I get the weirdest ideas when I'm feverish. This one is nowhere near in the same league as that whole 'hey, let's see how filing the serial numbers off that AU idea of yours would work' one was, but it's still likely to win some kind of award for sheer pointless futility.

Once again, there's this webcomic I read.

I know nothing good ever starts this way, so for those of you who'd rather not be subjected to my ranting about Why Shit Sucks, here's a webcomic that doesn't suck. It's called Sailor Twain, it's by Mark Siegel, and it is truly wonderful. Go look at some good things.

Okay, is anyone still here? No? Well, I don't care. I'm determined to get this rant out anyway though I know that it is extraordinarily pointless, will make no difference to anything, and even on the off-chance that the subject of said rant did stumble across it, they probably wouldn't give a damn what some anonymous, totally uninformed Internet Girl had to say about their work anyway. I am, after all, in no way, shape or form any kind of an artist and so I'm not exactly in any position to judge this stuff save on entirely subjective ones along the lines of 'I like this; I don't like that'. Right then.

So, I read Megatokyo.

I know this isn't exactly a cool thing to admit. True, the older I get the more I'm starting to think that if you like something that's obviously flawed you shouldn't feel you have to make excuses for liking it, just as long as you're not kidding yourself that it's anything other than what it is. I'm a Weiss Kreuz fan, who am I to judge? I have no problem with people liking Twilight as long as they're aware that it's the literary equivalent of a Twinkie. Just as there's nothing the matter with liking Twinkies as long as you don't kid yourself that snack cakes are the queen of all foods and that your diet wouldn't benefit from a little variety and rather more nutritional content, there's nothing the matter with liking an objectively bad book or movie just because you enjoy it. Long story short I've been reading Megatokyo for years and cool or not, I just rather like it and would like to see where the story goes from here.

I also know that better people than me have not only administered the smackdown to this webcomic, but also defended it. I'm not going to attempt to do either of these things. I am not a webcomic reviewer and would not pretend to be. For what it's worth my opinion falls midway between these two points - I think it has its issues and would not deny that the main characters are self-insertions, but that doesn't stop it from being an amusing enough diversion.

It's just that recently, certain things about Megatokyo - specifically, about its art - are starting to bug me. They're starting to bug me a lot more than they used to back when I started reading, which must have been not much more than a year after the site went live. Most specifically, it's this:


Why, dear God, do all these characters have gaping white voids where their teeth and tongue should be?

( Click here for a gratuitous picture of Ken Hidaka )

This is my problem, this is the issue. I don't know enough about art to comment on whether Megatokyo as a whole has good or bad artwork. To me it looks perfectly proficient, but it's perfectly proficient art that's being let down by the occasional... let's call it deeply unpolished element - and the longer it goes on, the more polished the artwork as a whole becomes, the more glaring those errors are starting to look. When a cack-handed fanartist on DeviantArt can't be bothered to spend much time on the difficult bits that are no fun to draw, it's one thing. When a professional artist does the same? Quite another.

I don't think it's bad, I just think it could be better. Should be better, even. And there doesn't seem to be any good reason for why it's not.