Independence Weekend Revue #3: Serious Engineering

Get In. Buckle Up. It's Gonna Be A Long Ride.

This Is Serious Engineering

"Freedom isn't free." We hear it a lot these days. It's used to defend everything from your weird neighbor wanting to own a ridiculous number of guns to some of our *cough* more energetic leaders wanting us to *cough* put boots on the ground in another country. The phrase has been used by so many unpleasant causes that it's starting to look a little grubby.
But at its core, it is true. Freedom isn't free. You have to put effort into the things you want. Meet resistance?

Put in more effort.
This is Serious Engineering, created by Roman Jones and Viky Machacku. This is the story of a girl who changed her life.  She's Corelle Lowell.She isn't a superhero, she isn't rich or famous or endowed with special powers. What she has on her side is a goal and a quiet resolve to reach it. She doesn't have a dream; dreams are things you wish for. She has a goal to work for. Corelle wants to be an engineer. She comes from a family that can barely pay the rent. She has every disadvantage. But she wants to build things. 

So she builds herself a whole new life.

The Rating

Rarely have I read such a powerful and affirming story.

The Raves

There is SO MUCH to love about this story. There's its snarky and definitely rated R humor.

There's the goofiness. There's the perfect layout of plot structure and the creation of atypical characters that are FOR ONCE treated as ATYPICAL, as in a different way of thinking, rather than 'broken' or (my all time bette noir) 'special'. There's an exploration of what poverty really does to the people crushed beneath it so profound that I choked up once or twice. I choked on the profound and deeply moving way that characters displayed how you really help someone suffering from a serious emotional trauma: by sitting there with them and letting them know they're not alone.

But I think it's the lucid honesty of the story and the protagonist that makes this story shine.

A lot of difficult themes are explored in this story: loss, pain, poverty, emotional and physical trauma, the failures of our culture. But we're looking at the world through Corelle's eyes in this story, and Corelle doesn't preach. She doesn't rail against fate or fall apart. When she is faced with monumental problems, she takes a moment to experience them.

Then she gets up and gets to work quietly solving them. No angst, no whining, no falsehood. Just Corelle, her problems, and how she solves them. Quietly, patiently, she deals with each obstacle, whether it be her poverty, her family, or a life threatening illness. Corelle's resolution and her quiet, reflectively profound narration of the story of her life and its changes is at turns moving, laugh out loud funny and heartbreakingly evocative. And it's always honest. 

The clarity of the story is matched by the clarity of the artwork; crisp, clean lines and sharp color contrasts create a delight for the eyes, and the color palette keeps the whole thing vibrant and breathing. In fact, use of color is one of my favorite parts about this work, along with a really witty use of background detail to enliven the scene. Keep an eye out for jokes and easter eggs.

The character design is fun and innovative without crossing the line into camp more than a handful of times (it's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there) and both the body language and facial expressions are spot on. There's use of a lot of manga-style visual intensifiers, but they're used deftly and at the perfect emotional moments, which means they do what they're supposed to and enhance the visual experience rather than detracting from it. Bravo!

The Razzes

At the beginning of the work there were some problems with overly small, squashed speech bubbles and small print;  I had to enlarge my screen to read well! But the artist has since realized their error and now the pages are both beautiful and beautifully readable. Which is great because the reader regularly is given extra treats in the form of splash pages with lovely quotations, and struggling to read those quotes was a shame.
I would like to make the suggestion to keep an eye on background shading: take this clip.

It's good, but the background looks a little flat. I'd suggest adding blended shadows to the inside of the window lintels to give a sense that they have depth; adding shadows only to their edges makes them appear to be cardboard cutouts leaned against a wall.  Details like that are pretty minor, but they can jar the eye of the reader.  And keep an eye on that proof reading. It's a bugger, but it needs doing.

The Revue

A wonderful affirmation of the fact that, no matter what's holding you down, you CAN rise. You CAN choose your own life. It will not be easy, but it will be WORTH IT.

Independence Weekend Review #2: Greenshift

Shift Yourselves! It's Time For

The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. It's arrived. Now, what are you going to do about it?
That's the question Greenshift, the creation of Andrew Rodriguez, poses . When you're handed a choice of evils, what do you do?
You become something of a devil yourself.

Buckle in and hang on, it's going to be a bumpy ride.

The Rating

Sassy, stroppy and smart. Okay, you got my attention.

The Raves

The feel of 'Greenshift' can best be explained like this: remember Hey Arnold? 

Okay, great. Now imagine that something very, very, VERY nasty happened to Arnold's city. Wait a hundred years, and what you might get is Green Shift.

