5th Review

Lancaster: The Ghost Detective

Art

Lancaster is written and drawn by P. Gibson. The art is clean and cartoony with furry inspired designs. Pages begin with only 2 or 3 panels and lots of splash pages making this a fast read as I browse through the archives.The low panel count has the effect of drawing out the tension as Lancaster finds and fights the ghosts, this is a format I feel more webcomics should be using. The artist isn't afraid to experiment a little and you see variations in style and playful coloring here and there. His coloring is solid but personally I like his black and white work, as it shows off his rendering skills.

Writing

The writing is generally light hearted, featuring a likable hero in Lancaster. There are gadgets galore and it's always amusing when Lancaster excitedly revels in his own cleverness. He insists that he's a ghost DETECTIVE not a hunter, and he does all he can to come up with a peaceful solution. There are a lot of funny elements that make each story unique. The constantly nasty turtle spirit that was Lancaster's first case and for a time resides in a jar (read the comic to figure that one out). Later on there's an impromptu Freestyle Rap Battle that is really amusing too.

Overall

Lancaster proves to be a unique webcomic, with nice art and an amusing story. It's not perfect but it generally doesn't make the mistakes of the armies of high school dramas and manga wannabes. The constant "what's going to happen next feel" is a nice touch and people looking for a real comic should enjoy this.

-Wrong

Fifth Review - Lancaster The Ghost Detective

Lancaster The Ghost Detective

http://lancaster.spiderspawn.com/

Pro:
Well it was refreshing to see a simple, cute, light, fun action adventure story as a webcomic. A really nice change of pace. Also I liked how they weren’t afraid to experiment with various art techniques. The creator does black and white, tone shading and hatchwork and manages to pull it off rather well.

Cons:
Remember how I just said I liked it as a fun action adventure story? Well the comic doesn’t stay that way. Rather abruptly, in my opinion, the story gets a bit dark and not as fun any more. Story elements of betrayal, suffering, pain, death, malevolence, and cruelty all of a sudden come out basically at once. Yes I know a story about ghosts is not going to be all happy, but this felt like a major turn in the tone and style of the comic. Also while I applaud the creator’s experimentations with the art, I do have some points of contention about it. Mainly while he was trying all these styles he was forgetting a very basic rule of inking, line weight. There’s was no sense of depth or dimension because of that lack of line weight. The creator seemed to pick up on it much later in the comic but then would seem to only use it for black and white. Still no line weight for color. Also the experimentation was nice but it was a bit random and haphazard. At first I thought maybe it was for dramatic effect, but after awhile it would just switch from color to hatch to shaded at a whim. And the final nick pick about the art is that while I understand its dark for dramatic purposes, it doesn’t help much if the coloring is too dark and muddy that I can follow what’s going on.

Final Verdict:
I liked the original story arc. The current arc with the evil organization working against the main character just doesn’t seem fun or original enough to keep reading. I thinking going into it now, some people would enjoy this style, but I can’t because I thought the original style had more potential to it.

Suggestion:
I’ve noticed that this webcomic and some others have a fairly ambitious update schedule of several times a week. While that’s fine, but I think the quality suffers some because the artist may be rushed to meet the deadlines. What if instead of having an idea of a webcomic and immediately going to a several times a week update schedule that they actually spend some time doing pages before their first update. Say they take 6 months to really plot out, layout and draw a good amount of pages and take the time to put a good polish on it all. Then release the pages on say a once a week schedule. Then while releasing finishes pages you can take more time on new pages and always have a backlog of comics to release. This also would eliminate the need for guest comics too.