"What the hell are you doing talking about a webcomic?" is no doubt your plaintive cry. "You're a film and TV kind of asshole." Well, you're not wrong. To be perfectly honest I'm only posting this here because to post it on Tumblr would be to possible invite hatred and rage (and maybe a lawsuit? Americans are awfully litigious) from the (presumably?) multiple fans of Plush and Blood. I don't want that. I just want to get this off my chest. And if you indeed are a fan of Plush and Blood who has somehow arrived here by chance or design, be forewarned: this is gonna be awfully slanderous. Note that all quotes are taken from the comic's Patreon page.
The author of Plush and Blood is TiredOrangeCat, or Corey Messer as his real name ostensibly is. And he seems to think (according to his Patreon) that his poorly-drawn, poorly-edited, lazily designed, badly-structured incomprehensible mess of an excuse for furry-bait is somehow God's gift to webcomics. And he's wrong. Wrong, I tell you.
While reading another webcomic, I was directed through an advertisement to Plush and Blood. I didn't click because I thought it looked cool or anything, just mostly because I thought it looked like a terribly drawn schlocky furry comic and I just love that type of thing. And I might actually have grown to appreciate Plush and Blood - it's basically the webcomic equivalent of The Room, and if you know me you know I love The Room - if only its author wasn't also basically equivalent to Tommy Wiseau, in the fact that he delusionally believes his terrible work of art to be a masterpiece worthy of praise and admiration and all the dollars his fans can possibly afford to throw at it.
And also, sadly, unlike the illustrious Mr. Wiseau (whose great name I would never slander), Messer doesn't even have the benefit of ambiguous foreignness and abject insanity to explain away his arrogance. He seems like a normal, non-insane, non-off-the-rails guy...who just happens to be an arrogant, deluded douchenozzle. Sadly, there's no entertainment value in that.
After reading the nigh-on incomprehensible first few pages of Plush and Blood (more about that later), I grew bored quickly and decided to read the guy's Patreon. (You can tell a lot about a comic and its author by its Patreon.) I was surprised and a bit miffed by the level of preening I found there. When you're trying to appeal to a fan base that has the potential to become your employer, you want to be kind and respectful and not arrogant. But it seems Corey Messer skipped that Webcomics 101 lesson, because this shit is the most arrogant self-advertisement for a webcomic I've ever read in my life.
In occasionally-poor grammar, Messer writes several paragraphs about how his webcomic is superior to all others - mainly because it's dark and philosophical, updates regularly, and maintains a thick buffer. (All things that 99.9999% of webcomics boast, by the way. You're not special for updating on a schedule.) But he doesn't only paint himself as superior, he insults webcomicdom at large, more than once, to make his point. Quote directly from the delightful man himself:
"So I ask you[,] dear reader, to look around at all the plagiarized and stolen intellectual properties, cliche and trope[-]driven stories, and shallow Mary-[S]ue riddled characters in the [webcomic] world; I ask you[,] dear reader[,] would you rather be reading that, or something original, well[-]structured, and enthralling[,] such as Plush and Blood[?]"
(Brackets indicate where I've fixed his grammar, punctuation, spelling or capitalization. You may notice there are a lot of brackets.)
Now, if you're going to talk that kind of arrogant and pretentious talk, you'd better walk that walk and have the best goddamn art and story there is. Here's a little quiz for you. True or false: Does the author deliver on his arrogant boasts?
(T) (F)
Check one. And obviously you've passed, because of course the answer is a hearty solid no. Plush and Blood is incomprehensible both in art and story. The grammar is atrocious and the "dark and philosophical" edginess seems to consist of the occasional f-word and splatter of gore. Basically this is an ugly, badly-drawn piece of furry-bait with nothing special to back it up.
Another couple quotes from the Patreon:
"During those four years life happens with its ups and downs, yet I never missed an update."
"Having never missed an update and maintaining a thick buffer of finished pages I set up a unique system for the fans to gain further access to more updates."
(Bold emphasis is his, not mine. And by the way, that "unique system" entails the fans giving him money to "unlock" more updates. Wow. Super unique.)
