Behind the Panel of Pixels:
Sally Protest by David Gonterman
Introducing Gonterman, or a Baptism of Fire
David Gonterman. David Gonterman. A forgotten page in the book of great webcomic failures. While there have been far greater and more explosive terrible webcomics (which will be covered in excruciating depth (hopefully only for me), few downward spirals have been as elongated and detrimental to the webcomic world than Mr Gonterman. Younger users of the internet (as in people who didn't use the internet until the second half of this decade) have probably never heard of this man, this cornerstone of everything BtPoP is trying to stop, and for them, this comic primarily serves as an introduction, as this comic, the infamous Sally Acorn (the title on the first page, though it is typically titled Sally Protest, or The Sally Protest) was probably the work that distilled in six pages the David Gonterman experience, and the perfect start to our exploration of all the works of such an artist.
First of all, a brief biography of the man who calls himself Daveykins Foxfire. A thirty-something fanfic (or 'fanfict' as his rather peculiar writing fingerprint would suggest) writer and webcomic artist, he was probably the most well known name in the more alternate webcomic world of early AOL users. There were earlier and far more famous artists and comics than him (Eric Monster Milkin, Sluggy Freelance, Doctor Fun), but his works represented the postmodern counterculture known as fan works. All of Gonterman's works either were fan made continuations to existing copywritten works or so heavily based upon them one could barely tell the difference. Part of the reason is that this had made him somewhat popular in the early years of his web use. His elaborate, convoluted (and interwoven with a ton of other works) fanfiction based on the Saturday Morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon and accompanying Archie Comic series, Blood and Metal had won him friends, collaborators (including the tragic co-author of The Rangers of NIMH) and even an online girlfriend. The story, which later spawned a prequel (The Piasa Bird, infamous for it's racist content) and a sequel (Sailor Moon : American Kitsune, his most controversial and infamous fanfiction, the racism is far more vitriolic and is compounded by blatant homophobia, sexism and what can without hyperbole be described as outright rape of a continuity: the greatest sin a fanfiction writer can possibly do!) formed the main part of the Davey Crockett trilogy, which told the story of David 'Davey Crockett' Kintobor, the estranged son of the antagonist of Sonic the Hedgehog, Doctor Robotnik.
Fanfiction isn't the main focus of BtPoP but the entire trilogy demonstrates all the main (and incredibly disturbing) quirks of a Gonterstory. The invincible self-insert hero who gets more powers than most deities. The impenetrable storylines. The massive crossing over of characters and plot devices from other works. The complete lack of any basic narrative principles. Sailor Moon American Kitsune was the undoing of his relationship with his rather tenuous fanbase, they outright rejected the work for its appalling lack of taste or tact, but this is a tale for another day. Gonterman dubbed himself “The internet's most dangerous cartoonist” and slipped further and further into obscurity.
His slow disappearance from the online equivalent of the limelight leaves a massive trail of abandoned, rushed or otherwise spoiled ideas he never had the ability to take advantage of. Those comics are upcoming but right now is an example of the reactionary nature of some webcomics. A lot of webcomics, due to being exceedingly quick to script, design and publish, as well as being explicitly dated are topical, dealing with not so much newsworthy events but certainly rooted in a particular time. Sally Protest is no different, and is the most explict, though far from the only example in the Gonterography. Typically, when people pen an explicitly topical work, it's about something important, like political events or national tragedies. Gonterman's use of the medium for a fictional subject matter leads to the implication that the man has difficulty prioritising real and fictional worlds, and Sally Protest touches on this odd paradox, albeit somewhat unintentionally.
However, this does mean one needs to explore briefly the context of the 1997 Gonterworld (Right, I'll try to hold back on the Gonter-puns, promise!). 1997 was not an especially good year for Sonic or Sega. The Sega Saturn had picked up some momentum in Japan, but in other markets it was sinking like a stone, and part of the problem was the lack of any system selling game, typically the job of a certain blue mammal. Original plans for a Saturn Sonic game (to be called Sonic X-Treme) were after a very tragic and rushed development schedule scrapped after project leader Chris Coffin nearly died from overworking in December of 1996. This forced Sega to port one of their other flops, Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island, to fill the gap. Three months later, Issue 47 of the American print comic Sonic the Hedgehog is released in which animated series character Sally Acorn plummets to her supposed death, starting the controversial Endgame Arc, which divided opinion of the comic and only three issues later Sally's 'death' was reversed due to the backlash by fans at the end of said arc. The comic could be dated to within those three months, presumably within the week of Endgame part one being published, and the opinions are just as spontaneous, irrational and half formed as one could imagine...
The term 'Brain Fart isn't what first comes to mind...'
