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A Matter Of Life And Death Review

Written and Drawn by: The Snipster 

So, I’m just going to open up with this. I speed read the entirety of this comic last night solely to review this. I did it for my one buddy because he recommended it and thus I began reading. And....it took a long time reading it before I felt like I wanted to keep reading more than I felt like I had to. So I got a quick look at the progression of the comic in both art and story, which....will definitely make this review come across as harsher to the comic than somebody who has been keeping up with the story for the last little while.

A Matter Of Life And Death is a webcomic whose concept initially started as the creator wanting to make a better storyline for a Yaoi comic than the extremely cliche-ridden ones the genre is riddled with. The main characters that are focused on are the Gods, a group of beings who embody specific concepts and thus have jobs related to those concepts in the world. One unique little twist though, is these gods are not the source of their concept in the world. They are more like....shepherds. So even if some of them disappear, the world does not suddenly lose that part of themselves. 

Our main protagonists are Life and Death, two of the Gods who had a previous relationship and are slowly approaching a point where they may rekindle a romance. And they are honestly cute in their little attempts at flirting and failure to realize flirting, the small tender moments, and even a few more playful moments. The clash of personalities that occurs between them is what makes the comic work for the moments that it does. And that’s a lot of the appeal here, enjoying the characters that are presented and seeing how they interact in different situations.

Unfortunately, here is where I start adding a lot of criticism to this praise. The comic is...a very hard start. While establishing the world is certainly required given the high concept of the comic, the way the information is conveyed is in massive blocks of text at the bottom of comic pages. You will have just seen a few panels of these two boys being cute to each other, and then have to wade through this bundle of text that is necessary to understand the universe of this comic. Its just kills the pacing of the comic, forces this bundle of reading, and feels like such a blunt use of world building where a more organic introduction to these concepts might have worked better. 

To add to this, the comic repeatedly uses flashback with....honestly a similarly blunt approach: with the initial efforts of using grayed out panels and a black border around extended flashbacks. Both concepts which weren’t explained quickly and instead required yet another world building block of text at the end to explain how this works rather than an opening “X years before”. Both of these points improve as the comic goes on, but it definitely requires acknowledgement so as to be open about how harsh the opening...year of content in this comic can be. 

Finally, the art. And....it generally looks exceptionally good. Like, the character models look good, the backgrounds in the more modern pages can be decently exceptional, and the shading can be extremely detailed in ways that really stand out. But that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Again, the first year of content from this comic leaves much to be desired. The comic attempts to do action fight scenes during the first year it was being released and its honestly really bad. It feels less like a fight and more like two floaty bodies smacking each other and occasionally having an injury appear. And the backgrounds for that first year, beyond the occasional splash page, are either basic or non-existent. Thankfully, the creator has realized she isn’t much of an action artist, with more of the recent pages focused on the relationship and the backgrounds have improved by leaps and bounds.

Finally, and I only bring it up because it stands out to me, the lettering on the comic can be absolutely horrid. The word balloons will sometimes be twisted, with the positioning decided so late in the art process that it requires the tail of the balloon be inverted and one pointed at a person speaking, with you hopign that you understand which goes to who before you reach the latter word balloon and suddenly realize you mixed up the dialogue. The worst offense though is when the word balloons are used without any clear way to indicate whose speaking, so the creator decides to simply add their initial in brackets before the contents of the word balloon rather than readjust the panel to clear up any confusion.

"Memento Mori"

Me as Death from A Matter Of Life And Death ♡

Just a costest, I'll improve a lot yet.

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