Tagged: novel

Webcomics You Should Be Reading: ‘Penny Arcade!’

  • Uncategorized
  • February 4, 2009

Penny Arcade!
It’s the trifecta of modern comedy: Sarcasm, Near-Cartoon-Levels-of-Violence, and The Deflowering of Fruit. I speak of a web comic that has consistently delivered all these aspects without fail for over 10 years. Since its creation in 1998, it’s spawned graphic novel collections, a charity that has raised millions of dollars for children’s hospitals, nearly half of my roommate’s funny tee-shirt collection, and its own convention to boot. I speak of Penny Arcade.

In concept it is merely a riff on the (now) age-old Beavis and Butthead theorem: Two dudes and a TV. Swap the TV with a video game system (or PC, or Tabletop RPG), and swap the aforementioned dunderheads with the highly sarcastic Tycho Erasmus Brahe and his friend, the sometimes-sharp-as-a-marble Jonathan "Gabe" Gabriel . The two will comment on various video games they are playing, or wax poetic on other whims and flights-of-fancy we nerds take to heart.

The strip is written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik. Over time the strip added an additional (beloved) character or two… and will (from time to time) not include Gabe or Tycho in lieu of an in-game strip. Be forewarned (if you’ve not been clicking on the links above, because you’re patient unlike me) the boys do love the potty humor and foul language. Never-the-less…. violence, swearing, and video games has always made for excellent laughs.

The guys have a wonderful store chock full of tee’s and hoodies adorned with cute catch phrases only "very cool and socially acceptable" people like us understand. They also recently added a feature allowing you to order any of their strips in a nice high res print, suitable for framing and posting with intent to have your co-workers acknowledge your exquisite taste. Suffice to say, the guys over at the arcade have spent a good long time perfecting their craft, and three days a week you can get your fill. There’s a great archive to dig through, and their news posts, while not as auto-biographical as their Texas counterpart Scott Kurtz, offers some great thoughts about the game industry from time to time.

Some Strips of Note:

The Breakdown:

Drama: Well, aside from the "sagas" from time to time, (see Cardboard Tube Samarai above) there is little is any drama. And it’s probably best that it stays that way.

Humor: Covering everything under the sun in nerditry from video games, role playing, computers, to insider-only game industry humor…all under the banner of cartoon-violence, swearing, and general bafoonery.

Continuity: Well, Gabe and Tycho have been long time friends, but that aside, really, there’s little you’d need to know to start laughing your pooper off.

Art: Mike Krahulik’s artwork has taken considerable leaps over the last 10 years. At the beginning, backgrounds were simple, and the colors were flat. Over time, Mike’s character stylings has gotten looser, and to his credit, far better. The exaggerated figures emote wonderfully. i dare you not to laugh at Gabe’s face when he wishes Tycho vast amounts of pain. At present, the strip is a great example digital painting technique, with a vivid color palate that always compliments it’s subject matter; Be it in Fantasy, Space, or just ‘Guys on the Couch’.

Archive: The strip is over 10 years old… Generally three strips a week over the course of 10 years? By my math that’s over a boatload.

Updates: Currently updates on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Risk/Reward: It’s a free web comic folks. By my dime, it’s well worth your time if you like topical nerd humor with a dash of blood, guts and laughter. Plus, every now and then you get a strip like this.

 

ComicMix Quick Picks – February 2, 2009

* the. Speak-er is shaped like a cartoon speech bubble. Of course, if it was a speech bubble, it would have speech recognition to render text on the fly. If it was really cool, it would look like John Workman lettering.

* ICv2 – First Second to Publish Scott McCloud. "First Second Books has announced that it will publish two upcoming works by Scott McCloud, the multiple award-winning author of Zot, Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics.  First Second plans to publish a McCloud-penned fictional graphic novel, tentatively entitled The Sculptor, in the spring of 2013 followed by a non-fiction work."

* Val Kilmer to be king of Bacchus in New Orleans parade.

* Aaaah! Zombie filking… wait, I’m being redundant.

