Vartijat – Guardians

I think I’m due for a new post so.. here comes.

This month, I’ll examine and dissect a finnmanga for you. So, what the heck is a “finnmanga”? It’s basically a finnish sarjakuva-comic that is either traced from some famous anime like Gundam or Ginga(REALLY popular here) or imitated pathetically from the eastern style. Here is an artist’s interpretation of the event:

Based on true events

SO! Onward! This 130-page monster was alot of work to dissect. But I did it.

kawaiidesunipponnekoplllfffrrrrtttttttt.. perkele.

First notable idiocy would be that this comic is made in Finland by finnish people for finnish people(this could never be good enough for a big comic country like Japan) but it is read from left to right contrary to the norm of right to left. No reason. Just “because”.

The cover is obviously made on a regular printer-style paper, with shitty, half-dead markers, really fast and photoshopped absolutely horribly to fit. It looks terrible. It’s like no one knew what they were doing. The artist apparently thought A4 would be the exact same shape when shrunk into a kiosk-pocket-book, but the truth was revealed too late. It also seems like they have a habit of not knowing how to place stuff at all, in any level, just look at this page that introduces a new chapter!

This is done by "professionals"

Oh, well let’s get known to the 3 most important characters first

lady: Aino boy: Seiya fox: Kerri

So the plot i.. wait.. WAITAMINUTE WHAT IS THIS!?

CYCLOPS!

What happened to that boy! And oh god the “fox” is even worse!

yiff?

Did she draw a fox while looking at a horse? Or llama? Llamabear? Oh god.. this is starting well, isn’t this..

So, the plot is that Seiya comes from Japan to Finland, meets a fox called Kerri and it is revealed to him that he is a part of an ancient guardian family and he swallows it right away and starts to train to be a guardian. Without guestion. GRRRREAT SCRIPT BY GOLLY Heikki Valkama must be a genious!

If the script isn’t so.. well-thought or special, the art isn’t either. A quite great finnish “manga” artist refused it because she wasn’t stupid and young enough to work with such a script in so little time and so little money, so Elli Puukangas took the job and is now a wreck of a human being.

The comic starts with dramatic scenes from the past.. or future. Oooh mystical~

I killed Kerri

..and this image confuses me, because I think that is supposed to be a night-sky with glowy stars and canine-spirit-thingy’s but the leaves of the bush they come from is.. uh, well I demostrated it with a brief drawing

dark bush VS dark sky see what I mean?

This is because she has no proper technique to do it look like the leaves are going towards the sky, or she doesn’t have a white pen/paint or she suddenly wanted to make the character stare at a bush that has bunch of white dots and animal spirits on it. Though I’d look at such a sight too but.. duh? bwuh?

Also, she is very poor at designing working pendants. I can imagine how this gets stuck in every goddamn thing.

Who else is seeing a dragon with a paw here and not a swan and a wing?

Also, daymn that ornament makes no sense. She tried to go for “kalevala”-type of ornaments but that’s just random bullshit thrown together to make it look cool.

Okay, let’s get on with the chapter o.. AAAGH WHAT IS THAT HIDEOUS THING!

derp durp gubble gomp

Why is even the toning completely off!??! I can’t belive we’re only on the page 5 of this thing..

The first pages are quite confusing

Seiya comes to Finland and is in a terminal

Shiny floor

wait. there's a car? He's outside after all? And my GOD is that an ugly car.

See that airplane on the first square and the sure, experienced and straight movement-lines on it? Look at it real close because after that great plane, you’ll never see anything like it in this whole sarjakuva.. er, I mean finnmanga.

In fact, what you’ll see is complete doodly, shaky and fast-done scribbles

*this is where she did Seiya's hair, but accidently drew the lines of the dead wolf over it and tried to camouflage it as grass instead

It is clear she is inexperienced as an artist(I did my first comic in very scribbly style and didn’t even intend to publish it, but then went and printed 100 as a practise) but the greedy finnish publishers are grasping to any straws to fill the gap that is Finland’s craving for home-made “manga”.

She is supposed to draw.. I think 3 parts of these 130-page comics but.. she has BAD inconsistency problems.

First they looked like this.. then this.. and then back like this because it's easier

Many other critics have noticed this particular inconsistency-problem with these lizard-people but it extends into some more fatal and just plain embarracing and newbie-like mistakes.

