The Adventures of Ace Hoyle: Web comic episodes #1-20
It’s best if I make one thing clear at the outset: I play a fair amount of poker. I’ve also been known to watch bits of the occasional tournament on television, or at least the overly dramatic parts while flipping channels. That being said, there was at least one bit of this series that baffled me in a technical way, and I do love to throw some negativity into what would otherwise be a positive review. How is it that the card hand played in episode 11 and 12 is the “opening hand� Didn’t we see our hero Ace Hoyle fold on the opening hand? It was altogether baffling to me, and seemingly only used to get rid of a couple of people at the final table.
Chances are I should go back to the beginning before asking questions about the middle, so for the uninitiated Ace Hoyle: The Golden Thread is a new webcomic. Writer Phill Provance and artist Tomas Batha put out a weekly comic dealing with the, well, adventures of Ace Hoyle. Duh. So far it’s just the one adventure, as the first 20 strips deal with Ace making it to the final five of the big poker tournament. There’s also some serious funny business going on with a side character and possibly Ace himself, but these things are only hinted at and are left for future strips. Or at least I hope they’re left for future strips. If they’re just oddities for the sake of being odd that’s some lazy storytelling right there. These two do seem to know what they’re doing though, so they deserve the benefit of the doubt on that front. Instead of going through these one by one (as I never do that for pages of a comic, so why do it for episodes of a webcomic?), I’ll break it down by how certain chunks held together.
Episode 1: OK, this one deserves a mention all its own. The introduction to Ace Hoyle, he tells us how awesome his life is, and then declares that he’s there to win. This is the first hint to a troubling conclusion I’ve drawn about the series, but I’ll save that for later.
Episode 2-5: We learn about the other 4 people at the table (Russian twins, a lucky yokel named Hank and Ace’s nemesis from past years called Dick Spadely, although I’m not sure if “nemesis†is the proper term for somebody that Ace seems to beat every year), have some minor drama when Ace just barely makes it to the table before the 15 minute grace period is up, and even the card dealer is given an introduction. We meet a mysterious lady in blue who tries to call Ace to get him to the table; she’ll come into play later. Episode 5 also has one of the few artistic rough spots, as that shot of the five players sitting around the table just looks sloppy. Dick’s face appears to have melted, Hank’s hat is gray instead of its later pink, and Ace has a fish eye. Again, I point this out because the art is consistently expressive for the rest of the strips, but this chunk looks like it was finished two minutes before the deadline.
Episode 6-8: Probably my favorite chunk of the series so far, and that’s because this deals with an important subject: poker. We get to see how the lucky new guy deals with being dealt pocket aces (spoiler alert: he’s not good at hiding his emotions), Dick’s tell, Ace’s decision to fold, and the Russians with their bluffing. My main problem with this is that it fades away to another character after #8 and we’re left wondering what happened. I get the artistic decision to do so, as they can’t spend the entire strip on every little facet of playing poker, but the choice to leave this hand leads straight to my later confusion of how two players got knocked out on the opening hand while there was every indication given that Ace folded on the opening hand.
Episode 9-10: We meet “the Finegold girlâ€, the same woman who tried to get Ace to the table earlier, as she gets her ass slapped with mysterious vanishing orange ink and a suspicious man, upon seeing her, says that that “this might actually work better than I expectedâ€.  What’s going on here? No idea, but we’ll figure that out in the next issue. Right?
Episode 11-13: We see the “opening hand†that confused me, the forcible removal of one of the losers, and the slow disintegration of another player. We also see that “the Finegold girl†has a very good idea of how the mind of Ace works, as she watches the hand at a bar and tells the bartender exactly what’s going to happen.
Episode 14-16: The Finegold girl (sorry, if there was a first name given I flat out missed it), a little drunker than she thought, sees the man who slapped her ass and gives chase. There’s also a little bit of set-up for the final poker hand.
Episode 17-20: Ace and Dick are both dealt pocket aces! The Finegold girl thinks she tracked down the creep who put vanishing orange ink on her ass! We get some serious trash talk between Dick and Ace! And they even had the decency to leave things on a cliffhanger! Sorry, once I get started with the exclamation points it’s difficult to stop.
So what’s the verdict for the series? There’s a problem with the coloring, as Hank’s hat shifted from gray to pink and back to gray. It’s a minor thing, granted, but it’s easily fixed. Hell, they could go back in now and fix the coloring, or at least do it before this is put out as a physical comic. On the plus side there’s a fascinating cast of characters and a burgeoning mystery to be dealt with. Is Ace’s late arrival to the poker table a part of that mystery, or was that just a way to rattle his opponents?  That leads me to my main problem with the series so far: Ace Hoyle. I know, it’s hard to like a strip if you don’t care for the main character. Ace seems, at least so far, like a low-rent James Bond. I’m hoping there’s more to him in future issues, but it’s always hard to identify with a man who can do no wrong.  Still, there’s way too much good here to dismiss it. Tomas does an excellent job of capturing the emotions going through these poker players at various times in the game, and Phill does seem to have a master plan going for the whole thing. Overall, I land somewhere around optimistic but not fully convinced.
UPDATE: Turns out Edgar Arce took over for Tomas Batha at Episode #10. Right around the time that the art seemed to noticeably improve. I probably should have caught that, what with me being a “professional” and all. Oops…