* More NYCC stuff: ICv2 says Joss Whedon will preview ‘Dollhouse’ at 12:45pm (EST) on Sunday, February 8th at the IGN Theater. Whedon will then conduct an autograph session starting at 2pm.

* The NYCC Indie After Party. I’ll be there… I’ll probably need the drink.

Anything else? Consider this an open thread.

‘Lone Justice: Crash!’ promotional trailer

‘Lone Justice: Crash!’ promotional trailer

Lone Justice: Crash! is the new graphic novel from the Harvey award nominated team of Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley. This two-fisted pulp adventure began last week on ComicMix, but it’s been in the works for a while… in fact, we had a promotional video at the San Diego Comic-Con this past summer. And now that you’ve had a chance to see some of the series, you’ll also notice a few more spoilery images in there. Take a look:

 Remember: the next installment of Lone Justice: Crash! premieres this Monday!

ComicMix Six: What you need to know about ‘Lone Justice: Crash!’

ComicMix Six: What you need to know about ‘Lone Justice: Crash!’

  • News
  • January 8, 2009

LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! is the new graphic novel from the Harvey Award nominated team of Robert Tinnell and Mark Wheatley.  It will begin right here on ComicMix on Monday, January 12th.  And in the interest of making all things EZ, we present the top 6 essential things you should know before you start reading:

1) LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! is a two-fisted, pulp adventure set in the year 1930, just after the big Wall Street crash in 1929.  It is a time when there is great uncertainty in life, work and politics.  But it was also a time when pulp magazines were introducing vital new characters to the public that we would eventually come to call Super Heroes.  So, step aside, Doc Savage, the Shadow, and the Spider – and make way for Lone Justice!

2) LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! is the sideways sequel to the Harvey Award nominated EZ STREET graphic novel, also perpetrated by the Tinnell and Wheatley team. Why sideways? In EZ STREET, the central characters Scott and Danny Fletcher are attempting to create a graphic novel.  And LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! is the graphic novel they create.

3) Yes, that means Tinnell and Wheatley are taking credit for the work of two fictional characters.  They have no shame.

4) Maybe you don’t need to know that the core ideas behind Lone Justice’s tribulations in CRASH! can be found in the pages of EZ STREET – particularly in the character of the homeless man young Scott and Danny befriended.  But if you are aware it just might make the reading experience a little richer.  No, really – there are parallels to life events in EZ STREET all through LONE JUSTICE: CRASH!

5) You should probably be aware of just how devastating the Depression was on the United States and its residents.  It was much worse than what is going on today, so far.  Tent cities – known as Hoovervilles (after President Herbert Hoover) really existed.  Hopefully, there will not be any Bushvilles before LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! finishes running on ComicMix.

6) There were often official efforts to keep transient homeless folks out of cities and towns and even entire states.  These were people who were just trying to survive.  But California, for example, would try to keep people from pouring into the state – and they were prone to use force.

You can start reading LONE JUSTICE: CRASH! right here on ComicMix on Monday, January 12th.

Manga Friday: Three, Two, One!

Manga Friday: Three, Two, One!

  • News
  • December 5, 2008

This week, in a desperate attempt to disguise the fact that he doesn’t have any coherent way to tie the reviewed books together, Andrew Wheeler will adopt a “countdown” format to write about three brand-new Manga volumes.

Adding to the difficulty level: he will also write about himself in the third person, for no good reason.

Kaze no Hana, Vol. 3
By Ushio Mizta and Akiyoshi Ohta
Yen Press, December 2008, $10.99

This is the end of “Book One” of Kaze no Hana, in which not nearly enough is wrapped up and hardly any indication is given that the series will continue on to a “Book Two” sometime, somewhere. (For those who are lost: reviews of Volume One and Volume Two.)

To recap briefly: Momoka Futami is yet another typical cute Japanese teenage girl, who just wants to live a normal life. But she’s actually part of a family that has spent the past few hundred years defending the world against the minions of an evil god that was trapped under a mountain, using eight “spiritual swords.” There’s also an opposed group that wants to free the evil god – they don’t seem to consider him evil, actually – and they use “sacred swords,” which are totally different in a way that’s never been clear.

