Double-A World-Zine Issue No.1: Break On Through to the Other Side!

By Anthony Atkinson

bigaband.com

This comic seems to have been created for a sort of strange (though interesting) reason. In the introduction Atkinson says that he's writing a story about someone travelling to another world, and that this comic zine is all about the development of that world. Neat!

This issue is about different types of alternative worlds, where they could be located, and how it's possible for people to find them. We have nuclear submarines discovering tears in the fabric of space and time, a giant Elvis heads that reveals a mysterious jungle, a tiny world located inside a filing cabinet, and a world found inside the hollow Earth (which is reminiscent of one of my favourite hidden worlds: Skartaris. Located inside the (hollow) DC universe Earth, and discovered because a pilot got confused by the Earth's curvature and flew into a hole at the North pole. Seriously! Comics are awesome!).

They're all pretty neat, and I'm a sucker for lost worlds and hollow Earth stories, so I dug this a bunch. I'd love to read the second issue sometime, as apparently it's about what these mysterious other worlds look like.

One Thousand Lies

By Laura Terry

www.bravesailor.com

This was a cute little story about a travelling itinerant who returns to LA to visit his former guardian, a bit shot lawyer. There's an immediate disconnect between the lives of these two people. One who is constantly dealing with huge piles of money, and the other who has all of their belongings strapped to their back.

The comic is about telling stories, and features the traveller telling increasingly ridiculous stories about some of the places they've visited on their travels. There's a city where the library is where you go for drug deals while intellectuals hang out in the playground providing answers for people, one where the railway tracks separate the mobile part of the city from the permanent part, and a city that was built to reflect the universe, but is now eerily empty.

The rapport between the two main characters is well represented, and you can tell a lot about the relationship between the characters just from their body language and the way they talk to each other. The dialogue and actions manage to reveal a lot about their interests and how they feel about both their own lives, and the lives of each other. That the friendship even exists despite the vast differences in lifestyles says a lot!

The stories are all fun, and even when they're being "creepy", it's still in a humourous way. The art works pretty well for the story it's telling, and Terry is good at making pages of "talking heads" look visually appealing as the characters banter back and forth. I also enjoyed the use of gray shading to give depth and shadow to the artwork.

Two Fisted Librarians

You know, I was so busy not updating this blog at all (and then writing reviews for it), that I completely forgot to post about the new anthology zine that I'm editing!

Two Fisted Librarians is a collection of fiction, comics, and art created by librarians concerning libraries and librarians. The deadline is April 30th.

We’re looking for stories that fondly recall the pulp magazines of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, and comics of the ’40s and ’50s. Mad science, weird fantasy, occult horror, spicy mysteries, noirish romances, thrilling adventures, and whatever else.

Want to write about a library that uses steampunk technology, a cataloguing system so obtuse that it drives those that try to use it insane, or a librarian who has to track down a Nazi zeppelin in order to get an overdue book? Go for it! Send an email or check out the blog for more info.

Stranger Knights #3

 By Bill Volk, Casey Bohn, Mary Soper, and Bryan Stone
www.billvolk.com
bohnhelm.blogspot.com
www.bryan-stone.com

Good job Matthew, failing to scan the cover entirely...

Anyway! This is an anthology of sci-fi, fantasy, and super hero comics, and all of them are pretty good! Kind of surprising given I generally don't care for about half of any anthology I read.

In The Capsule's Promise by Volk, the world is invaded by a murderous alien who wants to kill everyone. Two of the Stranger Knights, presumably some sort of super hero team, are nearby and go to find out what's going on. There's Ninurta Frankenstein who is some sort of weird monster thing made of stitched together body parts (and what looks like half a giant baseball attached to his stomach) who appears to be at least partially based on a Sumerian god of war. However he's much more interested in welcoming the creature to earth and sharing culture with it, and isn't too impressed when they end up in a fight. There's also Little Headphones, the unpaid intern of the Stranger Knights who...shoots people? I think that's his only power. Anyway, I enjoy a healthy dose of philosophy in my fight comics, so I liked this.

