Sunday Revue April 8: Valley Of The Silk Sky

There Is A Valley Beyond Your Imaginings...

Enter  this valley, and you step into a new world. Do not apply your own rules or expectations here: they have no place. You are in a new place that plays by its own rules. Learn fast, or things might get a bit...

Dangerous...

The creator, Dylan Edwards, describes the story like so: 

Valley of the Silk Sky is a queer YA sci-fi webcomic for ages 13 and up. Follow the adventures of a crew of queer and trans scientists as they attempt to discover new medicinals, find lost artifacts, and generally try to avoid being eaten by the more dangerous denizens of the Valley.

Valley of The Silk Sky can be read here . Even better, it can be bought on Amazon, Gumroad, or read in many forms available at the artist's main site. 

The Rating

A glorious gem of a story, it only needs a touch of polishing.

The Raves

There is so much to love about the Valley. Especially if you have a scientific bent. Especially if you enjoy good worldbuilding. Especially if you're into adventures that don't ask you to leave your brain at the gate. Especially if you're part of the QUILTBAG  cohort. Especially if you like coming of age stories that don't beat you over the head with the message. Especially if...aw heck, you see where this is going.  

This is the perfect story for an adult and the tweens and teens in their lives to share. It's got enough action to hold an 11 year old's attention, enough nuance to interest an adult, and a really lovely sense of interpersonal humor. The creator has taken the leap that so few world builders dare to do, truly creating a world that is its own entity rather than an analog of our own. Many of the issues we expect to see reflected simply don't apply. That doesn't mean there aren't issues. Oh gods are there issues. But they are not the tired horses of bigotry that we have collectively beaten to death. Now, don't get me wrong, those issues should and do need to be addressed regularly, so that we can understand them. But it's so refreshing to see a story that lets us look at the world as it could be on the other side of the fights we're in today: a world where race and gender are such non-issues that they don't need addressing. The diverse groups of characters, human and otherwise, binary and otherwise, are shown as people. Simple as that. 

The characters in these stories have other things to worry about.

Things like bandits, invasive plant life and deadly predators. Oh, and misfiled paperwork. Lots of it. 

One of the things to love in this work is the relatability in the interpersonal relations and the situations. Strange as it is, we share the characters' frustrations with bureaucracy:

We laugh with them as they experience the wonders and the exasperations of cultural exchanges. And we give a sappy sigh at the power of friendship. Come now, you know you like to give a sappy sigh once in a while.

Another selling point: this story is clever. One of the plot points revolves around invasive plant species. Does the plant eat people? No, but it wipes out economically valuable native species and impoverishes communities by wiping out their livelihood.
*Leans forward over podium* Gentle readers, do you know how rare it is to find a story with a real-world issue that is not overtly violent being used as a main plot point? Especially one that involves the economic value of plant life?
Let me tell you. Vanishingly rare. Hen's Teeth rare. The bookish squeal of delight I let out when I read that scared my cat.

The clever use of science, ethnobotany, biology and architecture makes the world creation a character in its own right. Without beating you over the head at any point, the story subtly weaves its readers into a new biosphere with its own traits. I especially appreciated the nicely understated way in which the creator shows the view of the world through human and non-human eyes to make it clear that the world does, indeed, look different to us all. Especially if 'all' includes beings who see in heat signatures.

The story also makes us question our own assumptions in the best possible way. What at first glance to Western human eyes looks like an alien cheesecake art piece turns out to be a bathing ritual. Yep, Harakos clean themselves and each other the way cats do, with their spiny tongues. No sex involved. Get your mind out of the gutter, you!

I also devoured the chapter addendums, each of which is a witty and well-thought-out world building dissertation. No, this is not boring, dear readers. This is fascinating, and the perfect thing to read with your youngsters in order to get them interested in the underlying structures of their own world to boot. Of course you can always read it yourself, for the sheer joy of exploring new ideas. I know I did. 

The Razzes

The only thing that knocked this story down a peg was the art. Lovely and fascinating as it is, it's also got a bit of work still to do on creating anatomically natural moving characters. Too often, the characters are stiff, especially at a distance. They often seem to be missing joints as well, creating wooden arms and/or legs and a hard-to-pin-down sense of something 'off'.

I'd also like to see a smoothing out of the color washes. The general stylistic effect is nice, but in some areas the effect gets a bit too scribbly and could do with some cleaning up. 

The coloring issues can be aided by running a *slightly* dampened sponge over the color laid down by the marker, as long as the creator is using a water-fast marker for the linework. The body dynamics are best worked on by doing a little more with wire-frame sketches before setting down those final lines. And by that, I don't mean draw more wire-frames. Many, many great artists have used wire frame and still ended up with stiff characters.  Instead, focus on lines of action. 