The guy is extremely braggy about how he's "never missed an update", and the main page mentions how the comic is meant to update Tuesdays and Thursdays, but, uh, it's February 23rd, and the last update was somewhere around January 30th. As I write this, the comic has just now updated - after a several-weeks-long unannounced hiatus, which seems to actually be the norm for Plush and Blood.
It seems that almost every time I check the comic, it's at the same page as before. The author does not update as regularly as he likes to say he does. And honestly, that's the absolute least thing that a self-assessed God of Webcomics could do. Updating your comic on a regular schedule is the most basic way possible to have respect for your fans and to, you know, actually have something approaching professionalism. And he doesn't deliver even on that simple promise. In fact, he makes his fans pay for regular updates - something that even the most lowly of unread webcomics can achieve without being paid - and then proceeds to rip them off by not delivering. Huh.
Now, the one thing that Messer doesn't explicitly claim to be is a superior artist whose brilliant work eclipses that of all other webcomic creators; but given the level of arrogance and delusion he's displayed thus far, it's not a stretch to assume he thinks of himself as one. But...is he one? Well, take a guess, and you'll probably be right.
Here's a nice little tidbit: in a rare show of humbleness, Messer acknowledges his early artwork was poor: "The comic started with a completed script and a simple style." Good, some humility! But, oh, what's this next sentence? "The style took on a life of its own and evolved into a sophisticated and consistent look." Um... no. It didn't.
The first page of Plush and Blood looks like this. Look at that. See if you can suss out what the hell that's supposed to be. Incomprehensible, you say? Well, I say so, too. When you're looking at a comic page, you shouldn't have to squint and concentrate just to figure out what the hell you're looking at. It should come naturally. That's the mark of a half-decent artist. And it only gets worse (read: funnier). Meet the first character to appear in the comic:
Page 3 is absolutely horrendous. It took me a moment of squinting to realize I'm looking at (I assume?) a... truck,...? driving around a.... thing. And the last panel is...some kind of large building...? And... Well, let's just move on to the next page of interest, page 5.
Be honest here. How long did you have to stare at that incomprehensibly badly drawn blob of fur before you realized it was an overhead shot of Furry McScarface carrying some sort of metal box? For me it was around ten seconds. Yes, I know I'm a genius, don't flatter me.
Now we're at page seven. Page seven is literally just a gray square, another gray square, and then a gray square with the word *thud* written over it in what looks like Microsoft WordArt. And page ten introduces one of the most badly drawn group of characters I have ever seen, bar none, on a professional money-earning webcomic. And...
Oh, for God's sake. Look, I know most webcomic authors start out as poorer artists and then improve, but this is absolutely beyond amateurish. This is terrible.
And just for the benefit of hindsight, I skipped to random pages - 160 and 240 and 699 - and found that there's not much improvement. This webcomic is horribly, inexcusably drawn. It's ugly and lazy, the level at which you'd expect a twelve-year-old aspiring furry to scribble and post on her Tumblr. And she doesn't even use a scanner to post it. She takes a photograph. Because she's unprofessional. Sort of like Corey Messer.
The man has been drawing the comic since two thousand and fucking six, and yet his art has only improved marginally. Other gripes: on this page, he re-uses panels (the two lower middle panels), a sure sign of a lazy artist who doesn't want to do more work than he absolutely has to. And as you can see on the most recent page - specifically, the middle section - he has very little grasp on how to properly lay out a page so that the action actually makes sense. Like I said, Messer has been drawing for ten years - long enough to crank out one thousand and nine pages - and somehow he's only marginally improved.
Speaking of cranking out pages, one of Messer's Patreon bragging points is that he designed his comic to be a story with an end, and that he absolutely hates when other webcomics don't do the same. In his own words:
"Unlike most [webcomics] out there, this story had an ending planned well in advance. This made it unique in that it was an actual story, complete with plot/character arcs that ended and not something that was wrung to death in an effort to make it last forever."
And then, a few sentences later...
