From Whomp in Peace

"Fat boy on a diet, don't try it"

Cypress Hill - Insane in the Membrane

 

 

Gag-a-day comics rarely grab me. The newspaper variety recycle the same jokes universally approved since the dawn of time (teenagers and parents scandalizing each other and so on) while the online alternative recycle their own subset of trending topics. Hit or miss, usually miss.

If you try taking Whomp from its beginning, it doesn't stand out in that regard through its first year. The jokes were random, and forced, and frequently overextended. Only after developing his own avatar's quirks as main character, after creating a set of expectations peculiar to his own work, did the author begin landing solid punchlines playing on those expectations. To summarize, comic-Ronnie is a morbidly obese, morbidly depressed, morbidly anxious, morbidly self-hating weeaboo keeping some indeterminate number of more-than-one cats. Though my interest in anime has waned over the years, I've never raised a cat of my own and I'm the scrawny subspecies of geek, when I discovered his comic a couple of years ago I felt an immediate kinship with the man, as anyone flipping through the "lycanthropy" tag here could confirm. (By the way, I beat you to that topic by nine months; how you like them depressive apples, Filyaw?)

In my case, being officially mandated to isolate myself from the rest of my ersatz species during the pandemic helped ease my anxiety tremendously. Tracking Whomp's progress, it would seem the social approval (wouldn't know how that feels) garnered for his work had already primed the author for major changes as 2020 struck. Certainly the large amount of overlap implied between comic-Ronnie and comicker-Ronnie made the whole situation untenable in the long run. I'll admit it's been many a year since my psych coursework, but getting praised and financially rewarded solely for self-abuse for a decade running cannot possibly be psychologically healthy.

 

So it's probably a good thing he gradually slowed his Whomp posts and moved on to a longer single project. Probably a less-good thing that it's not exactly breaking subscriber records, with views gradually dropping chapter by chapter from 10k to 1k. Granted his slow update schedule isn't helping matters, nor is the focus on humans as an entire species of Wesley Crushers, but the bigger issue seems to be that nobody knows what to make of From Earth in Peace. It starts from a space opera perspective, banks heavily on cuteness (unsurprising from an anime fan) and builds up small mounts of tension rapidly dissipated. The aliens are goofy, the punchlines quaint rather than cathartic as Whomp's audience learned to expect, the space opera science fiction skipping from idea to idea.

Possibly the saddest aspect of From Earth in Peace's failure is its verifiable originality. Though it may not be your favorite thing in the multiverse, I'll wager you've never seen anything quite like it. It relies neither on shock value nor on emotional blackmail, pastiche nor verisimilitude, political rants nor fad worship, yet it's gradually building up its own internal coherence... and readers are actively dodging it, because the truism of all creativity holds true now in the age of identity politics more than ever: nobody seems capable of valuing a work on its own merit. Unless they limbically, mindlessly "identify with" or feel an immediate kinship with the first image they see, readers wander off like livestock from a depleted salt lick. Apparently unless he panders to an audience of farting fatasses looking to validate themselves by his self-hatred, Ronnie Filyaw has no audience at all.