…by the opening splash page of utter horror, where not even the spiky foreground and background are safe from being fucked up. An existentially and subtly deformed Sally Acorn does her best Roger Daltrey impression while holding aloft a comic somehow worse than the one I'm currently reading. The first curious thing to note about David Gonterman's artistic style, and part of the reason why he's still actually got a fanbase of sorts is that if one merely glances at some of Gonterman's artistic attempts one could be fooled into thinking he's at least somewhat competent, a belief shattered if one looks at it for the same amount of time one takes to blink. The work is very jutty and aliased though not all of that is the fault of the artist but poor compression attempts and the pitfalls of early scanners. However, even with the pixellation, it's clear to see no cleanup work has been done, with very blatent and easy to fix mistakes being kept in the final product. Also, the supposedly shaking fist looks more like a colony of mosquitos are fighting a great war against the toaster welded to her arm. Also, more emphasis are placed on the bit of her body where boobs would be, were she not a squirrel. That's all I'll say about that. No joke here. Just, sexualisation of a squirrel. Let's move on shall we? Down to the bottom right wall of text being spoken by her... oh god damn it! I'm well aware that the hilarity of someone's genitalia being an orator is a goldmine for 'comedy' such as my own, but in seriousness nothing I could write about could beat the text, for Gonterman's writing is somehow worse than his art. From what I can tell from the heavy compression, Sally's snatch wants to “get [her/its] hands on Ken Penders” and she'll “personally make him a eunic”. Quite what an 'eunic' actually is becomes probably the most satisfying subplot of the entire work. Until I see a sequel to Sally Protest, my personal bet is that it's the squirrel equivalent of a fur coat, made from a human's ears...
Ahem! Sorry, got a little carried away there...
In any case, the livid labia continues her/its poorly written rampage, turning the aggression towards a “'hedgehog' [she's] supposed to be in love with” making it sound like the worst soap opera in history not made by Channel 5. I was feeling rightly cynical of the prospect of another five pages of this, then it asked the question we all wanted to know:
“Why should I even think about this
snobbish rude sneaker-smelling
...running...
*pin*- coushin?!?!?!
Again, the lexically playful nature of Gonterman's dialogue left an old critic like me spellbound and made me wonder if a 'coushin' and a 'eunic' were in some way part of a semantic field? Spelling and grammar destruction aside, this dialogue is a classic example of what can go wrong when an author hijacks an existing, vaguely fleshed out character (insofar as she has a personality, motivation and romantic sub-plot) and uses them as a soundboard for their own frustration. This, I think in essence, is the first lump on the long cancerous road of David Gonterman.
When Mullets Collide: Part 1
Then the next page, in what I can assume to be some kind of joke, one of the oddest characters in the already bizarre and messed up Gonterverse appears, Jonathan Brisby. Apart from looking out of place and almost competently drawn, apart from the painfully damaged hips, he's probably one of the few examples in history of a copyrighted character from another company becoming the mascot of sorts for another company, with only fanon and Gonterman's art to distinguish the two. They exchange painfully written dialogue about the mid-90s comic world, from Archie to 'Spaz and Harvo', which I was barely alive in at the time and now have to try and contextualise for you lovely invisible people out there, which resorts in a single colour (white being a colour after all) rainbow flying out of an incredibly lazily drawn single pixel house and into an equally badly drawn cuboid with a badly written series of fanatical whinings masquerading as a paragraph. To decipher for people who can't read idiot:
“Please dispose all of
Marvels and DCs
except Image artists
here, please
Keep America Beautiful”
For most people even vaguely familiar with the concept of a comic book, the first two names will be intimately familiar. Marvel Comics and Detective Comics Comics (DC Comics) are the two biggest names in comics and creators of pretty much any major American comic book hero you could care to mention. In the 90s, they had some highs (The Death of Superman, Knightfall) and some incredibly deep lows (the entire Clone Saga, the most controversial Marvel story in history, and essentially retconned completely out of existence). For this, along with the usual undercurrent of revolution that was becoming increasingly commercialised throughout the 90s was where independent comic companies started to find their market share, such as Image Comics. Why am I going on about this? Because Image, particularly during this moment in time was one of the worst comic companies around, churning out repeatedly the same Liefeldian designs in several awful series, the comic Youngbloods (By Rob Liefeld himself) being by far the most prolific offender. Youngbloods demonstrated everything wrong with 90s comics, most of which we will return to very soon. But for now the main connection between the two is the skewed perspectives and rather... interesting morality, to say the least. And with the third panel, we return to the wonderful Gonterctionary, as a very “scroned woman” is after Archie Andrews “@$$” while Brisby and a haracter introduced as “MechTail” exchange pleasant mysogynies and objectifications. Lovely. For the record, Sally Acorn and Gadget from Chip n Dale's Rescue Rangers were until recently the two furry pin ups, and somewhat unprofessionally I did throw up in my mouth while writing that. The only purpose this all serves is to lead us to more conversations between mulleted furries, which I hope will become the title of Gonterman's anthology some days. Oh, and MechTail insisting he has to 'get her back before...'
