Blog Archives
Gumprich, Chris – Evening Shift (with Dwight Williams)
Evening Shift (with Dwight Williams)
Oh random comic, why must you be so inconsistent? There was a decent, simple story in this one. Relatively simple, anyway. A man who gets to set his own hours ends up at a bar late at night and has a chance meeting with a lonely stranger. Sounds simple enough, right? Things get a bit more complicated from there, and it ends up being a pretty good comic in that regard. The problem is with the art. At times it’s pretty good, certain panels and pages here and there. Then at other times it’s awful, and I can’t figure out why that is. Maybe Dwight was rushed, or maybe he’s still learning his trade, in which case he has a ton of potential. It’s just hard for me to understand things like the last panel, where Jack’s (the main character) eyes are almost touching each other and two stocky midgets are outside by the ambulance. This leads to my bit of preaching to all young comic creators out there: every panel on every page is important. I understand if you have a deadline or something and you have to crank it out, but remember that everything you do could end up at the bottom of somebody’s closet and, when they pull the issue out randomly ten years from now, all they’re going to think is that you didn’t give a shit about something that is (for almost everyone who’s doing there own comic) a labor of love. Rant over, this is $2.95, here’s an e-mail address and the website is up there.
Gumprich, Chris – Recriminations
Recriminations Now Available! $1
This is a short one involving two best friends talking about a girl. The problem is that the girl is now dating one of the best friends, directly after dating the other, and the one who was dating her first, naturally, feels betrayed. Like I said, it’s tiny, but it’s a good little story, worth checking out. As it’s so tiny, I guess that means I have to remark on some of the little things. The pages are very dark, which is the choice of any artist, but it makes it a bit hard to tell what’s going on in certain panels. The lettering is also scrunched a bit. It would be helped maybe with a few less giant black spaces and a few more larger panels. Again, these are all my personal aesthetic concerns, but that’s why they pay me the big bucks, right?
Gumprich, Chris & Rainey, Jason – Ace Fedora: Private Eye
Ace Fedora: Private Eye (with Jason Rainey)
Chris seems to have a pile of people willing to do all kinds of different comics with him, which is pretty much always a good thing for a guy just starting out. This is a short one at 8 pages, and I think it mostly done so Chris could say “dame” a few times. It’s a parody of hard boiled stories. You know, James Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, those types of people, which everybody on the planet should read in between comics. This one is about a private eye who’s checking on a man to see if he’s cheating on his wife, although there’s a secret behind his “wife”. It’s was an OK book, over before I knew it. It looked great though, Jason obviously took some time on this one. Contact info is up there, it’s $1.
