April 24, 2010
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Less Than Hero #2
This is a preview edition, meaning that any complaints I might have about the art looking awfully scrunched up are useless, as I’m sure it was eventually put into a larger edition. Everything is noticeably starting to come together in this issue. The characters are starting to become incredibly unique, the art looks great (except for the fact that it needs a little room to breathe, but see the first sentence), and the dialogue is phenomenal. All kinds of quotable stuff in here, but I’ll just put up a good sample and let you check it out. I can see why they’d want to rush to get a preview edition out for SPX, as people reading this are much more likely to get hooked on this story than people reading the first issue. This is probably $3 and you’re not likely to find a smarter and more realistic superhero story. I almost hate saying that because I’ve gotten pretty sick of the “real people with super powers!” idea, but I promise that this is worth a look. Come on don’t you trust me?
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Less Than Hero #1
I’m breaking with tradition here and putting the back cover up instead of the front. Why? Well, it’s better than the front cover, frankly, and I thought it would help anybody who’s reading this to refer back to this synopsis to try and figure out what the hell’s going on. This is the first issue of a projected 12-parter, so I’m going to reserve judgment on the storyline. I didn’t get what was going on, but that’s because there are all kinds of characters, they’re all kind of thrown at you without an introduction, and I think they were trying to introduce too much in too small of a time. Still, points for ambition, and it might all come together beautifully. That being said, it’s time to start complaining. I don’t know what it is that some people have against punctuation, but, seriously, use it. Plenty of sentences in here where it just went on and on and it’s not like I can say anything about that but doesn’t it help to have a comma here and there to break up the sentence throw a little inflection into it do you know what I mean? Ahem. Also, for some reason a lot of the “n”s were backwards. Not sure if that was a stylistic thing or just a screw-up, but it stopped me in my tracks and I think that’s a bad thing. All that bitching aside, it wasn’t a bad first issue at all. Tony was obviously influenced by a lot of the great older artists and the book looks incredible, even if I couldn’t tell what exactly the superhero guy looked like until the full page spread. The writing is solid and the dialogue is believable and funny, for the most part. Look, my only major complaint is that they should have taken their time, maybe putting only one character per issue for a while. Sure, that was probably impossible due to finances, but putting out a few minis before this might not have been a bad idea. Anyway, this is $3 and worth a look, although you might want to wait a few issues to you can have a fair shake at figuring out what’s going on. Send them an e-mail…
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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The World is Our Icebox
This is a collection of what looks like three panel newspaper strips about penguins that was shoved into something that vaguely resembled a story. What you get because of that are really dumb punchlines every three panels or so and a very loose cohesiveness to the story, which doesn’t matter that much anyway. It’s all about penguins, so you have wackiness involving their trying to sweet talk a bag, avoiding a killer whale trying to talk them into the water, and trying to fly a paper airplane. Check out the Shellac Jones stuff if you’re really interested in his work, this isn’t a very good representation in my opinion. Unless the other story I saw was the exception and this is the norm, but I don’t like to think like that. Check out the website, there are a few other comics there too. I also found out on the site that this is a collection of strips. Maybe it’s an internet phenomenon or something that I missed, but I really don’t feel like I missed much this time around…
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Shellac Jones: River of Love
I’ll waste no time telling you about the plot because I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about this. Shellac Jones is a man who’s encased in shellac. A great adventurer, somehow, and someone who has been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years. A man finds him floating along the river and recognizes him, remembers the curse associated with Shellac Jones and decides to take him home anyway. It’s unique, I’ll give it that much. While the comic itself was pretty free from silly spelling errors, the front cover was full of them. Hard to get too down on it for that, but there you go. It’s the first of ten projected issues, so I have no idea where they’re going from here. Some of the dialogue was hokey, as you can undoubtedly see from the cover, but it works. I’m curious to see what happens next, and that’s all you can ask from a first issue. Great art too. It almost looks like a Disney cartoon, but in a good way. It’s $2.50 for this, send money to: Red Feather Flying Car, Co. P.O. Box 48582 Sarasota, FL 34230.
