New review today for DemonDust #17 by Bernie McGovern, who is a comics producing machine these days.
Update for 8/7/13
August 7, 2013
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Posted by Kevin
McGovern, Bernie – DemonDust #17
August 7, 2013
DemonDust #17
That’s right, the cover show the Karate Kid in space. No, the comic does not build a complicated story explaining how he got into space, but is instead a dreamy comic about letting your mind expand, pondering your existence and trying not to overthink things. Can you relate to that? Sure you can. Bernie is still using this comic to experiment with whatever is most in his thoughts in any given month, but promises in his afterward to get back to more conventional narratives in future issues. For this one you get to spend a little time thinking about the big questions in the world, or at least the best way to go about not thinking about those questions. Three cheers for him keeping this up, and how he finds the time between this and his other projects I’ll never know. But he is making some of you slackers who only put out one book every few years look bad. Are you going to stand for that? Better get to work on your next three projects to show him that you can do it too…
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 8/6/13
August 6, 2013New review today for Optik Noize #4 by Matthew McDaniel, and if anybody knows his current website, please let me know!
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Posted by Kevin
McDaniel, Matthew – Optik Noize #4
August 6, 2013Website?
Optik Noize #4
It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a comic with no clue as to who produced it or how to get in touch with them, but Matthew managed. That’s right, I already know who he is, but that’s only because I’ve been reading his comics for years. His website also appears to be down, so I’m not entirely sure how you’d get a copy of this if you’re interested, but I’ll do a review of it anyway because maybe you’ve also been reading his comics for years and have a good way to get ahold of him. I missed the third issue of this series, but he seems to be telling a continuing story, as the intelligent dog from the second issue is still around. Anyway, this time around Mark has decided to make a few clones of himself to help with an equation that’s been troubling him. No big deal, it just has the potential to solve basically every problem. That sounds a little too all-encompassing to me, not to mention vague, but I’ll let it slide. Mark decides to go to see a movie with Julie and to leave his clones to do the work, the clones run into some troubles and decide that they need another pair of hands, and they find out the hard way that it’s not a good idea to clone a clone. Some tricky moral questions get asked and dropped and a nemesis is still teased at the end of the book. Matthew has done a great job of keeping this a fun series over the years, although I could do with a bit more character development at this point. Still, it might be heading in that direction after the events of this issue, or it might already be there but I don’t know about because I’ve missed a couple of issues. Either way it’s still worth checking out. Provided that you can find a copy, that is, and I’ll update this with new contact information if I find anything out. That includes the price, obviously, so I’ll guess… $4!
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 8/5/13
August 5, 2013New review today for Nurse Nurse by Katie Skelly. In other news, I feel good about getting more than three reviews together this week. Well, maybe not “good.” Cautiously optimistic, maybe.
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Posted by Kevin
Skelly, Katie – Nurse Nurse
August 5, 2013
Hooray for this being a completed series! Which is probably an odd thing to say, granted, but I saw the first issue for this ages ago and was afraid that it was one of many series that just sort of petered out. Not so! This story is set far into the future (3030, to be exact) at a time when nurses are being sent out to help out with various illnesses that colonists are coming down with while settling different planets. Earth has long since had a population explosion, so they’re forced to take some risks in keeping humanity growing. Why this constant expansion is always assumed to be a good thing is rarely explained in science fiction stories, but don’t mind an old crank like me, as that has nothing at all to do with this story. Anyway, the main nurse is Gemma, and her fellow nurses sabotage her right off the bat when they get to Venus. On Venus she discovers a mysterious gooey substance that comes from butterflies and seems to be causing people to hallucinate/fall in love with each other. She eventually gets reassigned to Mars, but a butterfly sneaks onboard her ship as she leaves, causing all kinds of problems. This was an eight issue series, but apparently the eighth issue was never released, so even if you were awesome enough to keep up with this series you still don’t know how it ends. Other things that I can mention without spoiling anything probably? Space pirates! Clones! Pandaface! Shooting the leg off a guy! Meeting the most popular band in the universe! A malfunctioning ship! There, that should be vague enough for you to not know what I’m talking about. This series is a pile of fun, especially because the small press comics world does damned little in the way of smart science fiction (or any science fiction at all, really). More like this please, and Katie has left herself a little room for more of these stories, so maybe if everybody reading this buys this book that’ll make it an easy call for her. $15
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 8/1/13
August 1, 2013New review today for Passage by Tessa Brunton. Have I settled into a lazy summer schedule of three reviews a week? We’ll find out together tomorrow, when I either do or do not review another comic. Exciting!
