Tagged: art

Webcomics You Should Be Reading: ‘Player Vs. Player’

  • News
  • September 18, 2008

It started as just a gaming comic, but expanded to much, much more. It’s one of the most popular independent webcomics out there. It’s spawned books, cartoons, shirts, and even plush toys. It’s won an Eisner Award. And it shows no signs of stopping after ten years online.

It’s Scott Kurtz’s PvP .

Cole, Brent, Jade, Francis and Skull make up the primary cast, and the staff of PvP magazine, a gaming-centric publication that’s typically ignored by the cast in favor of wacky misadventures. Cole is the responsible grown-up (when he’s not jumping ditches in his replica General Lee), Brent is the Mac-loving artist type (and constant victim of panda attack), Jade is the hot chick who also plays games (and is often the “straight man” of the group), Francis is the twitch-gaming teenager, and Skull is the loveable-but-incredibly-stupid mythological creature (he’s a troll).

Kurtz’s style is a broad-based humor, backed up with ongoing plotlines. Pretty much every strip has a punchline, but there’s a continuity over weeks and years, and the characters develop throughout the strip’s run. It plays like a newspaper comic, if the average reader was a software engineer, rather than a little old lady.

If you’re intent on paying for additional PvP, there are six books available, five through Dark Horse (collections of pamphlets produced by Dark Horse, which are “enhanced” collections of strips published online) and a book of original material produced by Dork Storm Press. Shirts and books (and toys, as they’re produced) are available from the store, and then the random-and-amusing animated series.

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Marvel Begins Original Digital Comics

Marvel Begins Original Digital Comics

  • News
  • September 16, 2008

Marvel’s Digital Comics will begin original material for the first time, with two strips based on this year’s movies, Iron Man and Incredible Hulk. In fact, the content will be based on the film versions not the comic book continuities so as to appeal to a wider audience. The stories will run weekly, with new installments showing up on Wednesday, the traditional “new comic day”.

Iron Man: Fast Friends, starting tomorrow, is said to focus on the relationship between Tony Stark and Jim Rhodes. It’s written by Paul Tobin, with art by Ronan Cliquet and covers by Dave Bullock.

Incredible Hulk: The Fury Files, launching October 8, will feature Nick Fury investigating Bruce Banner. It’s written by Frank Tieri, with art by Salva Espin and covers by Steve Lieber.

Both strips are timed to the impending DVD releases of the films with Iron Man due September 30 and Incredible Hulk due out October 21.
 

More Creators Join in Auction to Save Siegel Home

More Creators Join in Auction to Save Siegel Home

  • News
  • September 10, 2008

Week two of the Siegel & Shuster Society’s auction to fund the restoration of Jerry Siegel’s Cleveland home is underway and more creators have signed on to add items for bidding.

Joining in the auction, which already includes items from Brad Meltzer, Ed Brubaker, Joe Staton, Gene Ha, Judd Winick, Ivan Reis, Bill Morrison, John Romita Jr., Dave Johnson, John Cassaday and Andy Kubert are:

BOOM! Studios Editor-in-Chief Mark Waid, donating the original Curt Swan cover art to Legion of Super-Heroes Index #2.

J.H. Williams III, donating his cover art from Superman Beyond 3-D #1

Jimmy Palmiotti is donating a chance for a fan to become a character that will be shot by the star in a future issue of Painkiller Jane.

Danny Fingeroth is donating autographed copies of his books Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero and Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society.
 

‘Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars’ Coming in October

  • News
  • September 9, 2008

Schlock Mercenary: The Teraport Wars is now available for pre-order. The Teraport Wars is the fourth collection of Schlock Mercenary strips to make it into publication; in true George Lucas style, Book 3 and Book 4 were released first. This book fits between The Tub of Happiness and Under New Management, and with it the first 1000 strips are available four hard-copy volumes.

This 228-page volume is in full color on glossy paper, and contains all the strips and footnotes from November 12th of 2001 through March 8th of 2003. It also features some new footnotes, commentary, guest art, concept art, deck plans for the Post-Dated Check Loan, eleven pages of all-new bonus story, and an introduction by Brandon Sanderson. The book is expected to ship October 9.

Schlock Mercenary is a webcomic by Howard Tayler that follows the adventures of a mercenary company aboard a starship in a 31st-century space opera setting. Schlock Mercenary updates daily at http://www.schlockmercenary.com/, and has been doing so continuously since June of 2000, a near-unheard-of feat in webcomics. Schlock Mercenary was previously featured on Keenspot, and is now a member of the Blank Label Comics consortium.
 

R. Crumb Exhibit Opens in Philadelphia

R. Crumb Exhibit Opens in Philadelphia

  • News
  • September 7, 2008

Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art has opened an exhibit, "R. Crumb’s Underground", running through December 7.  As a part of ICA’s Comics, Animation and Graphic Novels at Penn – A Year-Long Celebration, the exhibit chronicles Crumb’s work from the pioneering early days of Underground Comix through his more modern works of art.