The Orb of Shalla by Stone is a fantasy piece and probably my favourite story in the whole book. It features a robot and a cat girl who ride weird dinosaur/lizard creatures, acquire a treasure map, and head off to lands unknown in an attempt to loot abandoned ruins

I enjoy robots in fantasy settings, even if it doesn't make any sense or maybe because it doesn't make any sense. Stone's art in this story is attractive and uses good use of cross hatching and similar techniques to help create depth and contrast. Several pages of the comic are entirely silent, and yet they're easy to understand and follow. Plus there's a weird horned pig thing.

The other two pieces are another Stranger Knights story and a science fiction one, both of which are somewhat superhero-ish. While I enjoyed the stories in both of these, the artwork didn't appeal to me in the same way. But overall I enjoyed this, much as I did the first issue.

Expeditions and Adventures

By the Radar Friends and the Sonar Gang
(Two comics collectives which are now defunct, or at least their websites no longer work, I got this at contributor Jordyn Bochon's yard sale.)

It feels kind of weird reviewing older works by people who are still creating. Older works done by people who aren't that old are almost by definition not going to look as good as their current stuff. Drawing skills will improve, story telling will improve, hell, even knowledge about how to publish things will improve.

So yeah, I'm reviewing a five year old comic I got for free. How useful! Clearly my reviewing skills haven't improved in the several years I've been updating this blog.

This anthology features six different tales of daring do and thrilling undertakings. Tim Carpenter's Adventure Comics #371 is a tale of an early 19th century adventurer. Of course, as you can tell from the title it's also one in a longer series of stories that I don`t believe exist. This means that there isn`t really any beginning or end, though as I've definitely written my share of stories like this I can't really complain. Art-wise Carpenter has some nice use of shadow and blacks, though there's not much in the way of backgrounds.

Lydia Fu presents a tale of the pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny. I think by now this story has been done to death, though I`m sure someone will comment and say they've never heard of them before. Anyway, it features hard to read computer lettering (I`m guessing a font didn`t reduce/copy well), and full page lesbian sex. Woo!

Colleen MacIsaac does a comic about the Bathyscaphe Trieste, which is something I'd never heard of before! It's a neat story about undersea exploration in the 1960s, and the artwork manages to convey things pretty well. There are definitely some problems with the reproduction, but I'm glad I read this one.

Heather Verdin contributes a brief, almost wordless, tale about travelling by train, while Jordyn Bochon's story about rescuing a cat up a tree had some charm but definitely suffered from "I know your art gets better than this"-itis.

The final story by Kim Hoang and Mark Lee is a D&D inspired fantasy tale of a party of adventurers getting to a town and splitting up to get more supplies. Most of the story is about looking for hats, and I thought it was cute and funny. I liked the cartoony nature of the art, and the use of zipatone in the background. This was probably my favourite.

Cerebus the Newsletter #18

Edited by Margaret Liss
www.friendsofcerebus.org
PO Box 6997
Warwick, RI
02887
USA

Cerebus was an incredibly long running (300 issues over more than 25 years) indie comic created by Dave Sim and Gerhard that started off as a barbarian parody, but eventually featured a lot of political satire, philosophy, and other stuff (like Groucho Marx). It's an incredibly impressive feat, and what I've read of it has been pretty good.

It's just too bad that Dave Sim went insane.

You might think I'm exaggerating, but people seem to think that he has real mental health issues. His opinions about religion, gender (or more specifically women and their role in society), and philosophy are...controversial to say the least. Despite this he continues to have many ardent supporters, and Cerebus itself is an incredibly impressive work with large sections that are really good.

Cerebus the Newsletter is a fanzine that has come out since the Cerebus comic ended. It features fanart, Cerebus history, letters from readers, essays about various philosophical/mystical aspects of Cerebus, and a discussion segment with Dave Sim called "God Talk".

The discussion is interesting because in it Sim talks about his religious beliefs. Some of it seems kind of reasonable, some of it is kind of gibberish, and some of it is just flat out weird.

"It's only in the last couple of years that I've fully repented: I would have been better off to never have fornicated.

Fornication was a mistake from the first to the last one. I only hope I have enough years left to make amends.

[...]

I was in a cesspool up to my eyeballs and I've spent eleven years climbing out of it."

Dave Sim is a weird guy, and he's so tied to his own impressive body of work, that it seems reading about him is almost as important as reading the work itself.

The Sea Part Three

By Will Kirkby
chamonkee.livejournal.com

Dang, it's been like six months since I last read one of these, and almost a year since I read part one. Maybe I have too many things to read. And maybe (probably) I should dig up the first two issues of this series and reread them since upon starting this one I'm a little lost (but I'm not even sure if I still have those issues anymore).

