Mac Hall
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:Infobox Webcomic Mac Hall (debut: November 7 2000) is a webcomic created and drawn by Ian McConville and written by Matt Boyd about a group of college students who are typical slackers. While they sometimes do some actual work for classes, most of the time they just goof off and hang around the campus having fun. The comic takes its name from MacDonald Hall, a dormitory at Bowling Green State University. Later on, the cast moves into a house, where they currently reside. The series seems to have less focus on college life and more focus on the cast's antics afterwards, but it recently has started to return to a college focus.
There is an attention grabbing gag involving Digimon, specifically Digimon porn. Early on, Matt and Ian noted that the top search engine terms that led people to Mac Hall all had to do with Digimon Porn. So the joke was made that in order to boost traffic they would pander to the tastes of those people. As a result, a large number of websites of that persuasion linked to the comic, much to the chagrin and amusement of the authors. This particular gag sticks out, most likely because of its sexual content. However, it does not accurately reflect the bulk of the strip's material.
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Style
The series is done in a style reminiscent of anime. A favored technique of McConville is to draw the line art on paper and color the characters in Adobe Photoshop after scanning. Characters are often highly detailed while backgrounds, painted directly in Photoshop, are often blurry. The series has gone through a handful of changes in its style though. Early episodes had a style to it that did not look similar to anime, but more like western comic strips; backgrounds were also more concrete. Over time, this changed to the anime-like style that has become the norm of the series, as well as the digitally painted backgrounds. The chibi effect that has its origins in anime also became a regular part of the style. The characters in the series have lost their black outlines from time to time, and are now drawn entirely without them. McConville is particularly known for his Adobe Photoshop skills.
Other appearances of characters
A spin-off series called Mac Hall: Inside Mac Games was made in 2001 for the web site Inside Mac Games. This series involved the same characters, but focused on their interest in video games for the Apple Macintosh. The series ran bi-monthly from October 2001 to July 2002. The real-life counterpart to the character Anthony took over writing these comics later on.
The series has often had crossover episodes with the online manga Megatokyo. Ian has drawn a number of guest episodes for Megatokyo, and characters from both series make occasional cameos in each other's comics. Most notably, it was one of Ian and Matt's guest strips for Megatokyo that gave Piro his reputation as a self-degrading artist whose "happy place" involved "sad girls in snow."
Major characters
- Ian McConville - The main character of the series, Ian is based on the artist of the web comic. His trademark look is red ponytailed hair with a backwards baseball cap (sometimes with a cat sitting on the cap) and his sunglasses. He is the most innocent-seeming and upbeat of the characters, though often the most incomprehensible as well. Though not nearly as obsessive a gamer as Micah (see below), he plays computer and video games fairly often. He's known to be terrible at cooking.
- Matt Boyd - A character based on the comic's writer, Matt is an aspiring journalist. Slender of build, with medium-length black hair and a goatee, he often wears a shirt with the Bungie Studios logo on it. He seems sometimes more easily perturbed than the other characters, and occasionally less confident, but has a high regard for education, current events, and journalistic integrity. He seems frustrated fairly often by what he perceives as scientific illiteracy among the general populace. He was known to be taking, and may still be taking, some sort of medication, possibly psychiatric in nature.
- JM - JM has black hair and a goatee somewhat similar to Matt's, but is rather stockier and heavier of build. He wears a shirt with a Superman-like logo on it that has an "SP" instead of an "S" on it, which stands for "SuperPimp". He is the least irascible of the characters - an unflappable young man who seems unsurprised by the less pleasant sides of the world in which he lives, maintaining a gentle stoicism and sense of humor about it. He was responsible for convincing the other characters to move into the house in which they now live.
- Drew - Drew is a cynical computer science major who is "permanently" angry. He is thin, with brown hair that has changed styles several times over the course of the strip, but always has a goatee, glasses, and glowing red eyes. He is dismissive of intellectual arrogance, though he does not always respond to those he considers less bright than himself with good humor. He enjoys pulling pranks on other people.
- Micah Chang - Micah is a usually-cheerful young man who is given to impulsivity at times - such as jumping off a second-story balcony while imitating the famous music video for Fatboy Slim's song Weapon of Choice - and is the most obsessive gamer of the group. He has longish black hair, is at least half-Asian, and usually is portrayed as wearing a mostly-black, Asian-style coat with two white bars on the collar and voluminous sleeves. He started out as a compulsive Everquest player, in which he plays a gnome, but switched to World of Warcraft later on in the strip. His courtship (in a fairly loose sense of the word) and relationship with Helen Richter has been one of the strip's themes for some time.
- Helen Richter - Helen is an architecture student, generally cheerful but with a tendency to be quite sarcastic when annoyed, and is the only major female character of the series. She has long brown hair, a slender build, and is known to be quite physically attractive; she often wears a pink-and-white T-shirt with a deranged-looking smiley face on it. She is currently dating Micah, and as she frequently sleeps over in Micah's room in the house, interactions between her and the occasionally male-centered humor of the house's men have formed the basis for several strips. Micah convinced her to begin playing World of Warcraft with him, and she is now a regular player.
Much of the costume/visual iconography of the characters was based off of their real-life counterparts and/or their suggestions.
Supporting Characters
- Alan - An aggressive rival of Drew (though not always antagonistic to him), Alan is often the victim of Drew's pranks. He tends to hang out with either Jon or Drew.
- Jon - A college failure (he was kicked out for poor grades) who still hangs around the dorm. He sticks around the campus to play video games and use the college's high-speed Internet access.
- Mike - A friend of Helen who works at the college's sound studio. Popular with the ladies, but only when he isn't trying. He hasn't appeared in the strip for several years.
- Helen's mother - An attractive older woman who seems to take life as it comes, who usually appears with Helen's sister in portrayals of Helen's home life.
- Helen's sister - A bright-eyed little girl with a shock of wild red hair. She is in grade school, and does not always seem to enjoy the best or most forward-thinking teaching by her instructors, which has formed the basis of a few strips.
- Jason - Helen's ex-boyfriend, who resembled a classic nerd stereotype, thin and weak-looking with thick glasses and a pocket protector. He broke up with her because he thought they should see other people, which made no sense to the other people at the campus.
- Anthony - A somewhat violent friend of Ian's from back home and a self-described "car-ninja".
- Cthulhu - An H. P. Lovecraft character who pops up in the story now and then.
- Ren - Ian's character in the Morrowind video game. She is a moogle who sometimes appears wearing armor and carrying a sword.
- Prof. Dave Theison - Better known as the 'Hawaiian-shirt professor' who teaches one of Drew's classes. He hired Drew as his assistant because they share the same cynical outlook on life. He was based on the University of Maryland professor of the same name who passed away in 2003.
