Octopus Pie

I think I am in the proper age group for this comic. It’s about a girl trying to make it after college working in an organic grocery store when her boyfriend breaks up with her and her mom invites one of her pre-k friends to move into her apartment with her. Ning is very tight wound and thinks she is alone in the world and better than everybody around her. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ringling the whole time I was reading this. The organic grocery store just reminded me of Whole Foods which most of my friends are obsessed with. And Ning’s hippie-ish roommate remninded me too much of a lot of girls in art school. She seemed like a useless stoner but as it turned out she had a good business going and couldn’t be happier because she could smoke all day and still had a way of making money. Ning was always mad though; even when her roommate introduced her to guys she still didn’t want to like them just because her roommate was a friend with. Everything seemed to be going downhill for Ning, the turning point was when she threw her invented bike into the river and tried being a different person from then on.

The illustration style was very simple, which was suiting for the comic. There were not superheroes and nothing supernatural happened, this is simply a story of two girls living together in a Brooklyn apartment. It stayed consistent throughout, there were no panels with extreme detail, all were very simple especially the characters. It was interesting how it looked like a printed comic when it is strictly an online comic. First of all it was black and white, I was hoping that it would be color just because it is online and it doesn’t cost more to print color because there is no printing. But even with the black and white there was a papery grain. A lot of the grays had texture or hatch marks that resembled cheap paper. It is partly done like that to create depth in the images, but it looked very much like paper. It seems they are trying to fool the reader in thinking they are reading an online comic and are trying to give them the warm feel and texture of printed comics.