Friday 30 May 2014

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Vol. 1 (Comic Review)



This is going to take some explaining before we begin.

A lot of you are likely wondering just why this is on here. If you have not been reading this blog over the past few years, fans of the cartoon started spamming requests and demands to cover the comic. After I laid out terms if they truly wanted me to review this, these demands turned into threatsinsults and the occasional racial slur. After about a year of me having to censor this, someone finally agreed to my terms to review it and handed over a copy of the comic in person. So here we are now.

While my previous attempt to review this comic was effectively a rant which declared the franchise unworthy of being looked at thanks to the sheer fanaticism and psychosis of certain circles of fans, it was admittedly unfair on the comic's creators. So while I do stand by that sentiment, this is going to be purely analytically and leaving any opinions of the aforementioned fans out of this.

Enjoy.

Set at an undisclosed point within the series, the comic sees a strange change sweep through Ponyville. Multiple inhabitants are undergoing sudden shifts in personality, disappearing only to return as blank eyed and unresponsive figures who shun social interaction. As the characters gather, they soon realise this epidemic has spread far further than any would have guessed. With the threat of the entire population being lost hanging over their heads, they must find the source of this change and confront its origin.

3 comments:

  1. Somehow I completely missed this whole debacle, I read the occasional Brony comment on the older articles, and saw My little pony related stuff in the Review Archive, but since I'm not interested in that sort of thing I just thought "It's their blog, they'll do whatever they want with it, I'll read that sometime later." As I'm also not the person who likes that kind of thing, in my case the more "cutesy/colourful" something tries to look, the more I kind of turn against it from the start.
    The reason why is strictly because I don't like the art style, I like contrast, and as an example, for all its failings (and minus the pictures in it) I really like the art direction in the new 40K rulebook, to me the more colourful something is, the more it all blends together, if you remove some of the colour, all of the others stand out so much more, but that's just an issue of personal taste.

    The sad thing it that I'm sure this will get fans angry, and I'm not sure if there's any way to "appease" them, if you gave it a positive review, that would only open the floodgates for more requests, if you'd given it a scathing review, that would have a similar effect, maybe this mediocrity is the best way to go about it.

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    1. Honestly you were not missing much. For the most part I made a point of censoring and blocking the worst of the hatemail, stupidity, or attempts to pass off these actions as attempts to frame them by Brony haters. Or the ones that actually tried to claim I was morally wrong for not bowing down before them.

      Well, each to their own but there's really nothing which personally interests me about the franchise. I did initially look into a couple of episodes out of curiosity after the initial wave of messages, but the episodes seemed unremarkable at best. For the most part they just seemed to be glorified flash animations you'd expect to see on youtube, cheap animation and over-reliance upon pop culture references abound.

      Changing the subject though, may I ask what sort of style the new 40K rulebook is going for? Is it anything like the works of John Blanche?

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    2. It's a little hard to describe, it's not like his work, but take John Blanche's work, remove all of the colour, add the red and dark blue's back (or add a bit of dark blue instead of yellow) in but smear them a bit, and there you go, that's most of what's in there.
      Looking at the artwork is a little unsettling, they seem to be more going for a lovecraftian style than anything they've previously gone for, all of the side bits are sketches that have been scribbled over slightly, as if trying to hid what they are (especially if it has to do with Psychic powers or the warp), or as if they were drawn by a madman (which considering the people in 40K who do the drawings, isn't too out of place) and the colours are meant to bleed through areas in the drawing, it's very minimalistic, and contrasts pretty great with the colours.

      Again though, that's personal opinion, it's a vastly different style from the previous ones, but I like it better than the generic sci-fi feel of the previous 2 editions, though not as much as the crazy cyber-punk feel when John Blanche was still doing the artwork.

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