Precocious Guest Review 2.0

A Quickly Rising Webcomic Gets Reviewed

When I first heard of Christopher Paulsen's webcomic Precocious, it sounded like something I would enjoy. Well drawn, updated daily, longform plotlines but daily punchlines. This strip has popped up on the majority of the webcomic sites, garnering its share of amiable critiques.

Finally getting the chance to sit down and go through the site, I found that most of the hype was true, with one little problem: I didn't like it.

For the most part, the writing is clear, humorous, and at times the jokes were chuckle-worty, if not laugh-out-loud funny. The art is consistent, penmanship is good, proportions never stray, and each panel is filled with enough detail to really show off Paulsen's sense of design and space without ever feeling cluttered. By all purposes, it should be a very enjoyable comic, but there was something missing.

The biggest drawback for me was the characters. Not individually so much as just the aggregate design of the strip. All of the children look basically the same. Same sized body, same head, same eyes, same ears. The strips weren't really hitting home with me half the time because I couldn't tell the characters apart. Not only did they look the same, but they all had sort of random, generic names that don't really fit the characters well enough for me to tie them to the personality, so whenever one is mentioned, I keep having to refer back to the character page to actually understand the joke.

Aside from that, the premise is fairly weak. It's a group of child geniuses who exist solely in a world of child geniuses, so, not only do the characters mesh together, but their novelty runs thin. And they all seem to be the same type of geniuses, that is, they know big, adult words, but don't seem to have any special skills otherwise. This is prevalent in the first major plotline, where they have a water balloon fight. They spend the whole stretch of 60 strips bickering over the rules, but you never really see any devious strategizing, culminating in a logical, not very surprising outcome.

So while I applaud Paulsen's commitment, energy, and consistency, I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. Is this the best he has to offer? My hopeful answer is '"no,'" but I have a feeling it will be some time before we see something of real quality from his little corner of the web.

Charlie Thatcher is an art and animation instructor for preteen students, as well as a freelance comic and screenwriter.

To read the original, longer version of this review, read Precocious Guest Reviews 1.0