My confusion as to what was going on in this issues makes me think that anyone picking this up without reading the previous two issues might not enjoy it much (though I suppose I could be completely wrong). We're dropped into the middle of a plot, there's a time jump I didn't really get, characters aren't introduced very well, and one of them only speaks Japanese. Okay, so the main character (who's thoughts we are able to read) can't understand him either, and by not translating the speech Kirkby is putting us more into the mindset of the main character, but it's kind of annoying because he's clearlying saying _something_, I just have no idea what.

The story itself invovles captivity, monsters, escapes, amateur surgery, ominous predictions, and similar things. Kirkby uses first person narration to tell most of the story, and unfortunately it doesn't work as well here as it did in issue one. There the character was trapped on a boat and had only himself to talk to for most of the comic, whereas here we have other characters but have no real knowledge of what they're up to.

While the story disappointed me somewhat I continue to enjoy Kirkby's art. He uses a lot of close-up images of the characters heads in his art, each almost filling the panels. These are good at creating a sense of claustrophobia, and I remember them working really well in the earlier comics. However once the characters escape from captivity I'm left longing for bigger images that show more of what's going on. Kirkby at times does leave the four panel grid behind and draw images across an entire page, but all these really do is make me wish that all of the art was bigger and that this had been released in a different format.

If you haven't read any of Kirkby's comics this isn't the best place to start. Instead you should go and pick up issue one of The Sea or the Birdsong anthology he's involved with. He's an excellent artist, and I look forward to seeing what he'll work on next.

The Sea Part Two

By Will Kirkby
chamonkee.livejournal.com

I really enjoyed the first volume (issue?) of Kirkby's The Sea, and I was looking forward to reading the second one. Though, I will be honest, I had no idea there even was a second volume until I got it off Kirkby at a comics event, the first volume seemed to have wrapped itself up nicely.

So it makes sense that this comic begins with a completely new character and scenario. The main character this time around is a Japanese WWII fighter pilot. This can be seen as brave (ie. making the “enemy” the main character), or stereotypical (there were Japanese people during WWII who didn't fly planes, am I alone in thinking Japanese WWII pilots are overrepresented in fiction?). I'm not really sure what to think of it, and I guess there's no specific mention that it is WWII. But from the characters’ names, clothing, accessories, and the fact that the Americans are mentioned as the enemy you sort of have to surmise that’s what’s going on.

The story this time follows a character who has crashed his plane on an uncharted island, there follows exploration, mysteries, and monsters! The story is told using the internal narration and frequent close ups of the main character's face that filled the first issue, but now that we’re not spending weeks in a boat there are far more places to go and more people to interact with. There’re still weird monsters, a mysterious stranger who offers a choice, and the main character is left with much soul searching and a difficult decision to make, but while using some tropes similar to the previous issue this is still different enough to be interesting.

The end of the comic features some plot elements that begin to intertwine with threads from the previous issue, but it's not necessary for you to notice this to enjoy the comic. About the only complaint I have is that the comic doesn’t so much end as stop, leaving me desperate to know what happens next.

Darken

By Kate Ashwin
www.darkencomic.com

I feel like it’s been ages since I’ve read a fantasy comic set in some indistinct period in the past/another world that is not as technologically advanced as ours. I’m sure it hasn't been that long, but other than Order of the Stick I can’t think of any.

According to a note from Ashwin at the beginning of this comic, this is an except from a longer story about a group of evildoers who have set out to conquer the world. Here one of them, a thief named Casper, steals a bottle with a djinn in it. The djinn plans on fulfilling the standard wishes someone asks for (wealth and so forth), but doing them in such a way that it would teach the thief a lesson.

Unfortunately for the djinn Casper is unrepentantly terrible. The money he gets turns out to be from nuns (who cares?) and an orphanage (Casper wishes he’d known they had money so that he could have robbed them earlier), and so forth.

While the story was cute, and I liked the art (I enjoyed the djin's design), I didn’t really like the dialogue very much. It seemed sort of stilted and anachronistic. I’m sure that’s the style Ashwin is going for, but Casper sounded more like an Australian (he keeps saying “mate”) than anything else, and for some reason this bothered me.