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Kosmostraitor #2 Now Available! $2
Hm. He seems to have forgotten how to spell the name of his comic, or maybe he just didn’t notice. Whatever the case, the main story in here is fantastic. It’s about some giant monsters who begin fighting in a city landscape, when suddenly the zippers get loose, some giant people come out of the costumes… and they start screwing like mad. Great stuff, as it just kept getting more and more over the top. Some graphic stuff in here, so don’t buy this for a nephew or anything. The bits in the beginning and end were kind of throw-away stuff. Not particularly bad, just not that great compared to the phenomenal main story. Contact info is up there, monkeys come free with a comic…
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Kosmostrator #1 Now Available! $2
Here’s a pretty good random mini I picked up at SPX. Three stories in this one. The first is by far the best of the bunch, a break-neck retelling of, um, a blimp fight. Great stuff, worth the price ($2) right there. Then there’s the story of a movie shoot where a robotic dinosaur comes alive and starts killing people. Hey, I don’t know how you could possibly go wrong with a good robotic dinosaur fight. Then there’s “Secret Pornographer”, and I don’t get it. Maybe that ending will make sense to me at 3 in the morning tonight, in which case I’ll be sure to update the site again with my revised opinion, but right now it didn’t do much for me. Had to hunt down the contact info, as there was nothing in the book, but here’s an e-mail address. Check it out, it’s worth it.
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Bling Bling
Well, the conditions for liking this one are pretty simple. Are you the type of person who would find a comic about the love of bling, done in a mostly hilarious fashion, humorous, or are you the type of person who would take one look at something like this and decide that’s stupid and move on? Well, it is funny, if you like this sort of thing, anyway. Especially the reference to his “international homies”. So do you like funny things or not? The choice is yours!
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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The Mighty Offenders #2 (co-written by Tod Parkhill and art by Joey Mason)
I forgot to add those other creative folks in the last review. Sorry about that, I usually try to make all of that stuff clear. Anyway, onwards to #2! I said that this series could turn out to be one of the great parodies, and I still stand by that possibility, but this issue didn’t do too much to push that along. Our heroes have been captured by aliens in regards to that stolen jet pack, and most of this issue is pure mayhem and explosions. Which is fine, but… who are these people again? Please with some sort of synopsis of the previous issues before #3, it would be ever so helpful. Also, I have a tendency to bitch when people are lazy on the backgrounds, but this comic looks like it will never have that problem. Just check out the sample if you don’t believe me. EVERY panel is packed, sometimes to the point where you really have to examine it just to make sure you’re catching everything. All in all a good issue that looked fantastic. And it’s not like most parodies have the most well-rounded characters in the world anyway, so it’s entirely possible that I’m looking for something that will never come. Still, if I didn’t have that one minor complaint about a lack of character development (or even trying to remember who the characters were) then this would be a completely positive and gushy review, and who wants that? $2
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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The Mighty Offenders #1
I suppose there are already plenty of superhero parodies out there, and a whole bunch of them are bad. That’s fine, those things tend to go away on their own after a few issues anyway. This one (and I’m well aware of the fact that this is only one issue and it could go downhill fast from here) has the potential to be one of the best. The team is eclectic enough, as one of the members found an alien jetpack and watch in the mail, another can “think” at animals, anther one looks like the average strongman in the group, and the rest of them don’t get much time to develop. Why not? Well, because about half of the book is this frantic, completely insane car chase that involves a flying deer. The art looks vaguely like the best whorly animators on Nickelodeon or other animated shows, which fits the frantic storyline perfectly. Oh yeah, the story. The man with the jetpack has just gotten it in the mail from aliens and doesn’t know how to work any of this technology, so he’s trying to join this superhero group. One of them pulls the cord on the jetpack, he flies off and the chase scene ensues. It’s $2, you can find it here, and it’s well worth a look. Seriously!