Kaze no Hana has a fairly large cast of people with vestigial (at best) noses, and it’s difficult to tell them apart much of the time. This book also has a lot of talking and emoting rather than fighting monsters, though one character does turn out, unexpectedly, to be a werewolf. There’s also a huge plot problem that gets resolved exceptionally quickly, leading this reader to wonder if perhaps the original serialization of this story was hurried to a conclusion quicker than the creators had planned.

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‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Twilight’ Trailers

‘Harry Potter,’ ‘Twilight’ Trailers

The international trailers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Twilight have hit the internet.

First up is Potter, which can be found over at Trailer Addict or watched below. The new trailer offers some interesting glimpses into the film, including Dumbledore’s curse-ridden hand and Potter chasing after Snape while shouting, "Fight me, you coward!" You also get to see the cave where Harry and Dumbledore have their last great team-up together. All in all, looks like a fitting adaptation of the series’ penultimate chapter.

Click below to watch!

Next is Twlight, an adaptation of the young adult vampire/romance novel by Stephenie Meyer. The book has spawned three sequels: New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn. It follows the romantic relationship between a human named Bella and an animal-feeding vampire named Edward. The film stars Kristin Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Cam Gigandet, Peter Facinelli and Nikki Reed.

Head here to see the trailer.

Review: “Joker” HC one-shot

Review: “Joker” HC one-shot

On October 22, DC will be releasing the hardcover graphic novel Joker (originally titled [[[Joker: The Dark Knight]]]), presented to you by writer Brian Azzarello and artist Lee Bermejo. This is the same creative team who were behind the mini-series [[[Lex Luthor: Man of Steel]]], which explored the mind-set of the Metropolis multi-millionaire and touched on his justifications for why he sees himself as the necessary anti-thesis to the Last Son of Krypton.

[[[Joker]]] is a story of roughly the same note, though not narrated by the villain as Lex Luthor: Man of Steel was. In this hardcover graphic novel, the story is narrated by Jonny Frost, a two-bit hood. In an interview with Newsarama, Azzarello said that the reason for this was because the Joker’s narration couldn’t be trusted, given that he was insane, and so it was important to see it from the point of view of someone close to him.

As the tale begins, the Joker has been in Arkham for some time now and has only just now been released, legally and by the book (though how is never explained). This book plays the Joker as a gangster rather than a mass murdering psycho constantly trying to prove there is no point to life. As such, one of the major plot elements is that the Joker had several criminal operations going on when he went in and now he’s found that they have been taken over by others. To regain his criminal power and his money, the Joker begins hunting down the Gotham mobsters who have dared to dip into his operations, telling them, “I want what’s mine back.”

To help him on this quest, he grabs Killer Croc and Harley Quinn (who seems to be a mute in this story), as well as new assistant Jonny Frost, our narrator, a small-timer who admires the Joker and wants to be just like him. As the story goes on, the Joker directly challenges Two-Face, who has taken control of Gotham’s underworld while the Clown Prince of Killers has been away. And with each passing day, Jonny Frost realizes that the Joker is not a person to admire at all.

Not a bad idea. How was the execution?

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Review: ‘Jamilti & Other Stories’ by Rutu Modan

Review: ‘Jamilti & Other Stories’ by Rutu Modan

Jamilti & Other Stories
By Rutu Modan
Drawn & Quarterly, August 2008, $19.95

Rutu Modan came to the attention of most American comics readers last year, when her graphic novel [[[Exit Wounds]]] was published to great acclaim. Exit Wounds went on to hit a number of top ten lists, and won the Eisner for Best New Graphic Novel. But no cartoonist comes out of nowhere – Modan had been writing and drawing shorter comics stories for a decade. Those would be these stories, which have now been corralled between two covers.

[[[Jamilti]]] collects seven stories, all of them but the title piece originally published in anthologies from the comics collective Actus (of which Modan was one of the two founders). (“Jamilti” itself was originally published in [[[Drawn & Quarterly]]], Vol. 5, for those seeking closure.) Modan’s style has changed slightly over the years, but her artistic progression isn’t obvious. Her most recent work – Exit Wounds, “Your Number One Fan” from [[[How To Love]]], the currently running serial [[[The Murder of the Terminal Patient]]] – have a tighter, cleaner line and solid blocks of brighter, purer colors than her earlier stories, but that’s more of a tightening of what she was already doing than anything else. The stories before that bounce back and forth from color to black and white, with the drawing similarly getting looser and tighter as Modan worked out what she wanted to do.