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Posted by Kevin
Brunton, Tessa – Passage
August 1, 2013
Passage
Hey artists, I have a rare rhetorical question for you all that I actually wouldn’t mind an answer to: when somebody says that they thoroughly enjoyed your book/comic/whatever, is it an insult or a compliment for them to say that what they really wanted was to see more? I’d think of that as a compliment, but maybe it’s an insult to the idea of your comic as a complete thing by itself. Either way, and with no insult intended, the only thing I didn’t like about this book was that it felt like a part of a larger whole. Not that it wasn’t complete by itself, it just felt like this could have been 32 pages in the middle of a graphic novel and it would have fit in just fine. This is Tessa’s story of her life when she was roughly 12 and a rite of passage that had been planned for her older brother. Her brother (Finn) had been retreating from the family more and more as he got older, so his dad and a few of his friends wanted to get together to throw him a sort of rite of passage ceremony. Tessa shows brilliantly how her parents had given up many of the trappings of a conventional life years ago, wanting only to exist in their own space with their family, so they thought it was important to let Finn know that his gradually pulling away from them was OK, but they also thought it was important to give him a few pieces of advice before he got too far away. It’s tricky to describe the narrative of this comic, as it bounced around a bit between Tessa and Finn and their parents effortlessly, but it never felt scattered or unfocused. Tessa is becoming a woman but is still forced to deal with her mother’s habit of treating her like a child, their dad had quit his job and loved goofing around with his friends (but still seemed to be an attentive and focused father from what we see here), their mom had her quirks like painting in her studio without showing the art to anybody but was also incredibly devoted to her children, and Finn had moved his stuff into a gazebo in the backyard to highlight his separation from his family. This comic comes down to being able to recognize the times when you’re effortlessly happy and to enjoy them while they’re happening, and who can’t get behind that? The art is layered and complex, far behind the abilities of a non-drawing human like me to fully document but trust me, there is plenty going on in every panel. Her two page spread of her house growing up is a real thing of beauty. There are plenty of tidbits in here that make me want to see the rest of the story, although at least one of those tidbits suggests that she may not be comfortable telling any more. Either way this is a hell of a comic, and looking around online I see that it was rightly nominated for a few awards. I can also see that she’s working on a longer story and has a few older comics available, so there’s still plenty to look forward to from her/go back and read. $6.50
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 7/30/13
July 30, 2013New review for Men’s Feelings by Ted May. Yay Ted May! Wait, I’m supposed to be unbiased here, right? Eh, it happens.
