Precocious Guest Review

A quickly rising webcomic gets reviewed

Christopher J. Paulsen's Precocious is a comic about four young prodigies who can barely stand each other, let alone anyone else.

What can I say about this comic? To be honest, I thought I would like it more than I did. Everything about it screams Saturday morning cartoon. It's spaced into longform episode plots, it's dialogue heavy, it's actually fairly difficult to visualize in strip form. The author may claim to be influenced by Calvin and Hobbes, but Precocious draws many more similarities to Recess, Ed, Edd and Eddy, or Rugrats.

All said and done, the drawing skill is very high. For proudly being a daily strip, I understand that the artist probably doesn't have much time to devote to his craft, which makes it impressive in that right.
Paulsen details the frames very nicely, filling, but not excessive.

The line work is very clean, and the overall design and balance is expert. On a scale of artist to author, Paulsen lies heavily on the visual side. Not to say that his ability to punch out plot ideas and dialogue isn't impressive, but he's obviously working on quantity over quality. I know that side all too well, but as far as professional, literary writers go, Paulsen is a rookie. The main art-related problem I have is that each character has the exact same form. The artist could stand to work on some variety to help his characters stand out. I often can't tell which is which, and when they're referred to, I have no idea who they're talking about.

Much of what I've learned about the characters and whatever status they're constantly eluding to, I had to pick up from the character bios. To be quite honest, I have no idea who ANY of the characters are. I can kind of tell the boys apart from the girls, but I'm not sure how they're different from each other. One's pretty bitchy, another is maybe ditzy, but they're all a little evil. They are also all the exact same height, body shape, have similar hair and ears and snouts, and use all the same words. There's not really any telling them apart, which brings me back to my original comment, were this a TV show, they'd have different voice actors and would at least be identifiable in that respect. You may call me lazy for not taking the time to study the characters, but I really shouldn't need to. Each character needs to be eye catching in a certain way, and with Paulsen's creations, they just aren't.