Sea of Insanity Webcomic: Just Because Someone is an Amateur Doesn't Mean It Isn't Good.

Venue: Free webcomic at http://fractuslux.comicgenesis.com,
updates sporadicly.

Sea of Insanity is an online comic written by L. K. Malnassy, someone who is likely completely unknown in the world of professional graphic novels and sequential art. The comic is only available online at http://fractuslux.comicgenesis.com. There has been one collection on CD of the story from 2001 through 2005, originally available only through the comic's website. I have no idea if the CD collection is even available these days.

Like many other online comics that people post on the web, this is an effort by someone who does not depend on sequential art to make a living. LKM, as the author is known among her fans, started this online comic when she was a student. Nowadays, she's a working stiff like the rest of us. In many ways, Sea of Insanity, or SOI for short, is fairly representative of non-professional web comics: the comic is free - anyone with internet access can read it; the comic was started by a student; the subject matter and the plot line would never be touched by an American comics publisher; the art is not Sunday funnies or comic book standard; the art improves with time; the update schedule is random and sometimes the strip lies fallow for long periods of time.

All that being said, SOI has a dedicated following and for very good reasons, mostly because the story rocks.

Setting: SOI takes place during the present, in some nameless Midwestern college town. There's a twist: the Greek pantheon and other mythological creatures of Greek antiquity are alive and well and hanging out here and there. The muse Calliope and the nymph Isle decide that Isle needs a new roommate in the apartment to help cover the rent. There's a problem: Isle accidentally misplaced the living room and replaced it with a wooded grotto with a small lake. There's a giant snake living in the grotto for now which the god Apollo left there to watch over Isle. Now the various shenanigans of these refugees from classical antiquity are usually unnoticed by humans since things can be covered up by illusions and the like. The trouble begins because you just can't hide a lake in the middle of your otherwise normal-looking house. The new roommate is bound to notice something...

Story: The plot hinges around a bet between Aphrodite and Apollo. The bet is that Apollo can't get someone to fall in love with him if they know his true nature and he's not allowed to use his powers like a love charm on them. Basically, he has to woo someone with no extra help, just like the rest of the world. If he wins, Aphrodite will stop Eros/Cupid from shooting Apollo with love arrows for a century. If he loses, he has to serve Aphrodite for five years. That might not sound like a big deal but it is when you consider that every one of Apollo's known love affairs ended in disaster. That's the deep background to this story.

Apollo tries to make Isle fall in love with him. To start off, they had something going already but the problem with nymphs is that they aren't very smart. Most are incapable of any kind of rational judgment of their lovers - and they're nymphs: classical Greek sex machines and not picky about their partners in bed. So to stick with the terms of the bet, Apollo grants Isle with true intelligence so she has enough brains to evaluate his suit. Isle with a brain takes one look at Apollo's track record as a lover and dumps him. Apollo does not want to lose this bet and so he's been making a pest of himself with overly aggressive wooing and not-real-smart intimidation tactics. Apollo is basically the apotheosis of Mr. Wrong.

Enter Finn. Finn is a college student in need of a place to live. He's the new roommate, especially since he didn't totally freak out over the lake in the middle of the living room and the mythological nature of his fellow apartment dwellers. The plot to date revolves around the interactions between Finn and the other humans of the story and the surviving members of the Greek pantheon. There are a lot of good one liners and sight gags at the beginning of the story but it has gotten much darker and more serious as the conflict between Apollo and Isle has evolved. There is still a lot of humor in the story amidst the increasing complexity of the plot, and it is applied with a very deft touch with excellent balance.

The subplots abound. Some of them are quite funny, like that of Isle's shrink. He ran into a drunk Dionysus at a bar and helped the guy home without knowing who he was helping. Dionysus told Gil, the shrink, that he'd grant him a wish as a reward for helping him. Gil said that he would like to be a better fisherman, thinking that the drunk was joking. Dionysus wasn't joking and granted what he thought was Gil's wish and now Gil turns into a fish once every five hours, a never ending source of situation comedy within the comic. Another subplot is that of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and her pursuit of Gil. Calliope looks like she taken a shine to Gil and Gil is working very hard to run in the opposite direction. Calliope also functions as the main narrator of plot exposition, the source of background details for both characters and readers when more info is needed to understand the nuances of the plot.

Art: SOI is done in pencils. This is highly unusual for sequential art which is normally done in inks. On paper, especially in newspapers, pencils are never used because of the cost and difficulty of publishing art in grayscale. Ink has reigned in traditional comics because of the grayscale problem on paper. I can think of only one time that I have seen a comic done in pencils on pulp deadtreeware and that was the earliest published version of Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil. With the introduction of webcomics, the problem of grayscale is now nonexistent and SOI is only one of several online comics I have seen that are done in pencil.