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Mini Ring King (with Tim McClurg & Steve Black)
Yeah, this should probably be on one of the Various pages, but those things are too huge already and Sean was kind enough to send it to me, so he gets the honors. Just in case you were ever interested in that sort of “inside Optical Sloth” logic, and shame on you if you were. There are a few stories in here, as well as some lovely pinups of some old wrestlers by Tim McClurg. First up is a story about a soon-to-be-dead boxer, appropriately called Specter. Next is a silly story called Vowel Boxer about, well, boxers who shout vowels as they punch, which didn’t do a thing for me until the punchline, then I loved it. Finally there The Wrestler of Wyagoth, about the quest of man in general to overcome a Lovecraftian cast of monsters. Good stuff overall, worth it just for the pinups if you were a fan of wrestling back in the day, and the stories aren’t too shabby either, although the whole thing goes by in a blur. Hey, how much plot can you have with wrestling being the theme, right? $2
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Class of 2006 #1
Hm, is something still considered a comic if there is no actual art, just quotes from students accompanied by unassociated pictures of random students? Oh well, I’ll leave that for the philosophers to figure out. Sean works as a grader for the standardized tests that students are forced to take to avoid being “left behind”, and he decided to put together a few books with some of the dumber quotes from students. It’s a fairly depressing compilation, if you think these people are the future of the country, or kind of funny if you’re a hopeless cynic like me. It’s mostly simple errors like misspellings or grammatical mistakes (look around this site for two minutes and you’re sure to find plenty of those), with some real whoppers about mistaken history. It’s a fun little peek into the brains of the youth of today. $1
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Jury Rigged Comics: Leftovers
That’s usually an instant warning sign, when somebody puts out a book of stories that weren’t good enough to put in the regular series. Luckily in this case they really are still good stories, so don’t worry your pretty little heads about it. First you have the first attempt by the Chinese to travel to the stars way back in the early 16th century (drawn by Adam Walmsley). The art is downright gorgeous and I’d never heard this story before. Then you have the near-war over bridges in Cleveland and Ohio City in 1837 (drawn by David Beyer Jr.). Fascinating stuff again, as how many of us know any of the history at all of our state and/or town? In other words, don’t be fooled into thinking this is a throwaway issue, nothing to see here and please move on. There are stories worth reading in this comic, and that’s all any of us can ask for. $2
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
Website
Jury Rigged Comics #1
Here’s another first effort from somebody out of Columbus, Ohio. Must be something in the water out here. Anyway, this is a collection of stories with a variety of different artists. The first one, Snow Tires (with Leon Briones), is about someone selling his car but trying to keep the snow tires when he sells it. I know, it sounds boring as can be, but it’s not a bad story. The second is As Seen on TV (with Rich Molinelli), and it tells the story of a young paramedic who gains some unwanted fame by having a rescue on the television show Rescue 911. The last full story is Mentor: What’s in a Name (also with Leon Briones), which is the story of a young superhero trying to come up with a name and learn the ropes of the business. Then there’s a tiny, tiny preview of Zero Point (I say tiny because there’s one page of art and one shrunken page of script) and an essay about his personal history with comics. For a first effort, it’s not bad. It’s good, when writing, to use “it’s” instead of “it is”, at least every once in a while, just to make it sound like people are really talking, but that’s a minor quibble. There’s nothing here to set the world on fire, but there are three solid, interesting stories, so you could do a lot worse. It’s $2, send Sean an e-mail if you’re interested.