Art By Patchy9

The line of action technique starts a character not as a series of blocks attached by lines, but as a single flowing lines with other lines radiating from it. The body shapes are then drawn in over these lines, and a character emerges.

Art By Matt Smith

If the creator would like to improve on their fluidity, I'd recommend working on line of action warm up drawings once a week for a while, and maybe working it into their art style.

The Revue

This is a great story. Hand it to your kiddos. Hand it to your nerdy buddies so you can geek out together. Hand it to your favorite biology-field folk. Hand it to some teachers, this would be great in a classroom. It has a lot to teach folks.
What you learn from it may surprise you.

Independence Weekend Revue #1: Handicape

When Was The Last Time 

You Really Looked

 At The World Around You?

Look Up And Pay Attention To

It's so easy to go along accepting what happens in your life. You do your job, you get your pay, you take your breaks when you can. It's so easy to accept what you're given.
But do you have to?
That's the question at the heart of the comic Handicape, the creation of Red Tempest Media. 

Bound to his wheelchair, Ethan Stone doesn’t know about a deep and ancient conspiracy with its epicenter in the very town he lives in. As he learns that he has rare powers, he’ll have to discover his potential to overcome the dark conspirators and save the world.

The Rating

Powerful messages, deftly delivered

The Raves

Handicape asks the hard questions that our culture so often ducks or papers over: What makes us valuable? 

What makes us right? 

What makes us wrong?
What if the people in power 

have betrayed the people they serve?
What will you do about it?

   In flow and emotional content, the story is a blend of House of Cards and Daredevil (er, in a good way.  Without the ridiculous ethnic stereotyping. Sorry Daredevil fans, Russians don't start singing old folk songs as they're dying and all Asians aren't inscrutable)
 The events are deftly understated and thoughtful, layered with undercurrents. On the surface, it's simply the story of disenfranchisement and disenchantment. It's classic rebels without a cause fighting 'the man', right?
Look again. Look deeper. Look at who's pulling the strings.

That's what Andrew is intent on doing. Andrew is good friends with Ethan Stone, the wheelchair bound kid he's been close to since high school. School wasn't much good for Andrew and Ethan. Andrew got expelled under mysterious circumstances and Ethan...well, Ethan got some career advice. The kind that should get a teacher fired.

     

Their lives and their systematic disenfranchisement by those who would use them as pawns are laid out in slow, graceful arcs of image-based poetry that, as a reading experience, is a little like the most exquisite Chinese water torture. The tension just keeps building all the time, and there's no end in sight. The difference is, you don't want this tension to end.
The art style supports the story perfectly, the colors both bleak and rich. Character design, body language and facial expressions all add depth and nuance to the storyline, underlined when, at important junctures, the scene is stripped down to a pure watercolor style sans background and you're forced to pour all your attention into the characters. In this story, it really is about them: what the world does to them and what they choose to do in response. And what's that?
They choose to fight. Not with big, showy gestures: bombs and guns. That kind of physical fight is attractive because it's fast and easy. But the characters in Handicape fight with blogs, with information, and with what they have: their hope, their minds and their determination. They are ground down by the world every day, but they won't give up. They won't surrender to disability, to authority, or to dismissal. That is true bravery.

The Razzes

I have one request for the creators: please double check before you upload, you've got a handful of typos and wrong updates that bring down an otherwise pristine work.

The Revue

Ditch the caped crusader movies. Here's a story about real heroes: the quiet people who work every day to stop injustice.

Saturday Revue May 14: The Ladybugs Anthology

Need A Litle Variety In Your Life?

Come Explore The Possibilities With

Hey lads and ladies, a lovely little comic anthology was released just this Wednesday, and I was given a sneak peek into the works. This collection is the creation of the Ladybugs, AKA the Los Angeles Women's Comic Creators League. Comprising 15 stories and coming in at a whopping 119 pages, it's a charming romp through the many worlds these ladies imagine. It can be bought here, and if you're in the LA area, here's a link to learn more about the group and the release party for their premiere anthology; could be fun!

The Rating

A few stumbles, but not at all a bad performance

The Raves

There really are some gems in this anthology. In my case, I'll put in a split vote for best in the anthology between 'Bounty Hunter Space Besties', a story of bounty hunters who find something much, much more dangerous than the drugs shipment they were hunting for,

 and 'Orion', an excellent and touching exploration of raising a child in a post-apocalyptic world.

