Spinnerette Issue 9 Hit
Emmanuelle Riker
A tarantula magazine all about the Typhochlaena seladonia! Learn about care tips, advice from other tarantula owners, and other interesting facts about the most stunning and RARE tarantula in the hobby!
A tarantula magazine all about the Caribena versicolor! Sponsored by The Tarantula Collective, learn about care tips, advice from other tarantula owners, and other interesting facts about one of the most stunning tarantulas in the hobby!
A tarantula magazine solely dedicated to the Acanthoscurria geniculata (Brazilian White Knee) tarantula! Sponsored by The Tarantula Collective, you can find great care tips, advice, and interviews from other tarantula owners with experience with the A. geniculata in this issue!
A tarantula magazine solely dedicated to the Aphonopelma chalcodes (Arizona blonde) tarantula! Sponsored by The Tarantula Collective, you can find great care tips, advice, and interviews from other tarantula owners with experience with the A. chalcodes in this issue!
When it comes to more educational/expert info, I am hoping to interview some major tarantula hobbyists and go deeper into popular tarantula topics. As a subscriber, YOU will get to choose (probably through a vote or survey in the future).
The following comic desperately wants to be porn without actually being porn. Contains more fanservice and fetish fuel than any actual sex, usually patterned off of bad harem comedy anime. It may not even have full nudity (at most may contain exposed boobs), but your teacher/parents/coworkers will surely give you some odd glances if they catch you seeing this. View with caution.
You know, Spinnerette used to be better. Make no mistake - it's here on the Bad Webcomics Wiki for a reason. But compared to other comics on this list, Spinnerette was more innocent. It may have started life as a poorly written superhero parody designed to show off the main character in as many sexy positions as possible, but at least it looked like it was having fun.
This isn't the case anymore. Now that the comic's taken a turn towards more dramatic storylines, I've read comments from readers who pine for the early days of Spinnerette, where the stories were lighthearted and the breasts had no dramatic strings attached. But that's exactly the problem. Are you someone who thinks Spinnerette sucks now? Because I have to break it to you, friend - Spinnerette has had problems since day one.
Spinnerette is about Heather, a college student who develops the powers and abilities of a spider after being caught in a copyright-infringing experiment. She also grows four additional arms, but thank God her tits made it out okay. With her new powers, Heather decides to ignore her roommate's advice to go to a hospital and instead becomes a superhero just like her favorite comic book characters. It's a basic premise. Even at the start, it was barely realized - the humor mediocre, the characters one-note, the comic a chore to read. But at least it was cheerful. It wasn't GOOD, but personally I'd rather read about goofy superhero antics than the usual cynical skewering of the genre. It honestly could've been a lot worse.
A while back, Spinnerette's writer "KrazyKrow" decided he wanted to write more serious stories about a six-armed girl who hangs with a werewolf in shorts. This has resulted in formerly flat characters developing new dimensions out of nowhere in an over-the-top manner. There's nothing wrong with characters becoming more complex, even in a comedy, but the way it's executed in Spinnerette leaves a lot to be desired. Combined with melodramatic storylines, Spinnerette has quickly become a downward spiral of bad writing. Though, considering how often the comic uses national stereotypes, readers in Australia must be watching it spin in the other direction.
"Parody" is a word that's thrown around a lot without consideration. It's often used to describe any kind of comedy about a genre, even if it doesn't really try to mock that genre's tropes. This is Spinnerette's comfortable corner, relying on odd meta humor to communicate the premise. This gets us incidents where Heather is given a court order for using a costume that's similar to Venom, or the heroes discussing how big-breasted Super Milf has a costume that's taking a shot at DC. Superhero tropes aren't ridiculed, they're just mentioned.
But really, Spinnerette's meta humor wouldn't be so bad if it had any sense of creativity or wit. Comics have taken potshots at superhero tropes for a long time now, so to hold water, Spinnerette would need to put some inventive spins on the idea. Instead, the comic relies so much on silly real-world references that it falls flat on its ass. For a cheap gag in this universe, Bernie Madoff is a pharoah-themed villain with "pyramid power", and the supervillain named Dr. Universe became evil after reading Ayn Rand. (For me, it was Chesapeake.) This is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff.
