Scenes From a Multiverse: The First Few Months
by czwheeler
I’m having mixed feelings about Scenes from a Multiverse, the new(ish) comic from Jon Rosenberg. The premise is intriguing: Each day, the comic is about a different set of characters in a different world, generally in the middle of a scene or story. These “destinations” get voted on each week and the most popular setting in one week gets a second comic the following week (where it can be voted for a third comic, etc). The scenes tend to be science fictiony, which I guess makes sense given the “multiverse” theme. Still, it doesn’t always make sense; plenty of the comics are about things happening on Earth, but superimposed on the residents of other worlds (for example.)
I almost wonder if Mr. Rosenberg hasn’t become too attached to the “multiverse/destination/travel” concept. Does it make the comic better to imagine that we are “visiting” other universes? Not really. The “drop in on a scene from daily life” idea is getting old for me: I’m tired of characters who are written like we know who they are when we clearly don’t.
Let me try to rephrase: You can have comics where the characters are new each time (SMBC, xkcd, Chainsawsuit usually, Cyanide and Happiness…many, many others). Or you can have comics where the reader comes to know the characters over the course of reading the comic (any story comic, but also one-off comics like Nedroid, Dinosaur Comics, Red Meat – and many, many others). SFAM is doing something in between: It’s like jumping to a random comic in the middle of, say, Wigu, and understandably feeling like you are missing something about these people. The difference, of course, is that Wigu and other comics you can (and, perhaps on some level, are expected to) read through the stories and understand what it is you are reading. With SFAM, the point is you can’t do that.
That said, it’s still an enjoyable comic – many of the installments are quite funny, and the drawings are wonderfully charming and perfectly cartoonish. The audience participation mechanism is quite interesting and may, over time, lead to better comics – maybe. And today’s installment is the first one that I am going to make sure to vote for. What do other people think? Is anyone reading this comic?
15 comments
Honestly, Carl, I don’t follow you at all.
SFAM doesn’t expect you to know anything about the world you’re dropped in. Sometimes it’ll use made-up terms such as “sciencemaster” but it’s actually pretty obvious what a sciencemaster is. Everything in SFAM is ripped from issues and theories from Earth – for example, maybe you see something like “grey goo” as being universe-specific, but it’s actually a thought experiment (see: Wikipedia). And so on.
So in short: Examples plz? I have no idea what you’re talking about.
I never heard about this comic before, but it seems to me that it’s wacky for the purpose of wackiness. There are no jokes, and there is basically no story or continuity. It’s like Ballard Street of webcomics.
It’s not “wacky for the purpose of wackiness,” it’s “wacky for the purpose of social commentary”. Putting human conflicts / theories / politics into the mouths of other creatures seems silly, and then you stop and think, why isn’t it considered silly in OUR Universe?
That’s what I get out of it, anyway.
Except the bunnies. That’s a bit different.
Karl you hueg faggot this comment box makes me submit me email you’re going to use it for evil stuff
I BET IT NOT EVEN OPEN SCOURCE
Anyway I’ve read SFAM since it started but I can’t help but feel the central premise is pretty neglected-
more often than not it’s a springboard into commentery on religion or intelligent design.
When that happens it begins to feel a little tired you know? we’ve already heard the invisible pink magic unicorn argument a billion times before there’s no need to make a comic about it on a weekly basis.
It’s a good thing that the art and dialouge usually saves it- he doesn’t come across as smug which is good.
That being said I did like the ‘burden of proof’ setting with gary- it was pretty clever how it subverts the action of arguing about this stuff rather than “WHAT IF OUR NOTION OF GOD IS SILLY? GOSH THIS ALIEN GOD IS SILLY TOO!”
I have read this comic and found it mildly interesting, but only from a hardcore sci-fi fan perspective. It almost has a far side feel to it though. Alllllmost.
Also I can’t stop myself from giving a quote about your dash usage i have mentioned before Carl!