But there's quite a few gems in this anthology, from the candid sweetness of 'Playdate' to the laugh out loud imagery and very relatable emotions of 'Test Day'

The art of a number of the included pieces is impressive; Angelica McLaughlin's sketches will make you feel cheerful all day, for instance, and Christine Hipp does gorgeously clean and expressive linework as well as wonderful storytelling that is surprisingly thought-provoking. I really enjoyed these pieces; they explored the entire gamut of the human experience, including the mundane, the divine and the messy bits. 

The Razzes

Er...ladies? It's fun to get your friends together and work on something, but I'd really think twice about including sub-par art just because a friend did it. When sub-par work is mixed with high-class art, both pieces suffer; one by association and the other by comparison. The anthology would have been all the better for cutting things like 'Predator and Prey' and 'The Struggle Is Real', which look less like finished anthology pieces than doodles done in a spare moment. 'The Rainbow Bridge' obviously had some work and some thought behind it, but the art just couldn't support the story and really should not have been included in something that people are buying.
I was actually on the fence even on the first work in the anthology, and that's a bad thing; impatient readers will drop a book if the first few pages of art do not intrigue. The next time you do an anthology Ladybugs, I recommend putting your best foot forward and putting one of your most experienced artists in the first-story slot. It'll go a long way towards upping your reader retention.  Leading with work like 'Manifest' might be a nice gesture, but it isn't going to impress anyone.

I'd really like to see the editor ride her creators a little more in story design as well. Quite a few of these stories have little or no resolution, and leave the reader feeling mildly cheated and confused. Anthology stories should be whole in their entirety. They really shouldn't say 'to be continued', and they shouldn't feel like they have 'to be continued' tattooed on their heads either.

The Revue

I'd definitely read it, but I might buy the digital copy rather than the print. Great first try Ladybugs, you'll do even better next time!

Sunday Revue April 10th: O.S.F. Galatea

Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Put Your Hands Together! There’s Someone New Onstage!

Hello! My name is Glenn Song. I’m the author and illustrator of the comic This Mortal Coil, which Olivia has reviewed here. This Mortal Coil is about a Gothic Lolita deity, Kamiko, and her adventures helping mortals who become entangled with spirits, demons, and gods from the Eternal Realm. The first story “The Rabbit and the Moon” ends in May and I go on hiatus for a while.

Olivia asked for contributors to the Revue a few months ago, and today I’m answering that call (okay, well, I answered it last week). My reviews will show up Sundays. I look forward to sharing what I know about making comics after self-publishing mine online for the last 3 years, and maybe I’ll learn a thing or two as well -- I am an amateur after all.

At least I’ll get to read all of your lovely comics.

And Now, Without Further Ado, We Bring You...

Otaku.

The moe frontier.

These are the voyages of...

Otaku Space Force Galatea is a comic by David Swanson and Willis Stone. Otaku are “normal people -- as normal as people can get. They live normal lives and have normal interests.” In this story, a fanboy is an otaku gone bad, pulled to the darker side of fandom. They literally become gremlins that attack other humans (or otaku). Each issue of this comic chronicles the exploits of the O.S.F. Galatea and their mission to boldly go where no otaku has gone before and fight fanboys and girls everywhere, presumably so that we may be free to pronounce “Evangelion” and “Gundam” anyway we please.

The Rating

A sci-fi anime romp!

The Raves

As I read through the first issue of O.S.F. Galatea, the thing that struck me about this comic, was that it felt like a very lighthearted tabletop game being presented as a story. My friends and I are casual D&D players and these characters feel like archetypes and personalities that we would come up with for our gaming session. They’re good enough to get the game rolling and to have a few good laughs for a few hours (while harassing the DM and ruining all of his best laid plans). I really got a sense of that when each character turned down their own corridor of the ship and each one had a different encounter. In that sense, Galatea is fun to read.

The writing is chalk full of references to nerd culture -- Simpsons and DBZ come to mind, but there’s much more. The strips “Galatea Gaiden” rely more on Internet memes, video games, and anime tropes for their gags.

The art style evolves over the four and a half issues presented. It starts out like a manga -- grayscale and screentones -- but later becomes full color. I liked a lot of the graphic design in the comic for the O.S.F. and the Galatea symbol. Oh, and this mock-up of Akane's giant fan was really cool too:

Example of some of the great graphic/prop design in O.S.F. Galatea

A lot of the pages contain animation from simple flairs like the gleam on metal or gunfire across a wall to complex animation like Joan the AI making chibi faces as she zips around the bridge or speedlines as characters get into a fight. The animation is a nice touch and brings in some of the anime aesthetic that define its characters, big moments, and world building. It also gives the pages a bit of dynamism, and it’s cool to see “Galatea” embrace that. Why not, right? We’re in a digital medium and we shouldn’t be constrained by paper. So, if you're looking to add some animated effects for your comic, definitely check this one out.

