»  Review - Rumf Adventures

Introduction
Rumf adventures is a comic that very closely resembles something you'd find when you open up the newspaper to the comic section. It follows the adventures of Rumfus, servant/ detective/ one-man-army of the king of the forest. Throughout the tale, Rumfus can be found defeating rebel armies, tracking down missing persons, acting semi-clueless at times, and being an all around butt-kicker.

The Positive Aspects
Rumf Adventures is one of the only comics on SmackJeeves that truly pulls off the Newspaper style of comics almost to perfection. It has the style of an old 1920s silent cartoon and as such I found myself reading it listening to jangly piano music and YouTubing "Steam Boat Willie." A really great aspect of this comic is just that. If a comic can make you want to listen to a certain type of music or do something you don't usually do, it is really pulling out past its role of "comic" and having an impact on people's personal lives. It has a very basic plot which makes it possible for Rumf Adventures to keep continuing on and on without getting too involved in a single story. This also helps for new readers to pick up the comic very quickly without having to read through the entire archive. The humor is also a very clean, family oriented sort of humor. Much of it takes place between the narrator and the characters within the story, adding to the 1920s feel of the comic. This sort of narrator-character interaction is found quite commonly in old cartoons and newspaper comics.

The Criticisms
One of the problems that can and very often does arise in long newspaper style comics is that the jokes seem a bit recycled and the comic becomes predictable and people can lose interest in it. That is something that I found to be apparent in reading through Rumf Adventures. Although there's always something new popping up story wise, the narrator-character jokes seem to all start running together. Don't get me wrong, here, there are jokes within the comic, but it could use more of those jokes to make it better. Another thing that really frustrated me was the way some of the characters in the story are drawn, particularly the main character, Rumfus. The way they're drawn is for the most part right; however, the ears take the character and throw him all off visually. Now, I understand this is the style of the art, but it's just something that really needs addressing for the comic's sake. Other than the few issues such as that, the art is spot on for the style it is portraying.

The Conclusion
I can't stress enough at how much I like a good newspaper comic. There's something about them that just brings you back to a time before you were ever born. Comics like Rumf Adventures are the types of comics that you can really enjoy for their uniqueness. In today's fancy, CG driven comic world it's good to go back and look at the roots of the industry. I really recommend this to people because it's one of those comics that you can both enjoy and learn some basic things that might help your own comic.

- Vitotamito