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Posted by Kevin
May, Ted – Men’s Feelings
July 30, 2013
Just to take away the suspense up front: when I see a new comic by Ted May, I’m instantly happy. It’s like getting a new King Cat in the mail (but in an entirely different sense, if you can work your head around that). This is a series of short and longish pieces about a variety of topics, which would have been the definition of a mini comic back in the day, but at least a few of Ted’s rejected titles (helpfully provided at the back of the book) refer to this as a graphic novels, so what do I know? Stories in here include an awkward conversation in a bathroom, a crowd gathering because of a house without its blinds drawn, the best day of a young man’s life turning ugly in a hurry, the hilarity and terror of openly cheating, two older married men telling the truth at a wedding, a young man who is perhaps overexcited by football ordering a pizza, a man with the unfortunate habit of choking on his food testing his luck, and a conversation at a cancelled meeting (the people in the meeting were not told that it was cancelled) thinking back to a quiet moment where he opened a window and smelled the fresh air. Less madcap hilarity that I may have been expecting, but that’s on me, not Ted, and there’s still plenty of funny stuff in here. The sheer banality of the last story of the office meeting was damned funny if you have any experience at all in that sort of setting, and the herd-like American quality of gathering in front of a window just because other people were gathering there was pretty damned funny too. Above all nobody does facial expressions like Ted, as you can probably tell at least a little by that cover if you’ve never read his other comics. And why would you have not read any of his other comics? Do you just hate comics? Baffling. Anyway, as always, this is well worth checking out, whether it’s a comic or a graphic novel or some entirely new thing that we’re now calling comics. $5
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 7/29/13
July 29, 2013New review today for Look Straight Ahead by Elaine M. Will. I’m having some general trouble finding time to get back in the swing of things around here, but let’s see how this week goes. Yep, that’s pretty far from promises of a guaranteed five reviews a week. Eh, the weather is nice, it’s summer and everybody else is either not working or slacking at their job, so it does make sense if you think about it…
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Posted by Kevin
Will, Elaine M. – Look Straight Ahead
July 29, 2013
Look Straight Ahead
Somewhere out there is a human with no attention span who started reading this and gave up on it because they assumed that it would end up being another in a long line of graphic novels about a loser trying to get together with the girl of his dreams in high school. Which would be their loss, as this book has only the barest relationship to those very early pages. This is instead a story of madness, the attempts to deal with it and/or avoid it, and trying to come up with a good definition for mental illness. Jeremy is a kid in high school with few friends, but overall he’s made fun of and has very little luck with the ladies. Well, one lady in particular, who happens to be dating one of his few friends. Jeremy escapes a bit into his dreams and art, but these dreams gradually permeate his waking life until he finally ends up smashing a bunch of glass beakers during his chemistry class. It’s always best if you have your freak-out in high school behind closed doors, but Jeremy does not have that luxury, and he ends up getting sent to a facility where they try to get him back to normal. This is where I get into tricky territory in regards to potential spoilers, so I’ll just say that the rest of the graphic novel deals with his conversations with his demons (literally), the ups and downs of trying to regulate his moods and, above all, the world from his perspective. This is where the book really shines, as we’re immersed in his world and his view of what’s happening to him, along with his own internal logic about his conversations with God and his destiny. He also has to complete this destiny before he dies, because “they” have given him cancer and bugs crawling on his brain. It’s some genuinely terrifying and unnerving stuff, and the arc of it is beautifully done. This is damned near required reading for anybody who has had a friend/relative/acquaintance suffer through mental illness, as you see exactly what Jeremy was going through every step of the way. For a first graphic novel it’s damned near perfect, and I’m intrigued to see what else Elaine comes up with. This was published with help from the Xeric Grant, which is now gone, so I’m curious/nervous to see what replaces it. What, aren’t there any rich and famous people who want to help out with this sort of thing? Didn’t I see a quote from Jenna Fischer (from The Office) on an old Renee French graphic novel? Somebody who knows her should see if she wants to help out with a grant like this, as she definitely has a pile of money from that show. But I’ve wandered very far from the subject. Check out this book, that’s what I was getting at before I derailed myself. It should not be missed.
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 7/24/13
July 24, 2013The website connection is spotty enough where I don’t even know if this will get through, but the review today is for First Fight #4 by Bryan G. Brown. And boy howdy am I sick of the connection to this site being so consistently spotty, but I have no idea how to make it any better. Anybody?
