Broken Frontier

Wake Up to the Awakened

I wouldn?t actually recommend it ? this webcomic is much too weird to wake up to without seriously freaking out. The Awakened is a stylized and sporadically updated tale of a chronic insomniac spiraling into a world of werewolves and other general weirdness. Sarah Davis? bizarre fantasy tale packs a wide range of color into a world that probably could have been created by an insomniac Walt Disney ? if he had an affair with Tim Burton.

The art isn?t exactly rough, but it does seem somewhat flawed in places. However, Davis has succeeded in creating such a wildly weird world that jutting angles and crossing lettering actually works to the advantage of the feeling of surreal disorientation. This is one of the few examples where the lack of clarity actually helps the work as a whole, but Davis toes the line just enough for this effect. In other words, while I?ve seen many a work collapse under the weight of their own complication, Davis achieves success with her own personal art style as well as random yet simple characters who permeate well enough without ample explanation.

That said, there are a few points where Davis could do with a little more detail. A lack of clarity works well to serve distance from reality and general disorientation, but sometimes Davis? more physical punch lines lose out because we simply can?t see enough of what?s happening. When The Awakened?s protagonist Chase Sigismund runs headlong into a tree, we need to see the full effect of the visual to know it really happened, not just vague hints. The Awakened is also, as I said, sporadically updated ? the last update came on the 29th of October. To be fair, Davis is doing much of her pages donation goal by donation goal, so if you do want to see this work continue, you might need to shell out a few bucks here and there. But as long as the audience is willing to bear the price, The Awakened is a hard series to put down.

In more tragic news, Baby Sohmer, the cat of Least I Could Do creator Ryan Sohmer, passed away after its owners were forced to put her to sleep. The cat appeared several timed in the comic and was mentioned many times by Ryan during his updates of the popular webcomic. You can read a touching eulogy to Baby on the website today.