THE DAILY CHUM

    Yarn is a webcomic put out by Serenity Tales, which is a site that gathers together comics about Serenity/Firefly (the show/movie that Captain Mal is about).  Serenity Tales just put new comics up and Yarn caught my eye immediately.  It turned out to be about exactly what I’d hoped it was: knitting.  Yarn is distinctive because the artist actually depicted knitting realistically, unlike many comic knitters who seem to hold their needles like a ‘V’.  Be warned that the comic is set after Serenity and makes much more sense if you have seen the movie.   To avoid any spoilers, my review is after the break.

    Yarn is set after Serenity, and as such focuses on the fallout of the events in Serenity, particularly on the one character in the series who knits: Ma Cobb.  That’s right, Jayne’s Mom.

The writing is fairly good; there are certainly moments where the author seems to be channeling Joss, and then there is the rest.  The writing isn’t bad, it’s in a passive-aggressive type of deadly situation and her voice wavers between the extreme of “I will die before I tell them where my son is” and thinking nicer thoughts about the “doctors”.  The wavering makes sense when you consider that the Alliance could read her thoughts, but that might be over analyzing things.

I’m not sure that this characterization of Ma Cobb fits into the ‘verse, but I do think that she fits as a knitter.  She has the obsessive focus that we all do at times, and I think she shows understanding about what we as knitters do, we make numerous little actions and eventually they build up into something much bigger.

I really enjoyed the art in Yarn.  The lines are mostly heavy (in a good way), stylized, and simple, but you can tell who everyone is.  I thought the whole thing was very well executed, and, as I said earlier, I love that Ma Cobb knits fairly realistically.

The use of color deserves a special mention because the comic uses mainly black, white, and orange, to fantastic effect.  The orange really pops out at you, and I honestly didn’t even notice that there wasn’t more color until the second time through.

I would recommend this comic, the art and writing are both good, and it’s a comic about knitting, there are few enough comics with knitting, much less about it.  I give it eight out of ten government conspiracies.

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