Thanks to the K6BD creator re-tweeting a tweet talking about it, I've been reading Hitmen for Destiny for the past... five or so hours, and it is legitimately one of the weirdest things I have ever read, possibly even weirder than Homestuck. It's... ugly, quite frankly, childishly drawn, but the color choices and layouts... work? Somehow? I'm not enough of an artist to be able to break down why, but it does. I'm also really impressed by the storytelling, because at first it seemed extremely random and mostly a vehicle for lolrandom Wacky Shenanigans and the artist to show off the designs and overelaborate descriptions of the monsters he's made up and draw lots of cartoonishly, childishly gratuitous violence... but the pacing flows so well it kept me interested enough to keep clicking the next page button. Turns out it's not lolrandom Wacky Shenanigans - the initial setup is followed through step by winding step. I'm... still not entirely sure if I like it, even though I'm way out on page 452, but it's made me laugh out loud and I'm super fascinated by it. It's living up to the description I saw in the twitter thread and used for the title, and is so cheerfully, unselfconsciously unconventional that I can't help but be charmed by it despite the cartoonishly gratuitous violence. If you've read it, or are reading it or start reading it, please join me in puzzling over what the actual fuck this webcomic is. I'm still not sure, tbh, but I'm having fun!
So I finished the comic this afternoon and HEY IT'S REALLY FUCKING GOOD, ACTUALLY In retrospect it puts me in mind of an artsy European dark comedy film of some sort (I have a feeling my mind is reaching for one in specific but I'll be damned if I can remember what) - the flavor of the over-the-top slapstick violence, the seeming naïvety that's actually a mix of subtle wry humor, narrative sophistication, and INCREDIBLE weirdness... idk! It's fantastic, though! On a purely meta level, what I really love about it is that SO DAMN WEIRD and packs all the weirdness into a well-paced narrative that doesn't meander or endlessly sidetrack. Like. I love Homestuck, and I love Homestuck's weirdness, but it's also Plot Tumor Central and that ultimately hurt it very badly as a story. This? This is contained. This delivers on what it promises. It wraps up in a really satisfying way without strangling the life out of the story to wrap things up. It's also funny as fuck. I snickered to myself a few times but there was one page - page 400 - that had me burst out laughing and I laughed for about a minute solid, and the joke wouldn't have worked without the setup of the previous 399 pages. It was awesome. I wrote this about it on my tumblr: "... that story is about how good intentions can go badly awry, the importance of having friends who hold you accountable, the power of both stubborn and kind & gentle young women, and how destiny is, ultimately, complete bullshit. "