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Battles of Paradise #2
I’m going to cheat a little bit on this one: if you haven’t read the review for #1, start there. I ramble more than a little bit, but there are some possibly useful pieces of advice and criticism. Sadly, not much has improved with this issue, as there are still spelling errors all over the place and the basic construction of the comic is awful (you can see a good chunk of the comic on the right side of the cover). What’s the point on dwelling on what’s wrong with it? Granted, most things are wrong with it, but he does introduce a new character in this issue and it seems like the female lead has more than a few mysteries to reveal. The trouble is that most people aren’t going to have the patience to find those promising nuggets amidst all the crappy parts. I said before that I was hoping to see how things improved, now I have a much tougher request: I want to see a comic that is properly put together (no words or characters disappearing off the edges) and with no spelling errors (yes, that includes knowing the difference between “you’re” and “your”). It’s not too much to ask, and at least then I could get a good handle on the story and figure out exactly what’s going on here. I’m so distracted by the nonsense that I could barely even tell what was going on. Still no price, still probably a couple of bucks, and I’d still hold off until he gets his act together. I do think it’s possible, otherwise I wouldn’t be going on like this…
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Battles of Paradise #1
I’ll freely confess to a bit of a double standard in my reviewing policy. If somebody sends me a comic that looks terrible, has misspelled words all over the place and no discernible story, AND they’ve sent much better stuff in the past, I’ll probably tear it apart. If, however, somebody is sending me their first comic, and it has more than a few flaws, I tend to try a different approach: offering some (here’s hoping) practical advice. Jerell is 18, this appears to be his first comic, and he has a few basics to learn. I’m a big fan of everybody doing comics, and it’s clear that he has a decent imagination, so this should in no way be taken as discouragement from doing more comics. That being said, much needs to be improved here. Full disclosure: this is an anime-style comic, something I probably wouldn’t have liked anyway, just to throw that out there. The story, which would be a little difficult to tell if it wasn’t for the synopsis he thoughtfully included, is that demons are hunting after a princess for her land, and a young boy keeps popping up in time to save her. She develops an instant crush and eventually gives him some of her power so he can become a demon slayer. The trouble is that I was never able to really get into the story because of the number of basic errors contained. The sample page should give you a clue, but here are my suggestions, and this may well go for some of you people who think you have this comics thing down pat as well. First, use a spell check. I know, they don’t come installed on the comics page. If you’re not a particularly good speller, go to a place like dictionary.com and type in every word that’s more than two syllables. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but you’d be amazed at how many errors this can fix, and the more times you do it, the more you’re likely to learn. For example, “couragous” looks right if you don’t know any better, but they crammed an “e” in there towards the end. Next, keep your letters in the word bubbles/boxes. Maybe once or twice in a comic you can creep outside the lines a bit, or maybe if that’s an aesthetic choice for your comic. If it happens multiple times on every page, you need to plan your dialogue a bit better. If all else fails, write the words in first and then box them in.  You also need to know when to use “to” or “too”, “their” or “they’re”, etc. It drives me batty, and I know I’m not alone on that. You also shouldn’t need to write what’s happening in the panels, as Jerell will often use [runs] or [fall].  You have to trust in your ability to be able to show that action in the panel, as in most of the cases where he used brackets I could already see what was happening. In general, don’t be afraid to use bigger panels. There were a few battle scenes in here where everything was crammed into little panels and the brackets really were necessary. Solution: give more room for the action. I hope this doesn’t come across like I’m picking on the guy, but when you’re 18 a knowledge of the basics will take you a long way. Here’s hoping I get to see Battles of Paradise #2 to see what leaps the man has taken forward, but I’d chalk #1 up, except to the most diehard of anime fans, as a learning experience. No price listed, I’m guessing a couple of bucks.
