Review: Moby: Back From The Deep
In 1851, Herman Melville published an account of a white whale that rampaged through the high seas. The beast, known as Moby Dick, destroyed numerous boats and cost many sailors their lives. The end of Melville’s account saw Moby Dick disappearing into the ocean.
Today, the whale is back.
Moby Dick: Back from the Deep tells the story of the legendary white whale reappearing in modern times and wreaking havoc on the waterways near an unsuspecting beachfront community.
Moby Dick is a new webcomic, so new it’s only 27 pages long. You would expect a webcomic called Moby Dick that references the book Moby Dick to either be a sequel to the classic book, or make a story of the Ahab and his Whale metaphor like Star Trek 2. And Star Trek 6. And Star Trek First Contact. Star Trek likes Moby Dick. Moby: Back From The Deep has another fish in mind, though.
The story starts with a young girl, Susan Weatherby, going out into the water alone after a party involving lots of alcohol and getting killed by the sea creature. There are no witnesses, and the death is initially considered to be a boating accident.
We then meet the two characters most involved with this sea creature situation, the mayor of a small town and the chief of police for said town. The more protagonisty one thinks the death of the girl is a big deal and should be investigated thoroughly, but for political reasons the other one kind of wants to sandbag it quietly.
This would be the end of it, until the sea monster kills another person, a boy named Alex Gardener, and that’s all there is so far.
So, yeah, Moby Dick: Back From The Deep is pretty much just a blatant rip off of Jaws (having their Alex also be named Alex is honestly risible), except it has a whale, so it’s actually a rip-off of the 1977 Jaws clone Orca: The Killer Whale.
But there are other differences between Back From The Deep and Jaws! Back From The Deep
1. While Jaws very famously didn’t show the shark late in the movie, Back From The Deep has already blown its whale load within the first 25 issues.
2. Vaughn and Brody have switched roles, so that the mayor is the good guy.
3.
Back from the Deep has a shitload of completely pointless narration. Literally every single narration box could be removed from the prologue and it’d be vastly improved because they don’t add anything, Katherine makes a joke about narrating too much and then continues narrating. I don’t care about the full backstory of Girl Who Gets Eaten By A Whale. Chrissie Watkins didn’t get an elaborate backstory. We didn’t need it. It’s only purpose is maybe to try and trick us into not noticing that Back From The Deep is a nearly beat-for-beat ripoff of one of the most famous horror movies of all time, and less than 20 pages into it you launched a kickstarter for a book.
Normally I try not to be super negative or harsh on small creators, because I want them to improve and keep creating and not give up. I don’t in this case, fuck you for trying to get me to shill this cynical soulless garbage.
Stop making this comic, Matt Schorr. Go sit in the corner, think about what you’ve done, and write your own story. And then edit out the useless narration.
Moby: Back From The Deep gets 0/5 and shouldn’t exist
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