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Posted by Kevin
Brown, Bryan G. – First Fight #4
July 24, 2013
First Fight #4
I don’t look at things like the Diamond pre-order catalog (assuming that’s even still a thing), and I don’t know if Bryan’s comics would even be listed in such a thing. But for whatever reason I couldn’t help but think of this being described as “a grown man trains for an MMA fight while losing to everybody but a 15 year old kid.” Accurate, but not at all the whole story. For those of you who haven’t been following this series, Bryan lost his first match, was out of it for three years and decided to get back into fighting. This issue deals with Bryan taking some family members to an MMA event to show them what he was getting into and training with both adults and kids to get himself into fighting shape. I have to say that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me not to check around online to see how this story ends (or at least how it’s progressed if he’s still fighting), mostly because we live in a culture of instant gratification and the production time involved in making and distributing comics is bound to keep him behind real life. With that in mind, it would be helpful if he maybe included a timeline somewhere along the line, although with the events he hasn’t covered yet left out so we can avoid “spoilers.” Of his real life. Maybe “spoilers” is not the right word in this case. Anyway, Bryan is doing the right thing here and taking his time, showing his training and what he’s going through every step of the way. It would be easy for him to put the equivalent of a training montage in here and then just showing his fights, but it’s important to see exactly what goes into an undertaking like this. As a man who’s perpetually not in great shape with periodic bursts of trying to get INTO better shape, I really appreciated his panel when he realized that he couldn’t move the next morning after a particularly tough day of training. I do have one minor quibble: in a story showing how easy it is to do damage to your hand if you hit somebody with your fist, he used the example of Homer Simpson hitting Barney in a bar while Moe stands by. As somebody who’s been watching The Simpsons for the better part of 23 years, I can’t remember such a thing happening. Unless it did, in which case I hope somebody is good enough to remind me of the episode. OK, fine, that isn’t an actual complaint at all, and Bryan probably just wanted to draw some Simpsons characters, which isn’t a crime. This series is still well worth checking out, even if you’re not a fan of fighting and feel squeamish about the whole concept. Believe it or not, the things you’re most squeamish about are also the things that the professional fighters try not to do. Read and be amazed!
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 7/23/13
July 23, 2013New review today for The Index #4: Diogenes by Caitlin Cass. It seems like I’ve asked this here before, but just in case: does anybody out there have a good working plan for how they organize their comics? I’m talking the mini comics that come in all shapes and sizes. My current plan of shoving everything into a drawer when my desk gets too cluttered is not working, even though I have been using that plan for years. Regular long comic boxes are useless for these things. Any ideas?
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Posted by Kevin
Cass, Caitlin – The Index #4: Diogenes
July 23, 2013
The Index #4: Diogenes
Did the comics community as a whole ever get a ruling on the merits of putting a book out in mini comics form vs. putting it all out at once in a graphic novel? Maybe it’s not a problem that can ever be definitively solved. This series, for example, is a series of philosophical discussions that I’m thinking would flow beautifully as a graphic novel. However, Caitlin hasn’t done a lot of comics before this, so maybe this series will get her the recognition/acclaim/$$$ necessary to get a graphic novel together, while if she had just released this all at once as a graphic novel that wouldn’t have given people several issues to get to love this series. There is no answer! Which is a fine way to attempt to start to review this comic. Segue! Caitlin puts a recap at the start of this one, which is absolutely necessary for anybody who picks this up starting with the fourth issue. John and Susan start off in the burning Library of Alexandria with Otlet taking over the index cards. The two of them instantly start feeling useless, but they deal with it in different ways. Susan wants to go for a walk, John wants to take back control of the situation. We learn about Diogenes and it’s not like anything I said here about the guy would constitute a spoiler, but it’s still better to read all about him and his ways yourself. It’s another madcap adventure into the efficacy of constantly categorizing everything, in this case literally as the library burns down around them. This is one of the smarter series you’re going to see, and if you don’t understand it, yes, that is a personal failing on your part. Nah, kidding, she manages to keep it accessible to everyone. Well, everyone who has a natural sense of curiosity and a desire to understand everything. If that’s you, you’re in luck!
