Welcome to "Your Webcomic Sucks", where I will proceed to denounce and become generally antagonistic and inflammatory to those special winners out there that make people ashamed to be related to humanity. "Gee, Mister Internet Columnist Man," you may ask in a simpering, doltish voice, "why are you so angry about bad webcomics? You don't have to read them." Yes, that is true, I don't have to read them. However, their presence is still a thorn in the side of the entire art community. I have just as much right to be pissed off at bad webcomics as I am for being pissed off at serial killers and corrupt politicians.

To illustrate my point further, picture the internet as a large house, and every person who has a webpage is a resident adding décor and furniture to the collective abode. People who produce flash animations are bringing a television into the house, people who make recipe websites furnish the kitchen; a bad webcomic artist is like the family dog with diarrhea and an impacted colon that drags its ass, leaving shit trails in the carpet.

I'm not going to wait for the droppings to be picked up anymore. I'm tired of waiting for the person to give up updating after eleven pages, and then delete the entire site months later. No, a more direct route is needed. I am going to crush their dreams before they start. I'm going to shoot the goddamn dog.

This is a lovely segue into today's topic: Religious Imagery.

Recently, while submitting myself to the masochistic activity known as "browsing the KeenSpace signup samples", I came across no less than five manga-style abortions featuring angsty bishounen angels, popularly characterized as attention-grabbing emo whores with an LJ where they post black and white pictures of their self-inflicted cutting scars. While not personally religious in any manner, I still find it sad that years of holy scripture have only been able to convey to the average layman that angels are "pretty guys with wings".

Couldn't they at least stop using piddly little angels? There is so much more to choose from: archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, and even seraphs. However, this is never going to happen since it is usually quite obvious that most of these authors (usually anime-addled adolescent girls) have never read any religious material, let alone seen a bible. Note: If you're going to reference or borrow material from a world-famous, pre-established canon laboriously created over centuries, and held in extremely high regard by millions of people worldwide... KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT!

Let's take, for example, the oft-used cliché "half-angel". According to "The Book of the Watchers" (I'll forgive the fact that it is pseudopigraphia for the sake of argument), the offspring of angels and human beings were demons and giants, most of which were eliminated in the great flood. So, no, a half-angel is not a teenage boy who can grow wings at will and fire cross-shaped photon beams from his eyes. In fact, if he was, I'm pretty damn sure getting that cute girl in class to notice him is the least of his worries.

Next, stop giving me all this "angst-ridden angel" shit. If heaven is a perfect place of eternal happiness, the concept of "angst", "abject misery", and "Hot Topic" are completely foreign concepts. There is absolutely no logical reason an angel would cut off his wings and fall down to Earth with a trail of bubbly tears picturesquely trailing behind him. Most likely, the fall would kill him anyway. Fuck the chemically unbalanced angel, and shoot the people who propose them as an original and intriguing concept. It's been done a hundred times in Japan, and done more artistically and competently than you.

On the opposite side, please stop writing stories about a demon who is filled with feelings of love for a human woman. This is bullshit. Demons are creatures that act evil upon man for no other reason than to be evil. They tempt man to expose their weaknesses. Lacking human feelings beyond Schadenfreude, they are unable to fall in love. So congratulations on screwing up another concept that you could have easily researched. And if any of you bring up the point "but the demons in Inu Yasha fall in love with humans", fuck off and die cold and alone in a Texaco bathroom. One, it's Inu Yasha. If you are trying to get symbolic context from that show, you're better off looking for a non-linear family tree in Arkansas. Two, the Japanese concept of demons is far different from the Judeo-Christan concept. I'd go into the difference between "akuma" and "yokai", but that is neither here nor there.

Also, angels normally don't give two shits whether some random passerby gets crushed by a falling piano, let alone trying to make sure your love life works out. This is why people occasionally die and aren't always saved from disasters every day. Unless you're the next incarnation of Christ, or Beelzebub himself is after your well-being personally, they're not that concerned about your pissy little problems. Every time God looks down at you from heaven and sighs contentedly, knowing that your issues with your lame-ass high school boyfriend have been patched due his divine intervention, you can be sure that a bus full of kittens and nuns has careened off a cliff unnoticed because of it.

If you are going to use angels, either understand the background or at least clearly establish an original context, otherwise you come off sounding retarded and uniformed. You know what you call something that tries to use symbolism without a scintilla of understanding about what it's dealing with? You call it "Evangelion". Next time you want to make a comic about an effeminate angst-ridden angel who falls in love with a girl he saves from a wrecking ball deployed by a dejected love-smitten demon, think to yourself, "What is my audience, and humanity at large gaining from my ever-so-apt use of a pre-established mythos?" instead of "I hope my local supermarket carries Pocky!"

Either stay consistent with the canon you're using, or at least present us with a well thought-out theology instead of vomiting cliché and dramatic bombast on our internet.

Comment on this article in our forum