epic fantasy. As such it follows many traditional tropes found in the genre. The prologue’s glimpse at the larger world and story before shifting to the stories of the dual protagonists, Kiran and Teeko, is part of that tropic journey and as the comic develops readers are introduced to their stories, their backgrounds, and what drives and motivates them. Intermingled in that, is a periodic return to the larger plot until the two are woven together. Needless to say this isn’t a fast process; Chirault has been updating for eight years and while it appears to be approaching a final climax, the archives do contain over 900 pages of story updates.

Story

Chirault has one of the more interesting settings I’ve come across in the 15 years I’ve been reading comics; instead of the traditional fantasy races drawn from Tolkien and adapted by fantasy roleplaying, the pointy-eared inhabitants of this world are in fact human. Our main protagonists, Teeko and Kiran, are demons – nonhumans who have nominally been accepted into human society, though both have been discriminated against… Kiran more so than Teeko, though how much of Teeko avoiding the ire of various people is due to her diminutive size remains to be seen.

The “monsters” of this world aren’t the typical fantasy fodder; we have tree spirits (both benign and hostile), strange gangrel monsters that hunt humans (and who Kiran in turn hunts as part of his job), mind-control crabs, and other stranger things as well. Humanity mostly lives in small villages, often hidden in the ever-present forests, and several cities allowed in some ancient treaty with the forest spirits. Naturally, it’s humanity’s efforts to circumvent this ancient treaty behind the meta-plot… and eventually the readers – and cast – learn that the experiment which ends up driving the story has its roots many years earlier.

The initial 100 pages of the comic have a leisurely pace with no actual links between the larger plot and the story of Kiran and Teeko. Seeds are planted with the theft of the artifact the larger story sprouts from, but much of Kiran’s initial story is of his job as a monster-slayer, while we watch Teeko come to terms both with her new minuscule size and her efforts to befriend Kiran. The latter takes time as Kiran seems very much the outsider used to being alone, and it takes a lot of time before he overcomes this tendency.

While Kiran is nominally the primary “hero” of the story, I’ve found that Teeko tends to fill the protagonist role. My impression of Kiran is someone who reacts to things, while Teeko is the character who seeks to learn more and who helps draw Kiran out of his shell. She is also quite impetuous which naturally enough gets her in trouble – but if she needs bailing out from time to time, it’s because of her size rather than being a girl. This includes her learning magic as her non-human nature can make the magic less stable.

As the story commences, Kiran and Teeko are joined by three others; a mage named Astrid, a village warrior named Bethan, and a hanger-on named Aaron. Unfortunately, Aaron never really stood out for me; I’m not sure if that’s because Aaron was an everyman or if it was because nothing that interesting happened to him, unlike Bethan who fought to protect her and Aaron’s village and who had paid a price for her bravery a couple of times. And as for Astrid, a combination of his smugness, which rubs Kiran the wrong way, and his connections with the greater plot help him to become a more integral part of the story.

Other secondary characters help round out the story, both in expanding on the larger plot and in developing the word. Of these, Heryan is one of the more significant characters who helps drive the artifact storyline, while her comrade Rune’s links to Astrid is responsible for bringing Kiran and Teeko – and Astrid, for that matter – into the larger plot. Likewise, the story’s antagonists appear to have some link to Kiran himself and it seems likely their role in Kiran’s mysterious pass will come to light as the story starts to wind up toward a climax.

Artwork

As with most long-run comics, Chirault’s artwork has improved over time. The seven-page prologue actually uses newer art, and then goes back to older art. The comic has been collected into print collections which include updated artwork and likely revamped lettering. Unfortunately, some of the lettering in the older art leaves much to be desired and it can prove difficult reading the comic. After the first 200 or so pages, the dialogue tends to stabilize as the cartoonist improved his hand-lettering technique.

Varethane actually goes over his artistic method at the bottom of the About page, with the process including a brush pen to ink his pencils and markers for the greyscale. The dialogue itself tends to change according to what can fit in the speech bubbles and during the drawing process, which has resulted in changes to the script itself. While I’d not recommend the approach to new cartoonists, it does provide the cartoonist with a more organic flow to the strip as changes come organically; no doubt the larger plot itself has remained unchanged.

For the most part, the art works nicely with the story. There is an organic feel to the art and while at times the lines related to tree spirits and the like can get confusing, the line art and greyscale tends to work nicely. Color work appears in several places; primarily the colors are used in cover pages for each new chapter, though a short story on Astrid’s origins is fully colored with markers.

Website

Chirault’s website is fairly easy to navigate, and includes a top bar with links to a basic Cast page with a thumbnail of the characters that includes a hyperlink to their first appearance, their names (with one exception), and a one-line tongue-in-cheek comment on the character. Other links include an Archive page, various social media pages including Twitter and Tumblr, and a store where readers can purchase either a print copy of the comic, or a PDF with the newer art.

Conclusion

While the comic takes its time in developing the larger plot, a combination of an organic art style which stands out from most of its contemporaries, a world unlike pretty much any fantasy comic I’ve come across to date, and enjoyable characters helps make this comic an enjoyable read. Despite the problems with lettering some of the earlier comics suffered from, on the whole this has been on my reading list for years now and hasn’t disappointed. I definitely recommend it, especially for people interested in something that isn’t just more of the same old same old.

Strengths:

• A unique and interesting setting
• Fairly concise story without dangling plotlines

Weaknesses:

• Problems with lettering of early comics
• The art can be confusing at times

Rating:

• Story:   ★★★★☆
• Artwork: ★★★☆☆
• Website: ★★★
• Overall: ★★★½☆

* Note that our rating system is much more strict than most and 4 stars are already reserved for comics which are significantly above the average in the specific regard.
* Note that the overall rating is not the average of the other three ratings, but represents the overall impression of the comic.

While I am happy with the quality of this year’s lot of strips and am particularly fond of the second “Under a Killer Balloon” story arc that just finished, I have to say that I have never had a harder time to come up with ideas for new strips as currently.

I will give my best to ensure that Sandra and Woo will update two times every week in the new year as well, but this is the first time where I’m really concerned if I’ll be able to do it. In general, writing comedy is much harder than writing drama and coming up with new clever jokes after 7 years and 750 strips is no easy task.

So what I’d like to get most for Christmas is a flash of inspiration that once again fills up my idea document which is currently very short on ideas good enough for publication.