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 7/22/13
July 22, 2013New review today for The Outliers #1 by Erik T. Johnson. I actually had this done over the weekend but waited to post it because I know that a good chunk of you use this website to kill time at work (on your breaks, I’m sure) and I think this comic needs to be seen by as many humans as possible. Um, spoiler alert…
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Posted by Kevin
Johnson, Erik T. – The Outliers #1
July 22, 2013
The Outliers #1
It’s worth taking a minute right away to mention how gorgeous the covers to this book are. Yes, “covers,” as there’s a dust jacket type thing that slips over a silver wraparound cover of what are eventually going to be the Outliers. Which is not a spoiler, as that’s what he says up front, but in this issue we only get to see one of these creatures. Oh hey, I’m jumping ahead of myself. This one opens up with a young boy being forced to get on the “short bus” when his bus has a mechanical problem. He’s riding with another kid who never talks (Tsu), they eventually get into an argument and the bus driver is forced to pull over… but not before he almost runs into the giant leg of a creature that we barely see. The bus crashes, the driver and the talking kid make it out, but Tsu is nowhere to be seen. They make it back to the street to find a giant creature placing the bus back on the road and Tsu chanting some words that seem to be controlling the creature. That would all be alarming enough, but those two are not the only ones who see Tsu’s performance, and these new characters seem to have some decidedly violent ideas for the giant creature and Tsu. From there we get a couple of confrontations, the barest glimpses of what may be going on in the big picture, and a solid setup for what’s still to come. In other words, a damned near perfect first issue. This is one of those times where I’m selfishly happy that small press comics have such a tiny audience, as I have a suspicion that anybody in Hollywood with a brain would snatch this story up in a heartbeat if they knew about it. Instead of getting a compromised big budget version of this story, instead we get the pure story in comic form! Eventually. Unless I’m wrong about somebody in Hollywood finding out about this. Eh, enjoy it while you can, as it’s a genuine blast of a comic. $5
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Posted by Kevin
Update for 7/18/13
July 18, 2013Yesterday got away from me, but there’s a new review today for 3-D Pete’s Star Babe Invasion Comics #4 by Mike Fisher.
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Posted by Kevin
Fisher, Mike – 3-D Pete’s Star Babe Invasions Comics #4
July 18, 2013
3-D Pete’s Star Babe Invasion Comics #4
Oh Star Babe Invasion comics, never change. It’s always refreshing to see these retro ladies and read about some of these classic science fiction movies from back in the times when special effects took serious effort to complete (not that the computer stuff is easy on the programmers, but it’s different than the insane amount of time that went into producing stop-motion animation). And for a comic that could easily take one short turn into lewd and creepy, Mike always manages to keep things tasteful and seems to genuinely appreciate the work that these women put into their roles. This one is mostly about Carolyn Munro, who starred in an Italian ripoff of Star Wars called Starcrash (that sounds fantastically cheesy and includes a young David Hasselhoff of all actors), a Sinbad movie and a James Bond movie, among other things. This gives Mike a solid chance to dig into Starcrash, and he joyfully picks apart some of the production problems and ways in which it was obviously lacking in comparison to Star Wars. Hardcore nerds can try and name the characters depicted in the next section to the villains that she played against, but all I could manage was “Jaws” from the James Bond movie, so good luck with that one. Other stories include how quickly computers are going to surpass humans in terms of independent thought, the painstaking process of the special effects of that previously mentioned Sinbad movie, a brief history of Sarah Douglass (the female villain Kryptonian from Superman II) and several full page spreads of either regular pin-ups or what actresses might have looked like in different roles. These comics are always so good-natured that they’re impossible not to like, and this one is no exception. Old and medium-timers, this will give you some serious nostalgia for the good old days (whichever time period applies to you, as we all know that our own preferred period is the best). Young-timers, back in the day they made special effects using actual objects painstakingly placed into position over a period of months or even years just for the sake of one movie. You should look into it! $5
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Posted by Kevin
