Sunday Revue July 29: Romantically Apocalyptic

Pull Yourself Together And Get Ready For

After you meet Mr. Snippy, you'll never look at a bad day the same way again. His bad days include:

*Homicidal houses

*Insane travelling companions

*Getting tied up in a pink wig, while sober

and oh, yeah. Living through a nuclear winter. Or trying, anyway.
Some days are bad, and some days are Romantically Apocalyptic.

The brain-child of Vitaly S Alexius, the website tells us 'Romantically Apocalyptic was first conceptualized in 2005 as a series of post-apocalyptic paintings on deviantart by Vitaly S Alexius. It was developed into an online graphic novel in 2010 and grew into a surreal, collaborative, multimedia art project that includes: poetry, prose, photography, digital art, music and film.'

The current creative team is:

Art Director:

Vitaly S Alexius

Phototography:

Vitaly S, Oggy B, Chico G, Mabi.

Journal writers:

Vitaly S Alexius, Kaitlin Gossett.

Contributor Artists:

Mabi, Allyssa N / Hatsie, IIDanmrak, Andrey F, Christine Z, Ivan Yakushev, Malin Falch, Caroline H

UK Events Organisers:

Clare Cook, Oggy B

Chief Music Editor:

Oggy B

Ze Intern:

Tina Hoffman

Romantically Apocalyptic can be read at this link  and purchased at this one. Oh, and by the way, this comic's animated. It's definitely a work that takes your brain for a spin.

The Rating

A Topsy Turvy Tour De Force!

The Raves

To begin with, this thing is gorgeous. With its grasp of artistic conventions and its offbeat sense of humor, RA takes you through a cracked looking glass and into some of your weirder dreams. 

Then there's the world building. Tech advanced and human nature did not. Eventually, the inevitable occured: our species decimated itself and the planet. Now the handful of survivors scrounge in the rubble, fight creatures mutated to survive so much better than they can in the wastes, use the bits of tech they're left to scrape a living and dream of other things. But you don't have to look so glum about it!

The characterization is a fascinating and fun exploration of altered states of consciousness and mental process. If Mad Max had sung kids' songs or if Bruce Willis had been on bad Prozac while creating his dire futuristic movies, they would have been a bit like RA. It's a trippy ride through the comforts of delusional thought, gallows humor and friendship in the grimmest of grimdark situations. 

The Captain and Pilot have gone so far down into their own dreams that reality can no longer hurt them.  They set up Christmas parties with skeletons and hold conversations with billboards. To keep the readers in their mindset, the realistic art is regularly broken up with chibi scribbles.

Funnily enough, in their situation this kind of dissociation isn't a terrible idea. If they didn't reinvent the world into something they enjoy living in, they probably wouldn't survive long.

Unfortunately for their 'friend' Charles Snippy, he's still sane. He's relying on sheer stubbornness and weary survival instinct. And he's getting really sick of these nutcases. The contrast between Snippy's dogged and nihilistic sanity and the rosy madness of his companions is disturbing, intriguing, and downright laugh-out-loud funny.

Surreal, silly and terrifying by turns, this is a story worth following.

The Razzes

Er...correction. This is a story worth following when you can. While I enjoy the explorations of altered states of consciousness, at times the story wanders so far into the surreal that it becomes incoherent. This is especially true in the primarily textual sections, which read at times like a narrative and at times like pages from a psych patient's diary. That's interesting for a paragraph, maybe, but it palls very quickly. As a reader I found myself scrolling past these sections, not invested enough to parse them for meaning. But there would be a picture that drew me back into the flow. That's the problem with experimental writing: some experiments blow up.

The Revue

Get some shots or a bowl and give it a read. You'll be glad you did. Allonsy!

Daniel: A Grave Tale of Horror

Ladies and Gentlemen!
Today, I present you a grave tale of horror!
The story of Daniel!

Are you gonna mop that up, Daniel?

Daniel, created by Sara Nelson, is set in 1934 and is a story about the titular character, Daniel, his crush, Christine, her family, and potential rival,Wayne. Daniel is mild-mannered, introverted, and awkward, but after an encounter with Wayne, events take a bad turn for Danny-boy, who finds himself among the undead. Turned into a vampire. How? You'll have to read to find out. Over the course of the nine chapters (it's not completed yet) we're presented with an intimate look at Daniel and Christine's encounters after his transformation and slowly unravel the mystery behind him.

Rating

Raves

Story

I tend to like intimate stories like this one. It's focused almost entirely between Daniel and Chrissy. Epic adventures are fun, but I get lost with the sea of characters and their motivations. This story begins with a cute romantic moment and a lot of awkwardness and stuttering by Daniel, which I found that mildly annoying after a while, but as the story unfolds, Daniel becomes unhinged in latter chapters as he seeks vengeance against Wayne and lusts after Chrissy's blood.

I thought Sarah handled Daniel's transformation from shy and introverted to unhinged pretty well. The chapters are long and the pacing a bit slow, but it's enough time to really settle in and have nuanced moments with Daniel. It's those moments that give us the gradual progression into the darker chapters later in the story, and they do get pretty dark so if you're squeamish when it comes to blood and gore you may want to skip it.

Art

I dig the black and white look of Daniel. It's set in 1934 and the black and white gives it that old-timey charm.

The characters are really well drawn. They show a good sense of proportion. The clothing is detailed and looks from the era. Everything is cleanly inked and softly shaded. The character expressions are exaggerated but help sell a lot of the emotion. I like the eyes in particular where we can see a lot of the fear and craziness come through in later chapters.

Razzes

Art 

One of my qualms about the art in Daniel is the backgrounds in the panels. Yes, they're rendered nicely in black and white but they appear sterile.

