Webcomics of the Apocalypse: Angels 2200

Sometimes, an author has an awesome idea for a story, but just can't quite execute it....and sometimes both premise and execution suck. Angels 2200 is one of the latter.

Angels 2200 is about of group of rookie space fighter pilots fighting against a nebulous threat in the mildly dystopian future. Oh, and since almost men on the Earth have been killed, they're all teenage girls. Now, at this point, you're probably saying to yourself, "Oh, it's a comedy," and you'd be half-right, I mean, it's clear that parts of it are supposed to be funny, but most strips seem to fall more on the dramatic side of things.

Part of me thinks that the entire premise is just a really elaborate background for "hot" girl-on-girl action, and while that does occasionally happen, it's clearly not the main focus of the book, which is a rather uninspired story about evil government conspiracies, and low-octane battles in space that are even less exciting than I've made them sound.

And the characters, God help me, the characters. Well, the main character is your typical young, fresh-faced innocent about to face the horrors of war, who also happens to have painful phonetically-transcribed French accent. Also, there's Whiskey, the firey red-head from Ireland who exists as part of a contest to create the least original character in all of fiction. There's also the bitch, the ditz, and I'm probably forgetting a few other characters.

Finally, there's the art, well, there are two types of art in this comic, and neither is good. First is your basic anime-inspired art which is used for most scenes, it's not really good, but I've seen worse, I suppose. Then, for some unknowable reason, the space combat scenes are rendered in 3-D, which, again, isn't particularly good, but isn't completely terrible, either.

Ultimately, Angels 2200 is kind of impressive, in a certain way. It seems as if every single aspect of the webcomic hovers between "not good" and "awful", creating a comic that is consisently bad, but not so terrible that it's particularly fun to mock.

(Note: While researching for this review, I learned that there is actually Angels 2200 fanfiction, and, only being mildly suicidal, could not bring myself to look at it. Still, I must give credit to the authors for making a comic that people like enough to write fanfic about. On the other hand, this news does make me question what kind of loving God would allow such a state of affairs to come to pass.)