Guest Article - Rice Boy By The POWCG

This week the POWCG somehow confused a Tweet to him about not being able to tell good comics from the bad with a request from him to review Rice Boy and as artist negotiations (read: hey, I will work for 2 days and then quit) are eating my time, I present this as a filler.

My 300^th Twitter said I was done. No more anger, no more videos, I could finally retire. Then I got the call back into action. Koltreg, that son of a bitch, managed to track me down. As of last week, I was peacefully living in a southern Atlantic fishing village under the name of Mako Hooker. Most of my day was out at sea, catching my dinner. It wasn’t much, but it was peaceful, and nobody there could tell a Sonichu from a Dominic Deegan. I finally knew what inner peace was.

Then again, my 301^st Tweet was “Lol. Gonna retire to a South Atlantic Fishing village under the Mako Hooker. Peace, y’all.”

My 302^nd Tweet was a picture of the natives I uploaded using the laptop which I brought, with “Man, this South Atlantic Village kicks ass. I hope some jackass doesn’t rope me in to do a webcomic review.” I brought the laptop, so I could continue to post on the Something Awful forums. After all, those things cost ten bucks.

That’s when he walked in. I was on my boat, casting the first net of the day. The sun beat down harshly on my bronzed muscled skin, but I didn’t care. I marked a little note in a book I kept. Thirty. Thirty clear, beautiful days in a row. I stared out to the horizon and saw a small island, the same one I see every day. I never go past it, but today I wondered…

”Enjoying the view?” I heard a familiar voice say behind me.

“I was.” I said, grumbling at the figure behind me.

“It’s been a long time. I haven’t heard from you.”
”Well, I was kinda living in a South Atlantic fishing village under the alias Mako Hooker.”
”Yes, you mentioned it several times on Twitter. And Facebook. ”
I sighed. “You found me. Want to take off that fedora and trenchcoat? It’s like 98 degrees.”
”No, I enjoy the hypothermia.” He was strange like that.

“What comic?”

“Rice Boy.”
”Heh. You really expect that, don’t you? Not even in a million years.”
”And in return, you can come back to civilization. Maybe catch up on Ctrl+Alt+Del?”
”I brought my laptop.”
”Perfect, you can do it here. On a rainy day.”

“Fat chance. Tomorrow will mark 31 days of sunshine. Go find another patsy.”

The next day was a torrential downpour. The worst I’d seen in a while. Not even the worst Nor’Easter compared. None of my usual wifi hotspots worked, and I think one of the local children ate my laptop.

Rice Boy is a story set in the ninth century of the Red Age of Overside. It stars Rice Boy, who is chosen as the fulfiller of the prophecy to, YOU GUESSED IT, save the world.

Who is Rice Boy? A man made of nothing but rice? A ridiculous Chinese Stereotype? Possibly a guy who races ricers?

Rice Boy is “a little fellow with no arms or legs who lives in the Matchwoods. All he can do is grow plants and watch sunsets and listen to stories, but he's gone on his way to maybe repair the world" Um… Yeah, I’ve seen comics pull things out of their ass before, but this one takes the cake.

Everyone will say this comic is so awesome, especially on the Something Awful Forums. We’re only ironically liking it, like we ironically hate Ctrl-Alt-Del. And here I am to slaughter the sacred cow. It sucks. It lacks coherence, background, and everything thrown in feels like the writer, Evan Dahm did it to say, “HEY GUYS LOOK HOW WACKY I AM!!”

So, the comic starts of with a robot called “The One Electronic” (TOE. LOL it spells toe! See how wacky it is?) and a fat orange guy that ends up dying in the next few chapters looking for someone to fulfill this mysterious prophecy, that we never really feel the weight of. The world seemed just fine, thank you Robot Man. Now fuck off, I got a bunch of shit to do (watch sunsets, listen to stories) that wasn’t explicitly stated in the comic, so we have to go by the author’s word. Speaking of which, you might think that the images T-O-E’s screen mean something, but they don’t. (They’re from old black and white TV shows; observe my indieness!)

So, T-O-E tells Rice Boy all this shit while Orange Fatty fucks off and dies. No good sir, don’t let us get attached to him or anything, like we did with Darth McManus (Ethan and Lilah’s baby, hello?). Yeah, just kill him off to show his desperation. Maybe if the Rice Boy universe had LiveJournal, he wouldn’t be in this mess. So Rice Boy, initially doubting that he is The Fulfliller, sets out to go some wood. Then another fat orange thing, Gerund (It’s a language thing, aren’t I so smart?), hops onto his boat. Like, out of nowhere.

I’ll be saying those four words a lot this review.

Gerund is going to slay the Bleach Beast, in possibly the bluntest conversation ever:
”I guess I will tell you somethings. The monster ate my brother, and ran off. I don’t like killing things, but I love my brother, so I guess I have to.”
”That is a super sad story. Killing monsters is probably a hard thing to do.”
”Maybe, but I have an axe to help” says Gerund pulling up an axe. Like, out of nowhere. “I think is a magic axe.”

“I guess”? “I think”? What is this guy, an Animal Crossing character? I think?

So they go into the woods, talk to an asshole Cyclops, then a tree walks in and helps Rie Boy and Gerund get to their next plot point.

In the meantime, an assassin named Golgo is sent by a frog king Spatch, son of the previous candidate to fulfill the prophecy, to kill Rice Boy and TOE. Let me restate that: A fucking frog sends a black thing that fucks its sister, named after a Japanese manga series (gamers, weaboos, lend me your viewership!) to kill Robot Rorschach and a quadruple amputee.

One more time: A fucking frog sends a black thing that fucks its sister, named after a Japanese manga series (gamers, weaboos, lend me your viewership!) to kill Robot Rorschach and a quadruple amputee.

Rice Boy, ladies and motherfucking gentlemen.

Right, so TOE dies, and Golgo scares off his assistant Dolly in a drunken rage. It walks off into the forest, and uses its GPS boots to find TOE. Luckily, she finds the body in time to bring him to a shaman. His brother or something, invalidating his name, The ONE Electronic, comes to take him away on a cube horse.

You know what? I’m not gonna bother relating all this crap to you, because the second something’s introduced, it’s disregarded, like it’s part of its own world or something, and all this shit is common place, like A GIANT KKK MEMBER CUTTING OFF HIS HAND TO GIVE ROBOMAN PASSAGE INTO A PLACE WHERE YOU CAN SEE PEOPLE’S MEMORIES.

Although we do find out that Rice Boy comes from A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO REPRODUCE AND COMMUNICATE BY CUTTING OFF THEIR HEADS…

Like, out of nowhere.

So a few hundred strips later, the machine fight off some purple things and the frog men, so Rice Boy can go fulfill the prophecy. BUT WAIT! Turns out The One Electronic was the fulfiller all along! JUST… FUCKING… DANDY! So the words of Ridrom have been fulfilled, and Rice Boy wakes up in his house as if NOTHING HAPPENED.

Seriously, like, out of nowhere. At least it’s competently drawn whatthefuck.

The comic is basically Prog Rock without the wicked solos: fucked up imagery, incomprehensible bullshit, and terrible writing all ham fisted in the name of symbolism. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. And Rice Boy is one cigar I’d like to stamp out and kick in the sewers.