Webcomic Review: Pond Scum and Other Misc. Crap
on January 18, 2016 at 12:01 am
Webcomic: Pond Scum and Other Misc. Crap
Creators: Armando Avila
Format: One to usually three panel color strips
Updates: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday
Genre: Comedy, autobiographical, puns
Themes: College, poop, movies, autobiographical
Characters: duck, Armando, his girlfriend
Archive: Begins October 13, 2014
Armando has being doing this comic for a little bit over a year. It began as a one panel gag and expanded to additional panels. His comedy is hit or miss for me. Sometimes the jokes are super specific and I’m either missing something or I just don’t get it. The rest of the time, he’s pretty funny.
I think Armando’s reach exceeds his grasp. Although the bar is a lot lower for the artwork with a comedy, Armando’s jokes are sometimes dependent upon the art and don’t totally measure up and hurt the joke. This is probably because sometimes he posts the comic very small and it requires you to click on it so it can reload larger on another page.
I would suggest that Armando either make the strips proportionally larger or stack the panels and then the could easily be bigger and fill up a lot of the screen.
From an esthetic standpoint, the site could do with an update. I would stream line the title of the comic to just Pond Scum. (And Other Misc. Crap just undermines the comic and makes it sound like a half-hearted effort.) Next, it’s time to add things like an “About” page, a bio page about the creator and maybe even a little bit about some of the characters. Also, now that he has a larger library of content, it might be time to jazz up the archive a little bit and make it so you don’t to click through the entire year of strips. Maybe add some milestones every few months or direct links to the important strips.
I think if Armando just streamlined his site a little bit, it would be more accessible to his readers. I generally like the strips and would like to see more from this creator. As always, I recommend to creators to do link exchanges with fellow webcomic creators. It’s easy and brings in hits.
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