Broken Frontier

I have been awaiting the return of Cosmobear with equal amounts anticipation and trepidation.

Cosmobear is the latest work by Clay Yount, a webcomic artist of some renown. He happens to be one of the masterminds behind Rob and Elliot, which has taken the webcomic trope of two roommates engaging in wacky hijinks and perfected it into an art form. He ran Bikini Suicide Frisbee Days at Sluggy Freelance for over a year and a half, wherein he managed to capture the very essence of the strip so concisely that at times, he outshone Sluggy itself.

It was a sad day when he announced that "Bikini Suicide Frisbee Days" would be coming to an end, but one with a glimmer of hope - they were being set aside so he could work on something new and exciting.

Cosmobear.

Cosmobear launched in January. We were warned that it would be different from his usual fare, but it was still a startling contrast when the first page arrived with the first of the year, and was grim and stark - and filled with the potential for story.

It is a difficult adjustment to make. If I was coming upon Cosmobear in a vacuum, having never seen Clay's work before, it would have easily drawn me in without reservations. But as it was, I had become so used to the style of his other comics that this new experiment felt ever so subtly wrong. Rob and Elliot strips pack worlds of actions and layers upon layers of jokes into every single strip - while Cosmobear took a half-dozen strips before the title character even appeared.

You can feel that it is new ground for Yount as well - the pacing of the strips is ever-so-slightly off, and the adjustment to more natural dialogue has clearly not been a complete one. But those are very subtle discrepancies, and almost inevitable in the switch to a new style of comic. The real flaw was in my perception of the strip, and the distortion between Yount's other works and this one.

As the strip continued, however, I began to accept the new work. The start was slow, but necessary to bring the characters together and establish the premise. And it's a great premise, but it's only once we see interaction between our diminutive ursine cosmonaut and his curiously strong rescuer that the story begins to get going. The space-bear's name turns out to be Alexei, and he's from the Soviet Union, and has no memory of the last twenty years he spent in space - or what they did that took away his humanity.

Fantastic premise. We have mysteries to get the reader intrigued, a figure suffering from culture shock and a bitter past to help us develop emotional attachment... and an omnipresent lighter tone brought about by the fact that the title character is wearing the form of a cute little talking bear.

Just when I was really getting into the groove of the strip, it went on hiatus, as Clay took a month long break to recover from three years spent working nonstop on webcomics. It was a fair decision, and I can't blame the man from wanting some rest...

But still. It left me awaiting Cosmobear's return with mixed feelings.

I needn't have worried - the strip returned with the onset of April, and Clay has demonstrated his ability to keep the rhythm going strong. There is nothing to complain about with the content of the strip.

The presentation is a different matter. The art is gorgeous - I've found the black and white to mesh fantastically with Clay's drawing style, with crisp clear images and excellent use of light and shadow. The layout is perfect for comic book format - which is good, as Yount plans to collect the strip into printed format and publish it on a regular basis. The strip certainly feels right for it, and a lot of pacing issues that are harder to handle in single page updates will fade away when reading it an issue at a time.

Yount wants to bridge the gap between print comics and webcomics, and he'd have a great candidate for it - if only the website itself wasn't such an abysmal failure.

It isn't just challenging to navigate, it's outright non-functional. The news hasn't been updated since the strip's return, and most of the support pages (archives, cast, community, and so forth) are simply broken links. I can accept these absences, on the assumption that they will, in time, be fixed.

Less acceptable is the construction of the site itself. Built using fancy code to let the reader more easily move through the archives... it completely fails to function in several browsers. Forcing the reader to jump through hoops even to access the site is asking for trouble.

A webcomic is, at heart, about the comic itself. The website it is hosted on, the archiving system, news posts - these are all amenities. But they are amenities readers have come to expect, and I'm really hoping the site has an overhaul on the way.

Because the story itself has managed to grab hold of me, and the differences between it and Yount's other work has turned out to make it more appealing.. I really am looking forward to a successful future for it... but it will only get there if the audience can actually read the strip.