HOUSD Review

A typical example of THE RANDOM at HOUSD

If there's one thing I can say about HOUSD, it's that I've never seen a comic take some many completely random twists and turns in my entire life. Now, I've heard rumors that the folk over at Goats are infamous for bizarre plot twists, but never having read Goats myself, I'm not really able to compare the two. All I can say is this: HOUSD is random. And really, that's the genius of this strip. One of the characters in the strip is the creator of the comic, Ali Graham, and another character in the strip is a monkey, Mr. Chimpy, who supposed writes the comic. So this gives the strip a somewhat self-referential feel without technically breaking the fourth wall, as the creators are not seen as outside forces that come in on occasion to comment on the work, but more as the directors of a play who also end up acting in the play at the same time. There's layers of cyclical meta-humor that can be analyzed from this, but that's not my point.

My point is, it's entirely plausible to believe that the strip is in all reality written by Mr. Chimpy. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the real Ali Graham keeps a wise-cracking monkey in his house who bangs furiously at his monkey keyboard with his little monkey fingers. Take for example this recent storyline:

1. Jess and Craig receive a letter inviting them to a school reunion...
2. Which leads to an imagined flashback which turns out to be just their house burning down...
3. Which leads us to discover that the house was actually burned down by Donnie Darko and his demonic bunny rabbit friend...
4. Which leads to Craig accidentally killing Superman while attempting to exact revenge on Donnie Darko...
5. Which leads to Craig and Cubert chasing Donnie Darko and Frank the demon rabbit after they flee to Mexico, where they both get revenge on each other through tequila...
6. While meanwhile, Jess finds Superman in a dumpster with no memory and starts dating him...
7. Which leads Craig to believe that Superman has come back as a zombie to exact revenge on Craig for killing him, forcing him to cause Superman to regain his memory...
8. Which results in Jess going into a psychopathic rage, because now she has no date for the reunion.

Like I said, random. I mean, over the course of the archives we've seen Harley Quinn team up with Samuel L. Jackson, Moby Dick fight a T-rex, and the quest to find a Slogan for Cheesios, the breakfast cereal made entirely of cheese. I honestly don't see how anyone could believe that this comic ISN'T written by a monkey, pounding away at random keys.

The thing is... I'm loving it. Quite frankly these completely off the wall twists and turns are the best thing that HOUSD has going for it. Overall, the comic is not terribly spectacular. The art's not bad, but it's certainly nothing to write home about. And many times the punchlines in the individual comics fall short or the mark. Cubert the penguin is supposed to be a show stealer on many occasions, but overall he comes of as... well... kinda boring. Mr. Chimpy is always good for a laugh, but some of that is because he's an anthropomorphic monkey and hey, monkeys are just plain funny. In fact, I'd wager to say it's pretty hard to make a monkey NOT funny.

So in terms of style and execution, HOUSD certainly does not rank among the best. But its stars shine in the storytelling. While it does maintain a connected storyline, the progression is far from linear. The audience is thrown from one tangent to the next in such a jarring fashion that it's a wonder people don't break their teeth on the dashboard at each change. The feeling you get when you're reading through the archives is akin to one of those new rollercoasters. Not the old ones that take you up and down through gritty uphill climbs and stomach churning drops, but one of those new steel rollercoasters which whips you to and fro, up and down, round and round, and basically has its way with you until at least you are released from your restraints and leaves you completely fershnickered. That's what it feels like to read the HOUSD archive. It's a rush.

So give it a look. Maybe it's up your alley, maybe it's not. Maybe you prefer webcomics whose storylines flow more like a well crafted marble sculpture than like a splatter paint drawing. Maybe you prefer completely self-contained randomness ala Penny Arcade instead of a comic which definitely follows a plotline, but a plotline that seems like it was generated from hitting the "random page" button on the Wikipedia about ten times and trying to connect these ten pages together into a coherent storyline.

Then again, maybe you'll enjoy HOUSD.