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Review: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ The Complete Series

Review: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ The Complete Series

In 1987, television was evolving.  Thanks to [[[Hill Street Blues]]], the way dramatic stories were presented became more complex, the storytelling more diverse and the stories more compressed. The subject matter was also starting to broaden, moving beyond cops, lawyers and doctors.  It was just before the SF wave kicked off with [[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]] but that didn’t stop CBS from trying something a little different.

On a Friday night, September 25, 1987, audiences were treated to a different look at the classic [[[Beauty and the Beast]]] tale.  The series starred Ron Perlman as Vincent, the beast, a mutant of some sort, who comes to the rescue of Linda Hamilton’s Catherine, a rich girl turned assistant district attorney.  Their connection became the stuff of fairy tale and from that pilot episode, their fates became inextricable.

It had all the lush romance of a Harlequin book and the action to keep spouses by their side.  The series had its ups and downs, making a star out of Hamilton who left the series after just two seasons, derailing the eternal romance. Jo Anderson was brought in for the third season but that, coupled with CBS’s insistence on increased action for the males, hurt and the series came to an end in January 1990 (although the final two were run that summer).  Its 56 episodes remain a testament to the creative vision of creator Ron Koslow and fantasist George R.R. Martin who wound up penning 13 of the episodes.

Paramount Home Video has released a 16-disc box set of the complete series and it shows its age.  Beauty and the Beast has the look and feel of the 1980s without fully embracing the changing storytelling in television. The storytelling is slow, almost plodding at times, and each week they seemed to focus on some new social ill without really offering long-term solutions.  The threats were fairly standard stuff for the most part, intertwined with the poetry between the characters.  Complete with lush music, long, lingering gazes into character’s eyes, it was truly a romance novel brought to the screen.

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Review: ‘The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle’ by Jim Butcher and Adrian Syaf

Review: ‘The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle’ by Jim Butcher and Adrian Syaf

The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle
Written by Jim Butcher; Pencils by Adrian Syaf
Del Rey, October 2008, $19.95

Jim Butcher’s [[[Dresden Files]]] series is something of an anomaly in the world of contemporary fantasy – a hugely successful, bestselling series of novels set in the modern world, featuring vampires, werewolves, elves, and other beasties that go bump in the night…but also featuring a main character who isn’t an attractive young woman embroiled in love and/or sex entanglements with two or more of those aforementioned beasties.

Butcher’s hero is Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only consulting wizard – and Harry’s literary background is more from the hardboiled mystery (Always Having Bad Luck With Dames Division, rather than the racier Always Falling Into Bed With Dames Division) than from the romance novel, like so many of his high-heeled and back-tattooed fellow explorers of the supernatural. Harry’s the hard-luck kind of mystery hero: he saves the day, but doesn’t usually get the girl, or much in the way of monetary reward, either. (But that’s OK, since his heart is pure – or as pure as anyone’s heart can be, these days.)

Dresden gets called in – usually by Chicago PD’s Lt. Karrin Murphy, head of Special Investigations (which gets all of the woo-woo cases) – when something seems to be “weird.” No one but Harry actually really believes in the supernatural, of course, but he does get results, most of the time.

Welcome to the Jungle is a prequel to the Dresden Files novels, taking place just before the events of [[[Storm Front]]], the first novel. It’s written by Jim Butcher himself, and penciled by “rising talent” (which here means “someone I haven’t heard of – not that there’s anything wrong with that”) Ardian Syaf, an Indonesian artist.

The Dresden Files is like [[[The X-Files]]] (and many other series of stories about supernatural beasties, like Hellboy) in that there are “mythos” stories – ones that move forward the larger plot – and stories that are one-offs. [[[Jungle]]] is a one-off, concerning some unpleasant doings at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo.

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