See how the wound is first on the left knee, then on the right one, then on the right calf and then.. on his ankle.

I can understand drawing a scar on an eye on the wrong side once, but.. this wound switched places 4 times! How can you not pay enough attention to a thing like that? Every time I get some minor 5-page changes on my characters, I put a sticky on the wall of my workplace because I know I have a bad memory, but this.. is just amazing.

Even the number of fingers is inconsistent

Also, for a person who lives in Finland.. she doesn’t have a clue how to draw her own home country

England? New Zealand? Norway? ..what? Finland? DO A GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH YOU LAZY BUM!

Let’s leave the art for a minute here, and concentrate on the shitty, shallow and cookie-cutter script. What most bothers me in the script is not how bland it is, but how it skips all the important and interesting stuff, and tries to make up to it with.. um.. okay, it doesn’t even try to make up for it.

Like how the main character – Seiya grows and learns to fit the place of the guardian of the forest. Those are briefly skipped with two summarizing pages.. and the other one is not even a whole page!

This is how he grew up to be a guardian

..and this too

It’s like “Nothing to see here! Now back to the bland and boring stuff.” I mean, there seems to be some kind of magic and learning in it, but he only once in the whole comic shows what he has learned(”Trolls like this musrhoom, huh?”) and there is.. no magic shown in the whole comic. Maybe the sparkles fron Aino’s hand in the first frame are just sparkles from something or maybe Aino’s hand got drunk.

At least they go trough(VERY BRIEFLY and he already knows how to) learning archery.. which brings us back to the horrendous art and a prime example of why you should do research before you draw something you have never done yourself.

Your aim is going to be FUCKED if you don't guide it with your finger.. if it even flies anywhere with a crappy, newbie pose like that

And.. WHAT he's not even touching the damn string!

Oh good god the fail! I suspect she drew the string first, then realised she doesn’t have a white pen so she can draw his fingers going over the string and.. disaster! Also, what’s with that friggin’ badly scribbled “OMMMMMMMM”?

Ommmm

Oh, and look now. The bad archery made Seiya into a cyclops again

Help mom! It's happening again!

Also; elf ear wtf? Maybe she needs to put some half-tone in it to save the situation:

THEY MAKE IT ALL BETTER

I wonder why they also put some of the text by hand and some by computer, like.. completely randomly

GRRRrrRRRRrrrRRRRrrrRRrrrr

As shitty as this trainwreck is, most of the reviews I have seen are applauding the fight- and action scenes, but it must be because they HAD to say SOMETHING positive about this. Just look for yourself and tell me if you know what is happening. It would be a good sign if someone who doesn’t know the context would understand what is happening.. other than lot of movement

two separate pages.. but they could be happening right after other. Also lol arm.

To me it just looks like a bunch of obscuring lines(easy to do!) and batman-sound effects thrown together.

BAM!

BIFF!

MUNTTER-SLAPP!

..yes, I read muntter-slapp as a sound effect once. It was awesome.

Now I have to show you my favourite thing from this comic, and it is The Buckit

Sun hat? Weird plate? Some sort of musical instrument? Buckit??

Ahahaha, I just love The Buckit.

It is also to be noted that she had really hard time meeting the deadline and did about 40 pages really fast and with a help of two friends. I have heard that this shows as a decline in the quality but.. I see no decline to be honest. The last page is as shitty as every other page, give it a look:

"Stop pooping on my hand, Squawky."

I think that sums this atrocity pretty well.

Also, I just decided: this will be a finnmanga-month, my friend promised me one finnmanga, and.. let me tell you a secret now. I am stingy. Goddamn stingy. And I recognise a bad comic from 5 feet away, so I am not going to waste any money on it. I even bough this one second-hand and good I did! This was a good laugh but not worth any money.

I’ll make the next entry as soon as I meet my friend, get lost in a drunken haze into the depths of Finland’s(mountain-less) woods, recover from hangover, and finally get the finnmanga handed to me for closer, trought inspection and dissection and make the next post.

Untill then. See ya.

SHUPP!

Tags: bad comic, Elli Puukangas, finnmanga, Heikki Valkama, redline, Vartijat