No offense to any bronies in the audience, but when it comes to having your favorite works being the target of merciless parodies, I can imagine you all have nothing on the Care Bears, let alone its fanbase. From Robot Chicken to MAD Magazine to every other dime store critic with a webcam, the ursine denizens of Care-A-Lot have long been the punching bag of comedians and satirists. Alison Acton’s Bear Nuts is the web comic equivalent of this, and reading through it I gradually found myself hoping against hope that it would expand its idea of comedy beyond random cruelty. I was sadly denied that, but instead I was at least given some backstory on our cast of walking clichés.
Our gang consists of a band of misfit Care Bear expys residing in a zoo that doesn’t seem to have very good security, given the amount of times Evil Bear, a former abused circus bear gone mad, tries to eat various guests. Former lab rat Prozac Bear does the best he can to keep the peace, or whatever passes for peace in this comic, despite having a tendency to go completely bonkers and become a force of destruction himself when he’s off of his namesake. Nerd Bear is just that, a long suffering Hollywood nerd who has a hot dog on his stomach because I have no idea. Death Bear is a little black bear with a scythe and often is presented as a voice of reason, unless he gains access to coffee.
There’s also the ever so progressive and brilliantly conceived Gay Bear, another one of those stock characters whose entire personality and humor formula is tied to his sexuality, and whose sexuality is more of a caricature than anything. I’d compare him to South Park’s Big Gay Al, but Al at least has a sense of being beyond the stereotype. His primary rival is Lech Bear, a bargain bin Danny McBride-esque pervert/lout. There’s Tanked Bear, Crack Bear, you get the picture here. While they usually don’t get along that well, it’s their collective dislike of an arrogant little panda named Vanity (not to be confused with the former Prince protégé) that acts as one of the few things they can agree on.
The stories are usually short, self contained arcs with a decent amount of continuity, and they generally consist of the bears fighting over food, TV time, or just simply trying to, as they say, “get last” on one another. Whatever sense of love and camaraderie they have amongst themselves usually only kicks in for the sake of the plot, as there’s many a time one of the bears has to be rescued from something (or more than likely, themselves). Slapstick, violence and gross humor abounds, all looking like a hybrid of Happy Tree Friends and Spumco due to the energetic yet slightly angular art style. The character designs are often similar, but since it’s a Care Bears parody that’s to be expected considering the homogeneity of the original source. Also, the ears on the bears sometimes look like rabbit ears. However, the facial expressions are hilarious, and they usually make a lot of the material funnier than it ought to be.
Let me talk about this material for a minute, though. When I was a kid, Married With Children was one of my favorite shows. To me, the Bundy family was always a pretty good example of how to write loser characters that frequently annoyed each other but would always come together to protect their own in the end. The key, IMO, was that they never actually did anything that could be called unforgivable. With Bear Nuts, that dividing line doesn’t exist, and as I went through the archives I found it hard to sympathize with much of anyone because almost all of the main cast had at least one example of irrational and jackassed behavior on their resume. So whenever the bears united, it all just rang hollow for me. I think the better one writes an unsympathetic comedy protagonist, the harder it is to pull them back from the brink and make them into a character one wants to root for.
Bear Nuts isn’t a very ambitious comic beyond cute twisted creatures ripping the stuffing out of each other, and as sick of that comedy cliché as I am, I don’t necessarily ask it to be. If it had a theme song, I bet it’d be “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” because like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes sang, you’ll never ever know them because what it’s out to do is pretty clear. Still, what I would like is some raunchy humor that at least has some substance underneath the raunch, and alas I didn’t find much of it here. If you think you’ll disagree, take a look at this ish right here. What I don’t think can be denied, though, is the high quality of DoOomcat Studio’s artwork.