Part of SOI's appeal is the nuanced look of the penciled art. Like many other amateur online comics, the art has improved with time. The early installments of SOI look very much like the sort of thing I used to doodle in high school: not bad sketching done by someone with little training in artistic technique. The later installments are much better with greater detail and sophisticated shading. The later installments also take on much more challenging viewing angles and compositional arrangements. LKM has some real raw talent and her art gets better as she gains more practice in drawing her comic.

One of the problems with the art in SOI is the improvement in artistic quality, as strange as that may sound. The appearance of one of the main characters, the college student Finn, has improved so much over time that he looks completely different in the latter half of the published story than when he started out, from a long face with straight hair to a more square face with tossed unkept hair. I am personally undecided as to which version of Finn I prefer, though the latter Finn is certainly much better drawn. The other obvious problem with SOI is one of consistency. Sometimes the art is just awesome - and sometimes the art regresses a bit. I suspect the consistency problem will go away eventually as LKM gains more experience in drawing sequential art.

Age Groups: SOI is very character driven and some of these characters are Greek gods and nymphs. Greek gods, as we all know, didn't exactly practice modern American family values and nymphs were, well, nymphomaniacs to be blunt. Let's be frank: people have sex in this comic and not the monogamous married-couple variety either. Some of that sex is "Greek love," better known as same-gender sexual relations, though there is really very little of that going on. None of the sexual content is ever explicit, most of it is "off-screen" and doesn't even approach the level of soft porn you get these days in your average bookstore romance novel. I think the worst thing you will find is two nymphs being kissy...but for crying out loud, they're nymphs. Sex is what most nymphs do.

There is no nudity in SOI though it is suggested in spots. There is no strong language. There is no egregious violence. There is some binge drinking in a local bar. There are college-aged males committing typical college-aged clueless, hormone-driven, and/or alcohol-fueled stupidities - realistic ones, not ones out of movies. There are some "adult situations" but none so outrageous that your average sixth-grader would be disturbed by it. Frankly, some TV shows like Married with Children are far far worse than SOI.

SOI is safe for 12 and up. It would have a PG rating if it were a movie. I would even consider letting a mature 10 year old read it. I don't think it would be appropriate for kids younger than that just because of the rather sophisticated and atypical adult situations inherent in the plot. Whether you want to try to shield your older kids from the non-traditional relationships in SOI is a value judgment I can't make. I think they are relatively benign. I know I'd let a kid of mine read it at age 12 but I also know that some of my Mormon friends back in Idaho and Utah would rather upset if they found their high school aged kids reading it. Your own mileage may vary.

Other Comments: Frankly, I can't decide what really drives SOI: the deeply developed personalities of the characters or the totally byzantine nature of the plot. The thing I really like about SOI is that I can't figure out where it's going. The plot is unpredictable - and for someone like me who usually figures out the ending to most books before they are half-read, I find it delightful.

The story does start a little slow, with a predominance of gags early on. The humor is good and well-presented and it keeps you going as the plot is slowly unfolded and explained - or at least, that's how I found it. It feels like the humor content drops off as the plot progresses but it never goes away. That is an illusion - the humor does not vanish. It remains a major portion of SOI. Even when the plot takes sudden turns into rather dark content, the humor keeps going regardless - it's just that some of the developments are so serious that the humor becomes part of the background.

Something I haven't remarked on yet is the rich texture of SOI. The author knows her mythology - I mean, she really knows her mythology. I thought I was rather well educated myself in terms of classical mythology and history, being a survivor of a Great Books university curriculum myself, right down to reading the Aeneid in Latin in college. The author of SOI has put me to shame. She has picked up on and built off of little minor details from antiquity that I had completely missed. For example, it had never occurred to me that all of Apollo's love life was a disaster zone; or that while he didn't technically lie, because he is the God who never lies, Apollo still misled Hector as to the future fate of his son at Troy.

There are some things about SOI that annoy me. First, sometimes there are "guest strips" which were usually included when LKM was too swamped to get an installment out. Some of the guest strips have art that is rather poor and several have art that is very discongruent with the author's. One of the things that I like about SOI is the greyscale pencil art. Bringing in other artists whose art clashes with the author's is a detraction in my book. I'm also not fond of "filler" content, again often thrown in when the author was too busy to finish another installment in time. There is a lot of filler, more than most webcomics. While I did find the filler page of Calliope taking Apollo to see the movie Troy quite funny, the one with Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, most of the filler has done nothing more than annoy me. I would rather wait patiently for a new installment of SOI than read more distracting and not very worthwhile "filler" content. Including filler is something that a lot of amateur web comic do, but for me, I find that it rarely adds anything to my reading enjoyment.

The last thing I want to say about SOI is about the balance of art vs. story. I like the pencil art but I like the story more. The art does enable some good sight gags, a tool that a print-only author doesn't have available. The story is the kernal of this webcomic, however, and I have asked myself more than once whether SOI might not be better off as a book instead. The plot and the characters are so well developed that I think SOI might make it as a main-stream fantasy genre novel whereas now it's just another amateur webcomic. It's something that the author should consider in my opinion.