The 100+ works of art were originally selected and organized by Todd Hignite, the publisher and editor of Comic Art magazine in 2007 for San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts before coming east.

The retrospective was reviewed by The New York Timeswhich noted, “Whatever the aesthetic and formal attractions of his work, Mr. Crumb’s penchant for barging past the limits of good taste and political correctness into psychologically juicy and dangerously complicated territory is still the main draw. His most amazingly provocative creation is Angelfood McSpade, a young, inky black, big-breasted African woman in a palm leaf skirt who was inspired by racist caricatures of the ’20s and ’30s. Sweet-tempered and dimwitted, the long-suffering Angelfood is subjected to all kinds of sexual abuse in various episodes Mr. Crumb has drawn. In one hilarious strip in the exhibition she is abducted and molested by aliens in a U.F.O.”

The review also recommends visitors allot up to three hours to properly take in the exhibit. Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-7108.

Review: ‘American Widow’ by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

Review: ‘American Widow’ by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

American Widow
By Alissa Torres; Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi
Villard, September 2008, $22.00

Luis Eduardo (“Eddie”) Torres started a new job as a foreign exchange trader at Cantor Fitzgerald on September 10th, 2001. He was thrilled to get it – he’d been out of work for a few months, his wife, Alissa, was then seven months pregnant, and he was a Columbian national, so his immigration status could have been compromised by staying out of work too long.

Seven years later, we all remember what happened on September 11th, but perhaps only New Yorkers remember Cantor Fitzgerald as clearly. Their headquarters was at the very top of One World Trade Center: floors 101 to 105. That was directly above the impact site of the first plane; no one in Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices survived. Of the dead at the World Trade Center, nearly a quarter were Cantor Fitzgerald. Eddie Torres was one of them.

Alissa Torres quickly found herself a widow: one of the smallest of mercies was that her husband jumped, and so was identified quickly. And then she found herself a “9/11 widow” – alternately helped and hindered by charities, sought by the media, torn completely from her previous life. The fact that her husband had just started work – at a site whose records were utterly destroyed – only made things more difficult.

[[[American Widow]]] is Alissa Torres’s story, in her own words and presumably her own comics-panel layouts. The art is by Sungyoon Choi, a very young graduate of the School of Visual Arts; this appears to be her first major work. It’s also Torres’s first work in comics; before 9/11 she was an instructional designer for the New York City Department for the Aging and afterward she seems to have only written about herself and her late husband, with several essays on [[[Salon]]] and one in [[[Redbook]]]. (A search at Salon didn’t bring up those essays; nor does the Redbook essay seem to be online.)

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Review: Invincible the Series

Review: Invincible the Series

During the 2008 San Diego Comic Con, MTV New Media debuted their new animated series based on Robert Kirkman and Cory Walker’s Invincible comic. Published by Image Comics, [[[Invincible]]] tells the story of Mark Grayson, a young man who inherits his father’s superpowers. It’s been released through various outlets: iTunes, Xbox, Amazon, MTV2, MTV.com, and MTV Mobile.

Instead of creating brand new animation, the series has decided to use the latest editing techniques to “animate” Cory Walker’s actual comic book art. Just use existing comic art and let the camera to give the illusion of movement. To younger viewers this may seem innovative, but it’s been done as far back as the Marvel Comics based cartoons from the 1960’s. It was used again, very artistically by MTV, when they brought [[[The Maxx]]] to television. Even more recently [[[The Watchmen]]] has been done in this style.

While the story and art deserve all the critical praise that the Invincible comic has received over the years, [[[Invincible the Series]]]’ biggest stumbling block is its editing. The MTV produced show has the same pacing as MTV’s promo spots, wildly kinetic with lots of flashing graphics and texts. Never let the eye settle for minute. This is fine for 15-second ad, but watching a full show like that is taxing.

In a one step forward, two steps back move, the show decided to include the actual word balloons from the comic. But instead of letting people read it, the text has a subtle shake to it. To emphasize energy, I guess. While nothing sits still on the screen, you would expect the parts you want people to read to be motionless.

A good way to judge an animated show’s sound is to close your eyes and listen. Does the soundtrack still create images of the action? In Invincible’s case, the answer is yes, but barely. The voice acting and sound effects are serviceable. They don’t do anything cringe worthy, but neither do they stand out. No Kevin Conroy or John Di Maggio here.

If the production calmed down, this could’ve been a great show that brought quality comic books to video formats. But as it is, I couldn’t stand watching this for more than a few episodes. And like I said, I’m a fan. Imagine the effect to someone who’s browsing MTV2 late at night.

Watch the first episode for yourself below. Let me know if you think I’m right or wrong in the comments section.

 

Review: ‘Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!’

