Posted in: Comics, Digital | Tagged: comics green smile, tapastic, web comics

Tapastic: Green Smile Gets Us All Smiling

Published Mon, 02 Sep 2013 10:00:47 -0500

Louis Falcetti writes for Bleeding Cool;

As I delve deeper and deeper into the world of web I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of it. I'm beginning to see just how different webcomics are from the old paper and staples variety. Even though traditional comic books are a form of serial story telling, with webcomics it becomes even more apparent, as a chapter will only be one or two small scenes. That actually didn't take as long to get used to it as I thought it would, especially with a comic that already has 100+ chapters like Green Smile from Korean artist Chu Kwon.

Green Smile is a comic that fuses a variety of different story telling elements together to form an environmentalist fable about a baby harp seal named "Umbi" and a polar bear named "Eco". It's an adventure tale but it's also a comedy but it's also a drama, the genre blender of the 21^st century creative mind is one of the niceties of modern living.

One of the first realizations I had while reading Green Smile (after "harp seals are so cute!) was that I didn't care whether or not the art was done with ink and paper or digitally. That's a big one for me since I've tried my best to be an angry old man whenever it comes to anything modern that I can't afford, I mean, understand. (I mean afford, you should've heard my rants about how silly hi-definition is until my parents bought me a blu-ray player for Christmas one year). So as I gazed over a beautiful page of art I thought "I wonder if these colors were painted on or digital?" and then I realized, "I don't care, this is just beautiful."

The comic follows Umbi who loses her mother early on and ends up coming across Eco the bear. The story begins however with the Sri Lankan tsunami of 2004 and an UN led environmentalist think tank that's created in Korea afterwards to try to hone in on how animals can predict earthquakes. And while most of the time the audience is treated to the fun back and forth goings on of seal and bear there's also breaks in between for environmental facts, I'd say "fun facts" but sometimes they're about global warming, which isn't fun, unless you're psychotic. But some of the facts are fun! Like about narwhals! Except even then you learn that Vikings used to kill them and pretend the horns were unicorn horns to sell.
Green Smile is like a much cuter version of Brian Wood's The Massive, but don't let the cuteness lull you into a false feeling of grown up superiority because the ugliness of man (hu-man, not man-man) will come up and break the frozen frivolity like green house gases breaking a continental ice shelf.

I'm still pretty early on in my read but just looking over the chapter names and seeing the thumbnails for each is a pretty good indication that this story has got legs, well, at least paws. Homeward Bound meets Encounters at the End of the World, but the other end of the world. Kwon can do adorable just as well as horrible, it's a marvel to behold, the way he can play with a whole range of feelings and ideas and communicate them in a simple, disarming way. Green Smile is another gold star on the wall chart of excellence for Tapastic, do yourself a favor and get reading, you'll not only be entertained, delighted, saddened and enraged, you'll also be educated, like that fact I told you before about narwhals. You're now a little smarter than when you started reading this. You're welcome.