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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A Really True Story
If it says so right in the title, who am I to suggest that isn’t a really true story? Lisa says in her intro that “all the identifying facts have been changed to protect me”. Which is odd, considering that there is no female character in a leading role here, but I’ll let it slide. This is the theoretically the story of two cops and how circumstances helped them catch a potential car thief. I say “theoretically” because it’s really all just an excuse to get to the punch line, but it’s not kosher to give such things away in reviews, so I’ll stick to telling you about the rest of it. Bob and Jake (the two cops) finish up a day of work and head home. Bob realizes that he forgot to tell Jake that they need to come in early the next day but, as is required by the laws of the universe, he only remembers this when he is almost home. He pulls in the driveway, makes a pledge not to leave the car until he talks to Jake, and suddenly hears someone approaching his car. He ducks down, ready for whatever is coming, and he hears the kid talking trash about the other car in the driveway before getting to him. Bob kicks the door open, shocking the kid, who runs into a nearby house. The rest of the comic is a (shorter than you’d think) chase and the previously mentioned punchline, which was set up wonderfully earlier in the comic but it flew right by me. Lisa seems to have this 6 page comic thing down pat, as she managed to pack funny, tense and humiliating all in one pamphlet. It’s worth a look if you have an extra buck or two lying around.
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Tick Tick Boom
I should probably put a little disclaimer here: if you have ever had any serious issues with ticks being attached to any part of your body and you’d care to forget all about it, it might be best to avoid this comic. That’s OK, there are two good ones right below this to choose from. As someone who has had to deal with a tick before, seeing the bloated creature in this comic was more effective than any horror movie. This is the (if there is any justice in this world fictional) story of a gigantic tick, how it is discovered and how it meets its maker. There is a man who had a traumatic experience with a tick as a young boy, and he nurtures that hatred until he is able to get a job as a tick inspector. Upon arriving in the park he sees a queen tick (again, I can only hope there is no such thing in real life), and it has sucked the life right out of a small, hairless dog. This tick inspector manages to capture it and puts it in a box to the Guinness record committee, but he uses some unfortunate word choices on the box, and well, that title is an appropriate description for more than just ticks. This also has a handy chart of the tick life cycle, and some subtle (if pointed) commentary on tv news anchors. Like I said, as long as you’re not scarred for life from some childhood tick trauma, this is a pretty great story and you should probably check it out.
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Strange Science Fiction #7
Clones! Had to get there sooner or later. It looks like this is the second to last issue of this series, which is a shame because it’s been a blast, but really, Matthew has probably taken it about as far as he can and he has a new series to work on. Still, he’s not done yet. In this issue Mark decides to make 4 clones to do various chores while he goes out to the movies with Julia. Just friends, of course, as Mark has his head firmly wedged up a nether region in that regard. The clones decide that they need more help, make another clone of their own, and things go downhill from there. For the characters, that is. The comic was a lot of fun. Well worth a look, especially considering that I believe these are all still only $.50 each, and how else are you going to understand the dramatic conclusion unless you read the early issues?
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Strange Science Fiction #5
Here’s a tip to anybody who is making a comic and trying, in whatever fashion, to get it noticed: keep making them on a regular basis and keep sending them to people like me who are willing to yammer on about them. I suppose that’s two tips, but you get the idea. Matthew has been cranking these minis out consistently (about one a month, maybe even a little more than that) and has been sending them to me just as often. Not that this little site is going to make or break anybody, but it doesn’t hurt a thing to have your book talked about on a regular basis. So how about this particular issue� Well, as you can see from the cover, it’s about time travel, a rich subject that could go on for issues and issues if he wanted. In this one Julie falls out along the way, and Mark has no idea where or when she might have landed. She ends up meeting a real man in prehistoric times, and most of the issue is spent with her adjusting to life in a new environment. These are never anything less than an interesting read and this one is no exception, and as always more than worth a look for that measly $.50 price tag…
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Posted by Kevin
April 24, 2010
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Strange Science Fiction #4
Here’s another solid issue by Matthew, as Mark discovers a new dimension. Naturally, this means that he has to explore it, and something like that is never going to go off without a hitch. Matthew also looks like he’s putting more work into his backgrounds, something that never fails to improve the overall look of a book. Well, I suppose it could fail if the artist had no skill whatsoever, but that isn’t an issue here. Also, without going into spoiler territory, we get the best punchline of the series. That sexual tension between these two isn’t going anywhere for the time being, even if I do occasionally get the impression that they have roughly the same anatomy as Barbie and Ken… $.50
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Posted by Kevin
