Although she came close. She probably hoped with his materials, she might be able to get around the two-week limit on staying MM. If he hadn't been so paranoid, so pick to pick up a perceived insult, she might have told him...

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A MODEST DESTINY---probably the only "sprite" comic you'll ever see me recommend. The author is both brillant and infuriating, antisocial and confrontationial, but nevertheless writes a very entertaining and funny comic, with custom-designed sprites, rather than ripping off video games like most other "sprite" comics.

If you want to know when I update---although I've been aiming for Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays...you can go to COMIC ALERT and sign up to see when Mindmistress...and many other webcomics...update.

This is a review of the UNABRIDGED HISTORY OF THE WORLD. When I was younger, there was a CARTOON HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE which this reminds me a LOT of.

Hmmm. Is English your second language? It's "eunuchs", not "eunics". If it's a deliberate mispelling, I don't get the joke. Similarly, here at http://www.flurid.net/?strip_id=33---it's "revolution", unless you're deliberately mixing "revolution" and "revelation". If it is your second language, than you do it fairly decently most of the time, but you need to spellcheck them. If it's your first, you DEFINITELY need to spellcheck. And use dictionary.com. Uh-oh. "Beeing?"

Design; I like the parchment-colored wallpaper, fits in with the theme. Pretty bare-bones, isn't it? Pleasingly so, compared to most webcomics---but almost goes too far the other way.

Art: uh. Well, it's in color, that's a plus...but the art's pretty nondescript, even primitive. I wish I could say I thought it was deliberately so, but I don't think so. Sometimes the backgrounds are pretty good...an especially good one, using graphic software fairly innovatively, is here . But your characters, your people, I don't think you've found your "style" yet. Work on making them more individualized.

If you're trying for minimalist, like BOLLOX or ORDER OF THE STICK, you're not getting it---if you're trying for well-developed cartoon style, that's not there either. Shading would be GREAT.

Wait a second. How do you do this? Is this ALL graphic software, no real drawing at all? Usually I can tell, but I'm not sure in this case....I was thinking it was some drawing with backgrounds added in Adobe or whatever. Am I wrong? (Looking at it more closely.) Okay, I think I was wrong. This is all graphic software, right? Either way you're doing it, you need to be more...subtle. More detail, more individuality is needed.

The storyline: I smiled a few times, but never laughed out loud...

I can't really criticize the storyline much. I mean, it's not like you can really mess with the basic plot---but so far we've done the code of Hammurabi, a smattering of Egypt, the Illiad, the Odyssey, Democracy in Greece, and we're finally to Alexander. But you've got to work on your timing and punchlines, and on making your characters' dialogue more individualistic. You get to see what a badass (and drunk) Alexander is, get to see the "Nobody" joke in Odyssey played for more laughs, but really...nothing to write home about. In the Illiad sequence oftentimes I had to really check to see who is who (and I know Greek mythology backward and foreward...but I didn't get straight that Odysseus was the curly-headed guy until you went into the Odyssey). Both visually and personality-wise, you need to work on distinguishing your characters.

There are some good ones. Like this one where Alexander shows what a badass he is, especially when he's hungover. One of your better jokes. But notice how two-dimensional panels seven and eight seem? A little shading or a little gradient, to give some sort of idea of three-dimensionality, would work wonders.

The crowd scenes, where everyone looks like a simplistic pawn out of chess, or the main characters in BOLLOX doesn't help either.

You also need to work on your word balloon placement. Most of the time it's clear, but in this one, otherwise pretty good, the word balloons are such that you can't tell who's speaking first, especially in the third panel, and a little in the second or third panel. If you had just made the top balloon longer and the one underneath ditto, it would have been much clearer---or you could have mirrored the image, and it would have had the same effect. In those three panels, even though the woman's talking first, most of the time it looks like the man is.

I know you have classes, but if you could update more often than once a week, you'd make more of a splash...people would come more often to your website. Could you try for two a week, see how that goes?

Thumbs up on the basic web design, keeping it simple (almost too simple), art needs more shading, people both in graphics and dialogue need more individualization, and jokes need to be more polished and sharpened.

Would I recommend this to someone else as it stands? No, not really. But there's nothing wrong with it a little work and a little subtlety couldn't cure....and if you did so---if your art was improved and shaded more, if the writing (which even now is probably your strongest point) was a little more concise and honed (one trick many writers use is to assign, in their heads, the voices of real-life actors to the characters---gives them each a certain speech rythym that helps), if the dialogue was spellchecked, and if you updated more often---this could be a really fascinating and funny strip.

Not sure yet if this is a diamond in the rough, or a piece of coal. I guess it all depends on how you polish it.