Where are all of the people in these backgrounds? Even one or two would help sell the illusion of human presence otherwise it looks like a ghost town. Now, maybe that adds to the horror of it, but my initial reaction was the stage felt devoid of life. I don't know if these are 3D models, but they give me the feeling they are mostly barebone 3D models traced-over and textured. It's not a bad job by any means. The texturing fits the perspective and and line work is really good, but the building facades look flat and too perfect. Some bumps on the building silhouette could help show the unevenness of the brick, plaster, or concrete. The windows and doors could be deeper inset to show thickness as well.

I also notice some issues with building proportions and perspective issues. Whereas the character proportions look decent, the windows, door frames, and various aspects of the buildings don't seem to be proportioned well. The windows of the house (above) and in the previous perspective example appear too wide.

Anime artist Thomas Romain has some great tips for drawing buildings in perspective, which you can read here on Kotaku (or find on his twitter account).

The first example talks about building proportions. There are more tips in the article on Kotaku.

Here's a tutorial on constructing a building using a flat image manipulated into the perspective using Photoshop's transformation tool.

Word Bubbles

Another small nitpick I had was with the word bubbles. The words are arranged in a square and then circled with a word balloon, but it leaves uneven spaces around the dialogue and the bubble. The letters come close to the edge of the bubble in this case. The word bubble carrots appear too thick and in a few instances I saw them implicitly criss-crossing over one another. It's not a big deal. I was able to figure out which character was speaking, but these are minor things that could be fixed in future pages to make a great presentation even better.

Revue

Daniel's a story that unveils its mystery and insanity over time. It's well drawn and an enjoyable, intimate, and at times a deeply unsettling and an uncomfortable horror story.

Halloween Double Feature Revue: Hopeless Maine

Are You Ready For A Story?

Listen Close, And I'll Tell You Of Hopeless, Maine...

So glad to have you come to town. Mind your step, you don't want to trip on a tentacle.Oh, her? She's the nanny for a local family. Didn't you know ghosts make the best nannies? Oh by the way, the town witch's selling curses at half price this week. Only the best quality of course. None of this mass produced plague rubbish.
Welcome to Hopeless, Maine. It was imagined by Tom Brown, written by a woman he ensnared in his imagination (she's now Nimue Brown) and ready to ensnare you....
According to the creators, 'The small island of Hopeless, off the coast of Maine, is a breeding ground for demons, freaks, vampires, and other creatures of the night. Our story follows Salamandra, a young girl with one foot in our world and one foot in the otherworld, as she navigates a life on the edge of reality.'
You were warned. 

The Rating

Spooktakular!

The Raves

Dark. Shadowed. Things you can't name moving out of the corner of your eye. In a word: atmosphere. This work has it in spades. Every panel, even the most mundane, has a sense of something shivering on the edge of your vision: something unseen, unnamed and all the more disturbing for it. And then of course there are the blatant dissonances with reality: the family (skeleton) dog, the dead nanny who sometimes forgets to hide the fact that her face is a skull. The neighbors sleeping in their coffins. The tentacles in the bay. All these things are accepted with perfect equanimity by the residents of Hopeless, lending the work an air of macabre magical realism reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's 'From The Dust Returned' and 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' as well as a hint of Neil Gaiman and Brom, a dash of Lovecraft, and a little Addams Family in there somewhere too.  It's a truly thrilling and beautiful work. Oh, and the characters are pretty thrilling too! The town witch, the preacher's son, the girl who plays with lightning, each of them is at once an archetype and a character in their own right; stubborn Owen, dreamy Salamandra, each with their own yearnings and kennings. 

The storytelling beautifully balances the mundane and the mysterious, playing on the unique human ability to accept almost anything as 'normal' if it's presented right. The storyline explores many of our deepest human motivations: to fit in, to have power, to feel safe. And it explores the dark uses those needs can be turned to: combine the need to feel like part of the group and the need to do something in the face of an event that makes you feel helpless-a plague, say- and you have witch burnings. Combine the fear of death and the invitation of a friendly smile, and you might just sell your soul.
But it's really the art that sells this fantastic and fanciful world where the veil between real and unreal has been shredded to ribbons and left to twist in the wind.

The Razzes

I would have liked to give this comic a ten, but there's a snag. The art's stunning. The writing's superb. But the reading platform? That flies like a lead balloon, and no amount of magic is going to make it less of a burden.
Here's what happens: You go to the Hopeless Maine site. You get a page with eerily beautiful illustration, an introductory explanation...and no comic. Puzzled, you begin to poke about. Under the 'books' section, you find a list, click one. 

Another beautiful illustration with a link to 'read the book here'. You're then redirected to a yumpu.com digital image of the book, and your torture begins. Click to read and you get an insanely blown up version of each page with text that's grainy. Not unreadable, mind you...but awfully close. It doesn't help that the text is somewhat crammed in its word bubble to begin with, but I believe the fault lies with the upload. The art's fared far, far better than the text has when being scanned in. You click again...and the image arbitrarily shrinks again because apparently you clicked the wrong spot. Surprise. The fact that you spend a lot of time mucking about with your mouse, frowning, clicking and frowning again to read each page or properly view each image....you begin to see the problem.
I can see the creators' reasoning: they want to sell books. They want you to see how beautiful the books are, but they want to give you a reason to buy the better quality version. All that said, as a reader if what I remember about your work is being annoyed, I'm less likely to buy it. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Brown, if something is to be hosted on the web, please make it easily readable on the web. It's a terrible amount of work to redo all that text...but it might just be worth it.

The Revue

A must read. Eerie beauty that shivers in your bones and sticks to your dreams. The perfect read on a Hallowed night....with all the candles lit.