“Applegeeks”
Drawn by Mohammad Haque, Written by Ananth Panagariya
Updates vary weekly to bi-weekly
How can one realise the full beauty of life, without first stomaching the bitter bile of disappointment?
I believe life can be distilled to one basic strand, an eternal rule: one has to take a few roughs with the smooth. I was to learn this fact the hard way, many times in my short life.
Indeed, how can one call oneself an artist, if one hasn’t been through the furnace of the world, died for one’s gift and been smelted anew? If one hasn’t backpacked around Europe, keeping body and soul together through art alone, making untold daily sacrifices? Many is the night I have woken, drenched in icy sweat, a scream frozen on my lips and dark horror rippling through my body at the thought of the hardships I once endured.
Selling more than just my art on the streets of Prague, making geegaws and cheap forks in a Glaswegian sweatshop. The lime factories of Provence where I lost good friends; and the remembrance of fingers bleeding as I drew at gunpoint for a devil-worshipper in Oslo.
These experiences made me who I am today.
But at what cost to my soul?
Has “Hawk” (one of those responsible for AppleGeeks) ever drawn in fear, not knowing what fresh demon the pencil will reveal? I suspect his mind is as unclouded as a baby as his hands grasp the talent-buffer that is a Wacom tablet, and vacant anti-originality spills from him and onto the screen.
To see ten-thumbed abbey-lubbers drawing web comics as if they have a God-given right, while others less fortunate but with very real talent, struggle for their voices to be heard, is enough to make a person write a cease-and-desist letter. However, I did not know true labour until I read AppleGeeks.
The full-color, full-page formatted webcomic can be likened to a poorly-constructed crème brulee. One dips a spoon, quivering in anticipation, through the thick, burnt — and no doubt carcinogenic — glaze crust, only to discover the body of the concoction: insipid, pale, blandly venal and smelling faintly of egg.
Most right-thinking individuals may assume that so fetid an offering would stick in the craw of the average webcomic gourmet, and there would be much to support such a view, but to examine this self-evident lack of interest in AG by the internets populace would be like making a serious study of the Bible: time-consuming and thoroughly pointless.
Instead its humour and artistic merits shall be examined and discussed. Based on an already-overused recipe, e.g. Mac Hall — which in itself gives all but the meanest intellects a form of brain-gripe — one is given to wonder why the creators are trying to fashion a new flavour of boredom.
I offer the following interpretation. Anything is acceptable as long as it is presentable. To give a cogent paradigm: spray-painting a pile of elephant dung with pretty colours, sticking a candle on top and expecting people to eat it (something, incidentally, I have actually seen attempted in Zambia).
As a friend of humanity, I find this treatment of the unwashed masses as having the same intelligence and problem-solving skills as a teaspoon of head lice, both repugnant and elitist.
To be fair, just as Canada has a population, AppleGeeks has a readership, though one suspects that deep in their hearts they don’t really want to be there.
AG’s piece de resistance is of course its art; the actual dialogue, the humour catalyst as some describe it, is hidden behind a shroud of visual prostitution. Like a vestigial tail, an unsightly wart or a leprosy-ridden limb, the text is ignored and concealed for one blindingly obvious reason: it is indescribably boring. Like a Tom Clancy novel on Darvon, it brings tears of tedium to the eye, and gives the reader the mental equivalent of Dupuytren’s contracture. The “humor” is so far-adrift from any connotations of mirth, one can only assume that this is purposeful; why, I cannot fathom.
High points of the archive, if I may be sarcastic for a moment, include such delights as an invisible-talking squirrel and a disgusting Spider-Man joke from the 1960s. Quite brilliant. Right up there with America’s other great gift to the world: the word “absquatulate.”
The characters are such non-entities that I cannot recall any individual personalities. They are completely interchangeable. One cannot empathise with them any more than one can empathise with a rotting corpse. The spark of sentience has long since departed, and what is left is lolling bleary-eyed in a crypt of ennui.
The art itself is, for want of a better word, limited. At swift glance it looks almost reasonable: bright, shiny and bulbous. On closer inspection, however, the characters are unpleasantly misshapen, and their features simplified to such an extreme that any sort of exaggerated expression — one of the main sources of humour in drawings! — is nigh-impossible. The artist must resort to the masochistic practice of chibi to give his characters any form of physical humour.
Story arcs are split up by hideously deformed pin-ups of the female characters in an attempt to mask the glaring lack of content, and to give the prepubescent fan base something to salivate over.
The inking as a whole is functional, if soulless, except that the left construes are invariably far too thick, giving a lopsided look to most pages. This is not helped by the quincunxian layout and bizarre panel break choices.
This exercise in Abderitan futility should subside back into the melting pot of mediocrity before too long. To prevent this impending doom, two piece of advice can be suggested. I would recommend the writer read John Fowles’ The Magus, and then never put pen to paper lest he can write a script which is funny.
The artist should do what I found useful in my artistic travels.
Learn to draw.