Review - Kismet: Hunter's Moon

"Kismet: Hunter's Moon" by Layla Lawlor

I found this strip through the Webcomics Nation All-Time Top 100 list, because it happened at one time to be one place lower in the list than Eric Burn's Unfettered By Talent. It is no longer, but only because UfBT has risen two places since then – as it happens, Kismet is a fine science fiction comic.

The comic page is relatively simple – it takes good advantage of the features of Webcomics Nation, and the comic is sized appropriately for the screen. One problem I found with the site is the difficulty of locating the cast page and other such features – when I was searching, I first found an obsolete page on the artist's own site about the Kismet universe, and it took a little more luck to find the current Kismet info page. As I later discovered, this is the page she linked on her top-level WebcomicsNation page. While this appears to be the practical move (she hosts several webcomics set in the same universe on that page), it means that those readers who did not first read the top-level page may not to find the info page at all.

One of the more interesting aspects of the series is the setting. Kismet, the town in which most of the story takes place, is an interesting place – a domed city which, as time passed, grew downwards rather than outwards. The characters don't all come from there; in fact, the two main characters, Signy 12 and Linton 95 come from two other planets, Tertia and Secuba, and the history of these two planets is a major factor in the plot of the series. The universe is naturally not restricted to these three places – although little mention is made of other locations in the main series, the info page provides a fair amount of background on the rest of the universe.

Layla Lawlor's artwork is quite good, right from the start of the strip. Her style is cartoonish in some ways (and literally cartoonish sometimes) and not particularly detailed, but her proportions are always consistent and backgrounds appropriate. She is also good at doing special effects when she needs them. In fact, her use of atmospherics is superb – a cursory look at the three thumbnails included with this review show quite clearly how willing she is to change the color balance to fit the scene.

The characters are nicely developed as well. They are all plausible, and the influences of their backgrounds are clear in their actions. Very nicely depicted among their traits are the effects of the "memory implants" that Signy and Linton have, both directly and through the characters' reactions.

As I said before, the comic is quite good. Everything holds together, and has continued doing so throughout the reasonably-substantial archive that has developed thus far. A notable confirmation of this lies in the fact that the comic earned a place on Girlamatic, an invitation-only subscription website. It's quite a worthy story, and I recommend it.

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A note: This review was inspired by The Webcomicker, which was kind enough to link me as a webcomics commentary site. Since the purpose of this LJ was to get me writing on a regular (hah!) basis, I figured I should go ahead and try to live up to this expectation.

(no subject)

I made a post Saturday in which I said it'd be cool if you could 'view source' on a selected block of text on a page. I said in this post that the browsers I knew of didn't do this.

Erm.

(This is in Firefox 1.0.6 MacOSX, by the way.)