Sure it's a mess, but it's home!
The story revolves around Max, a scrounger who lives on his wits and thinks on his feet. Max is all show, and so is Greenshift. This is the quintessential 'show, don't tell' story. We get no boring backstories, no lengthy expositions. Instead we get a world that speaks for itself and a character who we don't need a backstory for. Every action Max makes expands and enhances his personality, and every detail shown fleshes out the world around him. It's a masterfully realized tale, without an inch of wasted page space.
That isn't to say there isn't room in Greenshift for fun. It's the sassy humor that made me think of this as an adult and apocalyptic 'Hey Arnold'. The snarkiness is the perfect response to the heavy handed authoritarian forces who control Max's world, and a nice showcase of humanity coping even in the most dire of circumstances.
It's easy to despair in Dystopia. When your choices are what will kill you outside the wall (on the left) and what will crush you inside the wall (on the right) it'd be tempting to just lie down and give up.

but Rodriguez's creation is diametrically opposed to despair. It's a scrappy, feverishly energetic world full of characters who WANT TO LIVE, whatever that takes. No matter what the world throws at them, Max and his friends are not giving up and not backing down. They trick, they taunt, they write on the walls and they keep bouncing back every day. They dig through trash to find things to sell and sing on street corners. They flip the bird to the authorities and they push the envelope. And they keep trying to find something better. No matter what the world thinks, they know they're alive, and they're fighting to be free.

The color pallette is a perfect choice for the world portrayed, its hues at once intense and slightly skewed. The facial expressions and fluid body language of the main characters are delightful. Those eyebrows! And the backgrounds are wonderfully detailed, fully realized and organic, sometimes pretty intensely. There's a tactile sense to the drawing style of Greenshift, in the most disturbing of ways: seriously, you can almost smell the trash and the exhaust. Some interesting experiments were done with photomanipulation, and it was done well enough that I had to look twice to realize what media was employed. That's harder than it looks; I was impressed.
 And as a last note, the easter eggs all through the scenes are truly snicker worthy.

The Razzes

One thing I'd like to see worked on: while the body language of the main characters is well realized, a lot of background characters end up with stiff cylindrical torsos and rather wooden poses that detract from the appeal of large scenes. Often the faces will be perfectly rendered, but the body will have a rigidness that the clothing doesn't hide. Every character needs to be fully realized, or the discrepancy shows.

The Revue

Carry on my wayward son, I can't wait to see where this is going next.

Independence Weekend!

Announcing The Weekend Of Independence!

Raise Your Hands For

Handicapes!

Green Shift!

And Serious Engineering!

FREEDOM

Freedom. It's a word that gets bandied about an awful lot in America this time of year. We have fireworks and freedom and a few beers. That about covers it for most of us.
But what is freedom?

Freedom isn't patriotic songs. Freedom isn't cheering crowds and nice cars and wealth. Plenty of places where true freedom is scarce have all those things, sometimes in great abundance. The best way to hide a cage is to gild it.

So this weekend, let's ask ourselves this question:

What Does Freedom Mean To Me?

My answer is this: my freedom is in my choice. I choose what I do with my money, my time, my life. If I make a poor decision, I choose to accept the consequences. If I make a good decision, I'll reap the rewards.
But it's. My. Choice. Period.
Keeping the right to make your own choices is harder than it looks. Plenty of people in this world benefit when someone else is deprived of a real choice about what happens in their lives, and they do it in a thousand ways. Information is withheld, and people are tricked into false dilemmas. 

Information is warped, and people are coerced into false choices based on what they've been told. 

Freedom is the making of a choice. It's what the founders of America fought for: the right to choose the future they were working towards for themselves, rather than having it dictated to them. The right to choose who and what they would become. Americans fought to have a choice in our own lives. Every generation that came here from another country fought to find a place, fought for the freedom to make their lives what they wanted them to be.
Some of us are still fighting today. 

We're fighting for the right to choose our lives. 

We're fighting for the right to choose a better way to live, for ourselves and our children.
We're fighting to be seen as people who deserve a choice.

As a people, we Americans haven't always chosen right. In fact, sometimes we've been dead wrong.
But here's the thing: every day, we have the freedom to make new choices.

It's up to us to make them.

When we sit back and let someone else make the choices....well, read your history books. There's plenty of examples in them on what happens when we give up our choices.

This weekend, America celebrates its independence. In honor of our right and our responsibility to make the choices that will decide our future, we'll review three comics that remind us of this fact:

We have the ability-and the duty- to stand up, raise our heads, raise our voices.

We have the Freedom to make a Choice. We must use it.

Here's hoping these comics will give you insight. What you see in them is up to you.