Thank heavens that thought was only half finished because otherwise we wouldn't have to set aside a whole third of a page to a non-explanation about the setting and why leaving a house has become the sudden and only element of antagonism and conflict in the story. We learn that Sally is for some reason 'a four and-a-half tree squirrel' and 'MechTall' chimes in explaining that she somehow missed out on that fact. Not how, or why but just simply that it is. All this from a bird's-eye view of beautiful Gonterland with it's rolling scribbles and interconnected circles. It's a rather depressing trend in a lot of more amateurish webcomics that backgrounds are either nonexistant or even more rushed than the rest of the art. The reason for this is absolutely obvious : When time is at a premium one focuses their effort on the vital aspects of a panel, typically the characters and any other focal point of a particular panel. As a result, backgrounds, being large, cumbersome to draw and typically requiring detail above and beyond the effort possessed by such artists tend to only be placeholders. However, most people tend to focus on anything inconsistent, so such lazy details are highlighted. The solution is rather obvious in theory, which is simply to either place as much effort into the background as the other artistic assets, or to omit them entirely. Gonterman appears to be in part following this theory, only drawing backgrounds when they are absolutely necessary to the narrative he is attempting to tell, except for this panel, which serves to show nothing other than Gonterman cannot draw anything that lives in the real world. Then we see another one of Gonterman's most infamous traits, the spoken sound effects, as Sally responds to plaintive cries of her name with '
Exposition Hell
'Paul' MechTa[i/l] (The greatest name in the world, besides Daveykins Foxfire of course) tries to comfort 'Sal', who asks the question every single one of us did when they stumbled onto Foxfire Studios' website: “Where the hell am I?!?!?!”, which leads to another two thirds of the page being taken up with banal exposition of a completely different story to the one I'm reading and rather limp-wristed shots at Archie Comics. This is the second page in a row to suffer from this Narrative irrelevance, where the story is halted so a different (and typically far more interesting than any of Gonterman's story). This is common in webcomics and fanfics, where a community typically gives cameo appearances to other artists' characters. For some reason, while the first two panels show them in a tree, they somehow warped to a bedroom (okay), which they are lying next to each other on (okay) and Sally is apparently naked (oh fuck you! Okay?). Then for some reason, David Gonterman continues the exposition, which leads to the rather unfortunate implication that he's in the room looking at something already suspicious. Moving as swiftly on as a gazelle from a French restaurant, Gonterpedia goes on to explain that his “anger over your 'death' caused you to have another life in my Fanfiction universe, I'm afraid.'
Being afraid is a typical reaction to exposure to a Gonterwork, that's true (Still trying to kick the habit, I'm afraid). And then Davey Stu goes on to give the wonderful and unworthy readers some of his 'humblest of opinions', a phrase when used by Gonterman carrying about as much weight as the heaviest feather.
The face that haunts a thousand furry nightmares...
Followed by even more incomprehensible exposition, as David Gonterman shines a crystal into Sally's eyes like a interrogator in his hauntingly square furry torture chamber bedroom, claiming he got it from “Another DiC-Cancelled Cartoon Show.” What is meant by this is likely lost to the midsts of time and Gonterman's head, as he never cares to explain this, like any of the other four subplots in this comic alone that are never elaborated upon, and this crystal, which apparently 'has a mind of its own' is never explored, and thus is yet another plot device introduced without explanation and dropped with even less. Apparently Gonterman is learning to control it with the power of his square computer on the desk. From the time period and context I'd say it must be an Acorn. David, being the benevolent 'DiCtator' that he is, offers his loyal subject a chance to escape the horror of the fanfiction universe but Sally, the squareness of Gonterman's room infecting her face declines, for not wanting to live in syndication, seemingly content to wait and '
Sally, interdimensional furry harlot squirrel
So the comic goes full circle, the fire of rage becoming a smouldering flame of catharsis as the awful Archie comics (that were in the big square thing weren't they? Why would you take them out of there?) along with a Marvel and DC comic for good measure, as it is clear the ideal way for couples to show their love is to set fire to comics together, while Sally talks about Sonic, the 'rude sneaker-smelling pin coushin' he was introduced as in the first paragraph. While initially I believed this to be a plot-hole, possibly it is a symbol of catharsis, that in the end when one can clear the initial shock of things that change one's life, then one can see a new perspective on things. Which makes Sally either a philosopher or very badly characterised, we may never know. And so the comic ends on Paul MechTall watching and trying to bite his tongue as Sally whistfully thinks about her other lover from another dimension. How touching. As a rather particular final note, there is the credit block, which sort of ruins the idea that the concept of redemption I was getting from the text is anything other than random chance. Here it is in full:
No thanks go to Ken Penders.
May he rot eternaly in Hell
Along with Scott Lobdel and
the Dorks in DC Comics.
Because when Gonterman is calling someone a dork, shit just got real!
In conclusion, I suppose it's difficult to really tie all the pieces together, not just because I didn't have a concept in mind when writing this post but also because Gonterman's work at its worst defies trying to apply patterns and constants to them, because nothing in them lasts long enough to become constant. In a comic as short as this you only got tiny flickerings of this, but even here you get the impression that Gonterman has an obsession with tying in all his voluminous pieces of work, even to the detriment of the project he's working on, particularly when said project is intended to be a piece complaining about the sudden death of a character in a comic book and yet ties in to four different works of fiction. In the end though, this is but the first step on a long arduous Gonterjourney, to try to find enlightenment.
Lord SuperC
Behind the Panel of Pixels : Webcomic Fucktardary and How to Avoid it