“That said, it’s still an enjoyable comic – many of the installments are quite funny, and the drawings are wonderfully charming and perfectly cartoonish.”
In this sentence, the dash links two dependent clauses. This is what i have been referring too all along; a semicolon is usually used for this. I hate myself from bringing up dashes/semicolons again, but i will emphasize that this post has a very pleasing aesthetic and does not have too many dashes.
Also i request a review of axe cop. it almost made me pee myself with its absurdity, but can that kind of humor last in a comic?
I have mixed feelings about axe cop- it’s not entirely absurd- it has a sort of fairly consistent internal logic.
The kid who writes it clearly understands the nature of if you’re a vampire or werewolf who bites somone, they become ‘like you’ and extends this concept to basically anything, like fruit, dinasaurs, even axe cop himself bites things to change them around- I think it’s this subversion of the normal tropes that is the core of axe cop’s humour-
And a five year old who hasn’t been quite ‘conditioned’ into accepting the way things just are exposes these things well.
I also feel weird considering axe cop comes across as a massive psychopath due to his (and nathan ethan?) approach to binary morality.
Typing this comment made me want to write a review but this comment reads like a badly edited wikipedia page.
WHICH IS BAD I GUESS
oh fuck such bad grammar and so many typos and im too computer illitarate to edit my post.
cocking shiteats
Hm… it sounds interesting, but my time for new webcomic archive rummages is quite short of late. It’ll go to the top of the list, though, cause I’m a goddamn scif-fi fan.
So, to criticize your criticism(because old habits die hard), are we really supposed to know these characters? I haven’t read it yet, obviously, but I guess whichever new concepts appear can be deduced or don’t really matter, and reactions the characters have are supposed to be analogous to earthly people and stereotypes.
I could be goddamn wrong, but, hey! It wouldn’t be the first time anyway. Let’s just float with that!
“Anyway I’ve read SFAM since it started but I can’t help but feel the central premise is pretty neglected-
more often than not it’s a springboard into commentery on religion or intelligent design.”
That’s definitely true. The places change, but the (superficially distinct) characters and situations get boring really fast.
I guess my main problem with this comic is that it takes situations from everyday life and says, “Hey! Maybe this will be funny if it has aliens!” But situations from everyday life aren’t usually funny, whether they’re experienced by aliens or humans. They’re just boring. Because they’re everyday.
Oh great, now we all get to read about Carl hating OTHER webcomics he could just not be reading! How wonderful!
Grey Goo is an actual term for a huge swarm of nanites that destroys anything in its path, using the destroyed material to make more of itself. It is indeed a made-up term, just not by Jon Rosenberg.
The non-sequitur thing is something you just have to get used to with this comic. If you don’t like it, don’t read it, but if you can get used to it, it’s very good.
If you don’t like the alien thing, you are a RACIST. Just kidding. Imagine them as humans, maybe.
There aren’t any hard-and-fast rules for dash OR semicolon usage. Have you looked at any writing from even a hundred years ago? Everything’s a mess! What’s considered correct grammar or syntax now happened more by accident than anything else. Not long ago we used to Capitalize random Words and spell the same word three different ways in the same document. Fuck people who think there’s a “correct” way of using something so poorly defined as a dash or semicolon (which could be just as easily read with a comma, anyway, but there’s no fun in that).
Double fucking comment because I can: I agree with the criticisms put forth in comment #4. There’s so much potential here, and it shows in some comics (i.e. Sciencemaster Adler, the two guys jumping off a cliff) but it returns to the ideas of religion so often it’s like religion is just his go-to topic when he can’t think of anything else. Hell, I prefer the damn bunnies to that.
Because you didn’t read Goats from the beginning.
My main complaint with SfaM is that Rosenberg very very quickly got lazy and turned everything into a thinly-veiled “LOL religion sucks” allegory. I mean I’m a pretty strong dyed-in-the-wool atheist and see very little that’s redeeming about religion but even then it gets old and self-congratulatory to make that the only “punchline,” such as it is.
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