As a part of my website redesign, I’ll be moving my SPACE CHUCK chapters over to the website proper. I started making this comic in 2018, po
I have recently discovered this abandoned webcomic. Yes, I know, yet another one. But as far as I can tell, this time the author didn't die (see Lovecraft is Missing), but simply moved on to doing something else.
TL;DR: go read it if "comical Star Trek", as the author describes it himself, speaks to you. It's got some interesting ideas, but it feels "incomplete" to me.
Longer version below:
I truly admire creative people, and envy them quite a fair bit. So it's never easy when I want to share something someone else created, but at the same time I have to be critical to manage the reader's expectations.
I enjoyed reading Space Chuck and I wish that it had continued. I like the drawing style which is clean and to the point. I like the many cool ideas and concepts distilled throughout. I like the writing, which I find to be interesting, with one major caveat however: it feels like the author regularly had an idea for a scene, wrote around it, but then left it unfinished / unresolved. This is especially true in the older strips (e.g., Chapter 8 or Chapter 10). That's honestly a shame and it really contributes to lessening the impact of anything happening. The holes between strips are so big and devoid of any explanation, that it feels almost like they could belong to different stories.
Nevertheless, I really love the background stuff, for instance humanity's struggle, its relations to the other races of the galaxy, its efforts to expand and finds it place in the universe. Or the place of hybrids individuals in society. Or the role of the forward fleet. Or the multiple uses of the mysterious "element", ...
But you have to piece these things together from the strips, because they are always in the background and never really explained properly. And the few "shameless exposition" strips (their actual name!) don't do much to help with the impression that the author had a lot of great ideas for his universe but didn't know how to introduce them naturally in the narration.
Again, I really don't like to criticize an author/artist's work, especially when it's available for free on the internet. After all, what we perceive as quality is a highly subjective thing and something that I will dislike might not register at all with another reader. And conversely.
And on top of that, I genuinely enjoyed this webcomic and I would have liked to read more of it. I think it has a lot going for it. If nothing else, it will really have made me thought about the author's universe and story and I have 200 questions I would like to ask him.
So if you like sci-fi and are not too put out by relatively disjointed story telling and an unfinished piece of work, I'd highly encourage you to check it out. It's pretty cool!