And while we're down in this barrel with the fish and monkeys, let's not forget Spinnerette's third main source of humor - national stereotypes. Feel the resounding groan reverberate from your inner being and expel it to the world like the dawning of a annoyed god. We'll talk more about this in the Characters section, but we all know by now that humor based on stereotypes is old hat. It's so old hat that it dated the pot in high school while it was calling the kettle black. It CAN work, but again, it demands a new spin on old ideas, and that's not within Spinnerette's forte.
Now, I do want to be clear about something - just because a piece of fiction is comedic doesn't mean it can't have complex characters. Complex characters in comedy are even better because there's multiple angles to get comedy from. Think about a webcomic like Dr. McNinja. The main character is a ninja of Irish descent who's also a doctor. But beyond that one gag, he wants his family to respect him, he obsesses over shutting down his nemesis King Radical, and he has a kage bunshin no hardon about Batman. The premise of the webcomic is still humorous, but because McNinja is a layered character, Hastings can make more jokes with him AND use him for occasional serious moments. It's a winning combo.
Let me drag you by the hair back to the stereotype issue. Spinnerette's characters are bare-bones and one-dimensional. (At first, but we'll get to that.) Usually what defines them is a broad personality trait and that they are from a certain country. Heather is eager and American. Sahira is serious and Indian. Katt O' Nine Tails is a French masseuse, LE ECLAIR! You get me. Stereotypes are thrown around without rhyme or reason except to grasp for some kind of recognizable gag that the audience can realize. And then when you have Greta Gravity prance around in lederhosen because she's German, only to find out she was actually born in Brazil, you just jump from one gag-reflex to another. It's irresponsible at this rate.
Since these characters aren't parodies of common superhero tropes, that means most of the humor has to hinge on their personalities. Unfortunately, Spinnerette's cardboard people offer about one running gag and not much else. Let's go back to that Dr. McNinja example. Compared to him, what does Spinnerette have to offer? My favorite is Tiger, who insists he not be called "Black Tiger" because everyone assumes his name is Black Tiger because he is a black superhero. Aaaaaaaaaand that character's done, who's next? Well, there's Green Gable, who wears a dress because he's descended from Anne of Green Gables. Also, he's Canadian. You can see how few straws there are to grasp at here.
It's because all of these characters are so flat that Heather's old love interest, Darren, was probably kicked out of the plot due to his grand total of zero interesting qualities. It also serves to aid Heather's contrived relationship with fellow female superhero Mecha Maid. Maybe I shouldn't have expected a minor character like Darren to hold on, but the fact he vanished because nobody could figure out what to do with him, rather than giving him things they could do with him, is just one example of how bad Spinnerette's writing gets.
But why bother to characterize? Since the start, Spinnerette had one clear goal - draw sexy women doing sexy things. It's certainly enough to convince readers to contribute to the comic's Kickstarter. (I wasn't ready for all of those C sounds.) To Krow's credit, though, I think he realized this and decided he didn't want Spinnerette to be known just as a webcomic with sexy superheroes. That's why he's worked to bring more detail to Spinnerette's world, fleshing out the characters and involving them in more complex storylines than ever before.
At first, Spinnerette was mostly about episodic superhero adventures. These were surprisingly boring. Even simple situations can be made better with interesting and/or funny characters, and since Spinnerette didn't have either, it was hard to care what happened. Most of the time, they were really just vehicles for bad meta commentary. But it was a framework to build upon - if the comic stayed the course and just developed its humor while working on better storytelling, all in the name of superhero comedy, Spinnerette might've had a chance.
And then comes Issue #7, where Evil Spinnerette, Heather's nemesis who turned herself into a drider, comes back to town. After tricking Heather and literally using Dungeons and Dragons books to create some evil minions, she kicks Heather's ass. When Heather asks why Drider doesn't just kill her, Drider asks the rhetorical question of why Garry Kasparov wanted to play against Deep Blue. No, put your Wikipedias down, we're not here to debate that. At this point, the comic begins to commit its greatest error: it tries to start being complex.
Soon, characters exhibit more dimensions than ever before, and take part in more serious storylines. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't presented in such a melodramatic, hamfisted manner. It almost feels like a completely different person is writing these stories now, because the execution is so awkward that it's hard to consider this being written by the same guy as before.
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