One of the many animated frames in the comic

Having done some animation for my comic, I know it’s additional time consuming work on top of penciling, inking, and rendering a page, but it does add an extra umph to the presentation.

Storywise, I think that they’re trying to create self contained episodes and throw us tiny morsels for the larger overarching plot, which I think is a good way to go about writing stories in high-concept, expansive worlds like this one. You can finish writing/drawing an episode and lead readers onto the next big thing. We can have intimate stories with a few characters, and also, get to the bigger aspects of the world presented in “Galatea”.

The website is clean and simple, and it’s responsively designed to handle desktop, tablet, and smartphone screens so you can pick up and read this work anywhere (I read it on an iPad). Some of the images are fairly large and load slowly on my tablet. I assume because they are animated GIFs. There are some tools like EZGIF's online optimizer and GIMP, which you can use to optimize color palettes and do other things to compress your GIF image.

The Razzies

Organization

My first problem was with the presentation of the first few pages when you read the comic in chronological order. It was a story comic first, then an unrelated gag comic as the next page. As someone coming in cold and binge reading the comic, the gag strips “Galatea Gaiden” threw me off. If the pages were reordered so that we got the first 10 pages that elaborate on the back story and characters, then we’d have some better context for the gag strips. 

Characters

Another issue I had was with the main characters. 

They felt like a collection of gags and anime stereotypes rather than fleshed out individuals. We get a sense of why these folks have banded together -- fighting Fanboys (i.e. monsters) and doing a Robin Hood-thing, but I never got a sense of who they are individually.

If we go back to the tabletop game analogy, the personalities work if I’m at the table playing the game, but once it stands alone as a story, a lot of the humor that would be funny in the moment is lost. I’m looking to connect with these characters beyond the gags.

I assume the characters are all supposed to be otaku of some kind, as the title suggests. In “Galatea” otaku seems to draw it’s roots from how westerners interpret it: someone who watches anime or plays video games, but otaku means more than that. Someone who’s obsessed with a specific hobby - be it anime, idols, manga, history, sports, trains - is an otaku.

For reference there’s some great anime about otaku: Genshiken and Genshiken Nidaime, which are both slice-of-life shows that depict otaku going from college to the working world and how they relate to one another through their hobbies. Princess Jellyfish is about a group of fujoshi (i.e. "rotten girls" or female otaku) who fight to keep their apartment complex from being torn down. There’s also the j-drama Densha Otoko, or the “Train Man”, which is about an anime otaku who saves a beautiful girl from being groped on the subway and ends up trying to date her with the help of other otaku on 2ch.

Embracing this other aspect of otaku might help give the characters some more depth while thematically fitting with the story. Maybe Nobu is a military otaku, and we can get a sense of how he plans tactics in his head for the carnage he’s about to commit. Maybe he knows every detail about the weapons caches he comes across.

Art

The art definitely improves over time, but the biggest issue seems to be the use of perspective for backgrounds. From one of the latest pages:

Wonky perspective with some correction over it.

It’s 1-point perspective going off to the left, but the grid under the Mechland store appears to be going off to another vanishing point. If it’s meant to be some kind of tiled grid pattern then the lines should be straight. The perspective also seems to be really distorted and stretched, and I noticed that in a lot of panels throughout the comic.

If you're looking for a good book on perspective, there’s Perspective! for Comic Book Artists, which presents the concepts of vanishing points and horizon lines all in the form of a comic. Also, Thomas Romain’s twitter feed (he’s an animator in Tokyo) has some nice tips on dealing with background perspective too.

Example of the wonky perspective. There appears to be 3 independent vanishing points.

This is an earlier page of "Galatea", but the perspective looked really wonky. There appears to be 3 different vanishing points in the image. One for the city blocks, one of Nobu that looks like it could be 2-point perspective, and Yukio with his back to the camera. Maybe what we’d really want here is the 1-point perspective, and Nobu and Yukio would have to be pushed up and overlap with the exploding Fanboy to properly achieve the effect. The horizon line also looks like it’s dividing the large panel into two, but it doesn’t seem like that was the intention.

Another issue I have with the perspective is that it’s mostly just lines making up cubical shapes.

Nice perspective but could use a little more background detail to give the place life.

In this panel, he looks like he’s sitting in a large rectangular box and not a cafeteria. The giant LCD gives it something, but the rest on the right is pretty sparse. There could be a little more detail to ground the place.

Website

Minor quibble with the UX: I’d like to be able to click on the image to advance forward through the story instead of pecking at the ‘next’ button. Sometimes I end up hitting the ‘issue forward’ button instead.

Revue

If you’re an otaku, or like internet memes, video game/nerd culture/anime jokes then O.S.F. Galatea might be up your alley.