"[The fans] waited patiently for an entire year as I wrote the second story in the Plush and Blood universe titled, Memory's Threads. The script itself is 440 pages long and will be an estimated 1200 comic pages in length."
(Emphasis is mine.)
And then, a few sentences after that...
"I have a third story penned after Memory's Threads titled Patchwork Lives. It will deal with the rise of the Plush and what they have learned from their past."
(Emphasis, in this case, not mine.)
The man insults webcomics that are "wrung to death in an effort to make [them] last forever", and then TWO SENTENCES LATER he mentions how he's written TWO SEQUELS to the original story, and asks for money to complete them! I'm not even going to comment further on this bullshit. I'm sure you're smart enough to tell why this is the shittiest shit that ever fell out of the back end of a bull. Moving on.
To conclude. If I had just taken a look at the comic without reading the Patreon, I'd have chalked it up to the worst-quality comic I'd ever seen advertised on Project Wonderful, and left it at that. However, Messer's Patreon turns this nonsensical comic into an entirely different story. The man is not only pretentious and arrogant, he's deluded. He somehow thinks that his mess of a webcomic is the superior standard that other webcomic should look up to in awe - just because he claims to follow standards that other comics have been holding (and not bragging about it) for literally decades. And some of those standards (updating on a schedule, as he's promised), he can't even seem to fulfill properly.
The man is a poor artist, and on top of that he seems to have a poor personality as well. There's confidence in your abilities and pride in your work - which of course is a wonderful thing to have - and then there's the arrogant belief that your work is superior when it really isn't, the category to which this author belongs.
The story of the comic is nowhere near the amazingly profound and edgy philosophical dystopia the author proclaims it to be; instead - partly due to his inability to structure his panels properly, write decipherable sentences, or draw a comprehensible scene - it's a barely-understandable mess with characters who are less than cardboard cutouts. It's kind of funny, but mostly it's just sad.
A little addendum: I've skimmed through the comic's forums and found a delightful little post by the author here (scroll down; it's the long and obnoxious-looking post, sixth on the page, by TiredOrangeCat) that neatly summarizes exactly what I dislike about this guy. He succinctly insults pretty much every genre of webcomic known to man in a patronizing, "oh-I'm-so-intellectual-I-wear-a-fedora" kind of way. And then, in a stopped-clock moment, he proceeds to - in a direct contradiction of his Patreon - acknowledge that Plush and Blood sucks (the only place I've seen him do so, by the way). But unfortunately he follows this nice and warrented slice of humble pie with a hefty dose of blaming his comic's lack of quality on his lack of time to perfect it, rather than his lack of talent or effort.
Frankly, given what I've seen of the webcomic and the author's attitude, it is very much rather the latter than the former that affects the quality of Plush and Blood. I've read webcomics with a million times the quality in every way of Plush and Blood whose authors are overworked, overstressed and tired to the nth degree and yet somehow manage to put more effort into their work and come out looking ten times better than Corey Messer. I've seen artists whose work is as beautiful as anything I've ever seen, whose art is stylized in their own way and yet pleases the eye immensely, and yet the only reason I ever saw their work is because they were asking for donations so they'd have more time to complete it. Lack of time is no excuse for lack of talent or lack of effort.
The author's arrogance is not only unwarranted, it's annoying. It's clear - he outright states it - that he considers his comic to be superior to most other webcomics. And yet, for all the reasons I've listed here, he is utterly wrong. His comic is artistically poor, and that's putting it mildly. It's about the quality I'd expect a 12-year-old to produce - both in maturity and in artistic quality. In fact, I've seen art done by twelve-year-olds that not only rivals but exceeds that of Plush and Blood, even its most recent pages which have been allowed ten years of improvement but have not improved at all. He is an arrogant jerk who is utterly in the dark about the true quality of his comic, and if I were him, I'd lose my arrogant short-sightedness and expand my reading to include all different types of webcomics so I could learn from people who've been doing it better than I have. Then, at least, maybe, there'd be some improvement in Plush and Blood.