 

Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!
By Howard Chaykin
Dynamic Forces, July 2008, $49.99

Science Fiction has never been quite as successful in comics form as it seemed it should have been. Oh, sure, there have been plenty of vaguely SFnal ideas and premises – from [[[Superman]]] to [[[Kamandi]]] to the [[[X-Men]]] to the [[[Ex-Mutants]]] – but they were rarely anything deeper than an end to the sentence “There’s this guy, see? and he’s….” One of the few counterexamples was Howard Chaykin’s [[[American Flagg!]]], starting in 1983 – that series had many of the usual flaws and unlikelihoods of near-future dystopias, but it also had a depth and texture to its world that was rare in comics SF (and never to be expected in even purely prose works, either).

American Flagg! suffered from Chaykin’s waning attention for a while, and then crashed and burned almost immediately after he finally left the series, with a cringe-making overly “sexy” storyline utterly overwritten by Alan Moore. American Flagg! limped from muddled storyline to confused characterization for a couple of years afterward – but the beginning, when Chaykin was fully energized by his new creation and the stories he was telling, is one of the best SF stories in American comics.

The series has never been collected well, though a few slim album-sized reprints were once available, and may be findable through used-book channels. This Dynamic Forces edition, reprinting the first fourteen issues of the series, is quite pricey. (Especially for a book with no page numbers, and one in which the pages are precisely the size of the original comics – not oversized, as those previous album reprints had been.) This book has a strong, thoughtful introduction by Michael Chabon – which has already appeared in his [[[Maps and Legends]]] collection, presumably due to the delay in the American Flagg! book – a gushing afterword by Jim Lee, and a new short story written and drawn by Chaykin.

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Review: ‘Wonder Woman: Love and Murder’ by Jodi Picoult and others

Review: ‘Wonder Woman: Love and Murder’ by Jodi Picoult and others

DC Comics got a lot of press last year when they signed up bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult to write their monthly [[[Wonder Woman]]] series – gallons of ink about her being the first female “regular writer” on the series, and about how this would finally catapult WW into the position DC keeps insisting she already has: a central, iconic figure whose comics people actually buy and read.

Well, more than a year has passed year later, and Picoult’s run turned out to be only five issues long – so much for “regular,” huh? – and also served primarily as set-up for one of the log-jammed line-wide crossovers, [[[Amazons Attack!]]] Picoult’s five issues were gathered into a classy hardcover, suitable for libraries (where I found it, actually) and real bookstores, with her name given huge prominence.

Assuming that the point of making Picoult’s name so large is to draw in the many readers of her novels, or other casual bookstore browsers, it’s fair to ask whether [[[Love and Murder]]] makes sense as a book in its own right, and provides anything like a satisfying experience to those new readers.

I haven’t read any of Picoult’s novels, unfortunately, but I also haven’t ever read Wonder Woman, and I haven’t read a mainstream DC book regularly in a few years – so, with my ignorance wrapped around me like a cloak, I dove in…

Wonder Woman: Love and Murder
Written by  Jodi Picoult
Art by Drew Johnson & Ray Snider with Rodney Ramos, Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson, and Paco Diaz
DC Comics, November 2007, $19.99

Well, the first thing a seasoned comics reader notices is that the art team changes entirely twice during five issues, which is usually a bad, bad sign. Readers coming from the world of prose probably won’t notice that – the three art styles are all minor variations on today’s version of superhero-standard, and the transitions aren’t particularly jarring – but it is a danger sign, implying that something was going on behind the scenes.

And then, before the story actually starts, we get a one-page “Previously in Wonder Woman,” explaining how she killed Maxwell Lord in some other cross-over that we didn’t read and don’t care about, and now she’s pretending to be “Diana Prince” again, working at the Department of Metahuman Affairs with her face-changing partner Tom “Nemesis” Tresser under the literally iron-fisted Sarge Steel. (I’m not sure if we believe that, since Diana has some much trouble with ordinary life later that we doubt she could convincingly fake a history or paper trail to get such an impressive job.) OK, fine, that’s backstory, and we’ll get into a brand new adventure now, right?
 

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Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson on “Bear Creek Apartments”

Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson on “Bear Creek Apartments”

  • News
  • August 21, 2008

Celebrated comics couple Bryan Lee O’Malley (Scott Pilgrim) and Hope Larson (Chiggers) returned the focus of their considerable talents to the webcomics pool this week with Bear Creek Apartments, a new, original collaboration between the two creators. They announced the project this week on their website, radiomaru.com, and the comic was subsequently flooded with traffic — forcing O’Malley to break it down from a single page to a series of linked pages.

For the art geeks, the pair also provided the following details about their tools of the trade for Bear Creek:

The art is done with pen, watercolor, crayon, and some CG elements (mostly lighting effects). The lettering was done with ComiCraft’s "Monologous" font.

You can see the full comic now at the link I’ve provided above, but be sure to read it through to the end. There’s a twist there that caught me by surprise… so you’ll want to beat the spoilers, too.

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