Foreach is a story about nested cycles of escapism presented in an incredibly well-executed, incredibly modern way. There are a lot of webcomics which have pushed hard at the boundaries of what the medium is and can be – Homestuck comes immediately to mind, but long before it were all sorts of curios like When I Am King,* and less obviously we have things like the clever value-add (and occasional jumpscare) of some of Unsounded’s more innovative pages. Each of these has, at times, felt awkward or jarring in how it pushes against expectations. Foreach doesn’t feel awkward at all: it doesn’t hack out a difficult new path so much as perfectly exploit the possibilities that have already been established. It’s an exemplar of how the most essential storytelling elements of ‘comics’ – images and text – can work without any of the structural baggage of the pre-digital age getting in the way.
It’s a little difficult to sell what’s so good about it without spoiling the first chapter and the experience of reading it blind, but I’ll try. Foreach’s story spans a number of different worlds, each of which is playing with the genre cliches of a specific sort of game (although I don’t think you need to be a big gamer to appreciate it; said cliches are set out, and then dissected, very clearly.) Each of these worlds, its central character and their struggle, is distinct and well realised, and each links to the others in interesting and evolving ways.
This means that rather than doing one narrative-and-artistic style convincingly, the artist, Lum (and team Peri and Rhys), must do a bunch of styles convincingly. Which they do, and exploit each style deftly. Different parts of the story might have MGS style dialogue-beneath-two-portraits, or argument represented as turn-based combat, or internal thoughts as dialogue menu options not chosen, all presented in a fluid and convincing way. Foreach nails a lot of distinct character voices in a lot of different registers (clingy dating-sim responses, overwrought pseudoreligious doom, Hard-Bitten Quippy Action.) The art is again extremely digital, all hard-edged aliased drawings and limited palettes. It gets across exactly what it needs to, especially conveying emotion in several styles (written and text) across a range of different, mostly nonhuman, characters. At a first glance it’s quite simple (especially early on in the story), but it takes a lot of hard work to make it look this easy.
The plot is much harder to get into without spoilers (writing this at page 88, I am very interested to see how the author resolves an increasing pileup of complexities within their narrative), so I won’t comment there except to say that there is a confidence and rhythm to the pacing and the revelation which shows a lot of careful planning. I really enjoy Foreach, and since starting Oubliette I have a much greater appreciation of how hard it is to do what it’s doing. It’s an ambitious, compelling and wonderfully confident story and I’m enjoying reading it. Go! Do the same!
Also, for reasons which will quickly become obvious, it reminds me a lot one of my favourite music videos of all time (but go and read the comic before you come back and watch this.)
* Who knew that would still be online in 2024?