Saturday Revue October 8: BrunoHarm

Load Your Guns, We're Going On Patrol With

'A dark night in the naked city...great, time for a glass of prune juice and bed. What, you thought a hot dame was gonna walk in? Gimme a break!'
That'd be Bruno Harm, the creation of Travis Shearin. This crotchety crimefighter will save the day, and he'll get the damned kids off his lawn too.

The Ratings

Pretty good for a rookie, you're getting your chops on these mean streets.

The Raves

It's the writing that really charms readers in Bruno: the perfect one-two punch of a subversion of a trope and deadpan humor team up like the Keystone Cops to have you chuckling. This comic is a master of the deft bait and switch: just when you're settling down for a boilerplate noir novel, in stumps a crotchety old fella. So you get ready for a male version of Murder She Wrote? Nope, because there's fight in the old dog yet.  Thought you were getting noir? Sorry, here's the comedy surprise. And just when you thought it was funny, wait! It gets dark!
And while you're being bait-and-switched around the plot like a rookie boxer being flurried by an ol' pro, you'll be chuckling at the deadpan jokes delivered so adroitly that they'll get a chuckle out of you no matter what.

Shading and color scheme rapidly improve, and by the most recent comic they've become quite a treat: bold, sharp and engaging. There's wonderful use of visual intensifiers and sound effects as well, encouraging that Golden Era comic feel. You can almost hear the newsprint crinkle between your fingers.

The Razzes

While there is amazing improvement from the first page of the comic to the last, I'd still like to see a little more work done on figure drawing, especially around the head and joints. For me, the most jarring note in the work was in two areas: shading and layout.
The artist often leaves faces unshaded, while the rest of the body is limned in bold shadow. This leaves faces looking flat, doughy and unfinished when contrasted with the rest of the visual landscape.

and boy oh boy, did following the speech bubbles get to be a pain in the neck! Right to left, top to bottom Travis, that's how English readers do it. Anything else confuses your readers: keep it in mind going forward. I can sympathize, I'm a fellow sufferer in this area of my art, but you gotta keep at it till you got it!

The Revue

Plenty of shenanigans here! All around, a good ol' fashioned Penny Dreadful romp through Noir City. Give it a read! 

Saturday Revue August 27: Ten Years

Come Take A Stroll Down Possibility Lane

With

Ten Years

Should've. Would've. Could've. What would've happened if...we all ask ourselves these questions. Danny Valdez has taken it a step further, creating Ten Years: An exploration of both time and place, and the potential intersections which could have shaped my life. The story splits down two alternate routes with the opening of that dreaded college acceptance letter so many of us remember. Holding it in sweating fingers, our hero opens it and finds...well, he could have found two different things. And that's where things get going.

The Rating

I give it an A for creativity, a C for execution.

The Raves

Reading 'Ten Years' is, for a lot of Americans, like looking in a mirror. It expresses much of our collective social experience in a charming 'boy next door' way, capturing scenes that make you give a gentle, reminiscent smile and remember the time when you were in your own version of the situation.
The writing is solid; the creator is very good at encapsulating an entire social experience or life event in a few panels, and the writing flows from experience to experience in a cogent way. There's a gently affirming comfort in the work as well: even if your life didn't go exactly as you had planned, you can still find joy in it.

The art is extremely stylistic and rather flat, but also highly consistent (an image creation program I presume?) and meshes well with the story style. Nothing particularly wrong.

The Razzes

Problem is, 'nothing really wrong' and 'rather flat' sums up the entire emotional tone of 'Ten Years'.This comic is a little TOO realistic; events happen. People do things. Nothing is really resolved, and though character growth is hinted at there's nothing that calls the character to really rise or fall.

  I've lived in the Midwest, and this is the comic equivalent of sitting on a porch in a small Wisconsin town and watching your neighbors go by. There's nothing wrong with it, and on certain days it's pleasant. But it doesn't' do much beyond comfort.It is, quite simply, ordinary life in Heartland America on paper....and most of us read to get out of our everyday lives.
The creator has grasped all the aspects of comic work and draftsmanship. What they're missing is a soul. I'm hoping they'll use this as their learning project and go forward with a new idea that has a bit more zest. Everything's here but the spark.

The Revue

If you need some mental downtime, grab a seat on the porch, ma will have some iced tea for you. If you're looking for excitement, keep driving.

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 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.

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.