No armor.

No leotard. She's starkers. (Naked used to mean "unprotected", not really nude.)

No locket. (Remember the two week limit before brain tumors set in...)

Yeppers. She's in trouble.

Featured link:THE JADED---excellent art, smooth storyline. I admired this when it was on Keenspace, and I admire it more now that it's on Graphic Smash.

And...

This is what I wrote for the last featured link:"BAD BLOOD---excellent bland-and-white art, intriguing storyline for mature readers (some sex, a little nudity, nothing gratitious), vampires, both as protagonist and opponents. Good stuff." Of course, I meant to write "excellent BLACK and white art"---to make up for the typo, I'm keeping this link up a little longer.

Thanks, those of you who went to the Forum---much appreciated! (And the rest of you, join in!)

This is a review of RUGG ---and if this isn't QUITE the slam-dunk "yes!" that that SQUARESVILLE was, it comes close.

The first thing that strikes one is how professional the cartooning looks. I'm reminded of Gilbert Shelton in THE FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS (or is it his association with WONDER WARTHOG that I'm really thinking of?) Also a bit of a Calvin and Hobbes influence. Not slavish imitation, just an influence. Everybody has influences.

The website design is pretty clean---the orange swirls don't seem to distract, oddly enough...simplicity in the "news", "link" etc. with the arrows that is the mark of a good web design...(remind me to steal that for my own website, which is getting pretty junky...)

Clicking the character links...

So RUGG isn't the pig? Then what IS Rugg? Why Rugg? (Checking FAQ.) You're just going to leave us GUESSING??? No FAIR...

I think a better name might be picked..

. Look, elementary fact of cartooning, unless you're just doing this with no regard for readers. The name is to DRAW IN READERS. To intrigue. Or to tell us something about the strip. Or even to indicate the frantic pace of the story. RUGG fails on all counts.

For that matter, I think the animals need better names than "the chicken", "the pig", "the duck", etc. Make it a contest! Involve your readers! Why should YOU do all the work?

Let me get this straight. This is set in a farm. But the farmer, other than cutting off the chicken's head, isn't a character in the strip???

The writing:

Excellent. As good as the art. The jokes are funny, the punchlines delivered with flair and excellent timing. Every character has their own "voice" and foibles. The heart of the comic is Chicken's latest hare-brained screen, to mix my metaphors, and the Pig's attempts (unsuccessfully) to bring them back to sanity...

How can you resist a strip that asks,

"What is the BRIGHT SIDE of having one's HEAD chopped off??"

I was a little intimidated by the length of the archives when I saw the first comic went back to August 2002. Then I started clicking through...

Oftentimes laughing. Once you get past the absurdity of a headless chicken doing all this stuff, the jokes really WORK...

For a comic...a black and white comic...there's not really a lot of archives, are there?

I know you're doing school too, and I don't want you to overextend yourself...but you MIGHT consider trying to do it more often. The web, with its constant hunger for something new---you might get even more readers if you updated more often than once a week or so.

Okay, here's a criticism. You're bad to start a sequence and then just end it, leaving us with a cheated "Wha--?" Like the "What if Gravity just stopped working"? Yeah, the giant-mecha-zoid-whatever was funny, but...

And I know it's a humorous strip, and maybe I'm overanalyzing---I don't want an explanation of how they're all back after Chicken blows up the Earth with Erwin's inventions in a later strip...but it was just a bad ending for that particular sequence. (The gravity gone wild one.) The INDIVIDUAL jokes/punchlines in the sequence were good...like when Erwin was going to tell everybody how to fix this, but falls UP before he can get further, and Chicken goes,

"Whoa! Talk about inconvenient timing, eh, guys?"

---but the overall sequence didn't show a sure grasp of storyteling. You're good at planning the individual strips, but not as good at planning laying out the whole sequence in storylines.

To go from everybody falling up and the mecha-zoid and the end of Life as We Know It to, next time, Chicken crossing the road again---

I guess it was a change of gears, but it almost looked like you realized you had painted yourself into a corner, or worse, forgot, and decided to start anew.

On the other hand, the Erwin-depleting-the-world-of-water one DID end well---with the "look on the bright side of things" and ending "boy am I thirsty!" THAT worked. You CAN end a sequence well, you're just inconsistent about it.

Some of the others do work well also---I liked the "invasion of Iraq" thing that took them to the North Pole and mistaking a peeved Santa for Saddam. And it came in handy for the later talk about god, comparing him to Santa Claus, and then Pig reminding Chicken they had MET Santa Claus...

Like I said, some of the stuff within the storylines are priceless...like Chicken screaming about the Giant Bee he created with Erwin's inventions, heading their way, laying waste to everything in its path, and the Duck thinking,

"It's going to be one of THOSE days..."

The Clown squences DO make a nice change of pace, occasionally. As do the chicken crossing the road stuff.

Also...I'm not sure if the farm setting is the best one for this. Of course, the farm is only minimally touched on, but most of your readers aren't rural farmers, I'm assuming. If you ever do ANOTHER strip, I would suggest NOT putting it on a farm, unless the farm is going to be important to the strip.

This is an EXCELLENT strip. REally professionally written and drawn...I'm just not sure if the name and the initial concept is the best choice for your talents. The basic framework is the dynamic between the frenetic, charge-headlong into absurdity character (chicken) and the down-to-earth, somewhat cynical, sarcastic but sensible character (pig). That works really well...

But one's a headless chicken, and the other's a pig, set in a barnyard. It may just be me---I'm a city boy, although I literally married a farmer's daughter--but I empathize with the characters DESPITE of what they are, not BECAUSE of what they are. It's a sign of your sure skill with cartooning and humor that I laughed at practically ALL the storylines---but it's in spite of your characters' settings and identity, not because of it.

Steve's the only one you can empathize with because of who he is.

You're a really good cartoonist. All the characters are individuals, both in drawing (attention to detail can be shown in the hairs sticking out of the chin of the pig, or the half-closed eyes of the duck) and in the crisp writing.

Suggestions: first in general about your cartooning---plan things out more, work on better names (both on your characters and your strip). Your next strip, I wouldn't choose a farm for the setting.

Suggestions for RUGG as is. Involve the farmer a little more. Or have the farm bought by a soulless corporation and turned into a factory for produce. Name the characters. I can say "Bun-Bun the homicidal bunny" and not even MENTION Sluggy Freelance and a lot of us will know what I'm talking about. Or "Diablo the Satanist chicken" without mentioning GOATS. But "the pig in RUGG" or "the chicken in RUGG" is a little unwieldy. (Personally, I always thought Rugg was the name of the Pig, when I've visited before. Why not? It might be short for "Rugged", or he might have been named for a Persian rug.) Give 'em names. Plot out your storylines a little better, work on the endings.

But don't change a thing on the art, or the writing in the individual strips. They're EXCELLENT.

If possible, you might consider updating more often. I think you'd get more readers. I know you're in school, but so are half the webcartoonists out there, and some do it much more often, in color to boot! I'm not nagging, and you know your own responsibilities best. Just...consider it.

Still, a delightful comic. Don't let my suggestions and criticisms blind you to how much I enjoyed reading RUGG.