Allow me to indulge in some product pimpage here.
Awakening is a zombie horror comic written by Nick Tapalansky, with art by Alex Eckman-Lawn and lettering by Thomas Mauer. It was recently nominated for an Eagle Award. It's published by Archaia Studios, who are responsible for awesome comics such as Mouse Guard.
Also? Awakening is really good and you should buy it.
Full disclosure: I met Nick and Alex at San Diego Comic Con last year. They were extremely nice and professional guys, and I remember they complimented me on my shirt. (That's the way to go if you want to flatter me, really. I heart my t-shirt collection). Anyway, they pressed their book into my hands and sold me on it with a very enthusiastic pitch. Which is fortunate, because without that experience, I'm not sure I would ever have picked the book up. Another zombie comic, right?
Not really. Awakening's not a gorefest, and it's not exactly full of scares. Nor is it a winking post-ironic examination of the zombie trope, or whatever else the kids are reading these days.
Nope, it's a down and dirty detective story where the zombies barely get any screen time. They're really more like phantoms than traditional Romero-esque flesh-eaters, and when they appear at all, it often happens too fast for us to get a good look at them. Tapalansky subverts all the usual zombie cliches: Instead of attacking in packs, they work alone; instead of roaming mindlessly, they hide in the shadows and strike like hungry wolves. Heck, their victims don't even turn into zombies, and they even occasionally run away.
So the zombie stuff is really there to lend menace and atmosphere to the overarching detective/forensics story. Much like Ellis and Templesmith's Fell, we get the sense that the town in the story is physically sick, festering with an unseen evil. It's all very moody, meditative and grim. All of which is a pretty clever device, but it might not have worked so well were it not for Eckman-Lawn's frankly beautiful art.
I really don't know how to describe the art and do it justice. It's like Templesmith and McKean had a love-child. Scribbly lines, wild ink spatters and off-kilter photo-collage are the norm here, and while this sort of style is currently popular and much-copied, Eckman-Lawn seems to be approaching a real visual technique of his own. Characters fade in and out of silhouette; in and out of reality. They appear flat and vaporous in one panel and lavishly painted in the next. Swirling patterns and scraps of newsprint fade in and out of the pages, subtext literally rising to the surface.
And the double-page spreads: Just gorgeous. Ditto the covers and the pages with closeups of character faces. The latter often feature elaborate haloes of design elements around the characters' heads, like crazy sunbursts of emotion.
Basically, it's stylish, gorgeous to look at, and a creepy-fun read. Best of all, there's a hardcover collection coming out in June. And if you're not already convinced, well, go check it out for yourself at the official site. All you have to do is email Nick, and he'll send you issues 1-4 as ebooks for free. That, folks, is how you market a comic book.
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
April 14, 2008
January 24, 2008
Oscars for Dummies
Is it just me, or are the Oscar nominations really bloody awful this year? For Christ's sake, the list includes Surf's Up, Transformers and Elizabeth.
And fucking Juno got nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay?
Look, I've seen Juno, and that screenplay deserves to be fired into the sun, not nominated for an Oscar. Transformers may have been a shit film, but at least the script didn't jump out of the actors' mouths and clobber you over the head with its desperate relevance. Juno is basically a poor man's Knocked Up, except that Knocked Up was actually, y'know, funny.
At this point I'm sort of hoping the strike holds on until just after the Oscars. That way I won't have to suffer the craven image of ex-blogger Diablo Cody on my TV screen.
On a cheerier note: Holy shit, Brendan McCarthy now has a blog. The man's a stark raving genius, and you should check that link out right now. I mean, seriously: unicorn chicken eyes!
Shout-out numero deux goes to my friend Luke's new blog, soon to be full of designy goodness. Welcome to the blogosphere, mate.
Right. Less than 24 hours until I get on the plane. Mel and Austin: Save me one of those minty hot chocolates.
And fucking Juno got nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay?
Look, I've seen Juno, and that screenplay deserves to be fired into the sun, not nominated for an Oscar. Transformers may have been a shit film, but at least the script didn't jump out of the actors' mouths and clobber you over the head with its desperate relevance. Juno is basically a poor man's Knocked Up, except that Knocked Up was actually, y'know, funny.
At this point I'm sort of hoping the strike holds on until just after the Oscars. That way I won't have to suffer the craven image of ex-blogger Diablo Cody on my TV screen.
On a cheerier note: Holy shit, Brendan McCarthy now has a blog. The man's a stark raving genius, and you should check that link out right now. I mean, seriously: unicorn chicken eyes!
Shout-out numero deux goes to my friend Luke's new blog, soon to be full of designy goodness. Welcome to the blogosphere, mate.
Right. Less than 24 hours until I get on the plane. Mel and Austin: Save me one of those minty hot chocolates.
January 9, 2008
Kill For Art
This is the most interesting slice of random news I've read all year.
Of course, once you've read that article, you'll want to go look at his Flickr set.
And after you've read that, you'll most likely want to check out this...
...which may very well lead you down a long and twisted path of trying to found out whether you really can mix deadly bits of ground-up glass into wheatpaste. And so on and so forth.
You have been warned.
Of course, once you've read that article, you'll want to go look at his Flickr set.
And after you've read that, you'll most likely want to check out this...
...which may very well lead you down a long and twisted path of trying to found out whether you really can mix deadly bits of ground-up glass into wheatpaste. And so on and so forth.
You have been warned.
October 26, 2007
50th Post Comics Extravaganza!
Believe it or not, this is the 50th post since I started this odd little experiment of a blog.
Of course, 50 posts isn't very impressive for someone like, say Josh Hechinger, who gets in at least 20 before breakfast. But for me? Well, it's rather big. 50 posts in 3 months! That's, like... some number of posts per week. I no can do math. :(
Anyway, I thought I'd celebrate by giving you all first look at the cover to Cages, soon to be my first published comic book. (For those just waking up in the back: It's a dark future story presented as a self-contained graphic novel, it's coming out next year from the fine folks at Insomnia Publications, and the art is by the wonderfully talented Mel Cook.)
We wanted something really different and eye-catching for the cover, so we contacted Jonathan Hickman -- iconoclast, comic artist and soon-to-be-superstar -- to see what he could come up with. And, yeah, it pretty much blew us away:
But that's just whetted your appetites, hasn't it? What's that you say? You'd like to see some more of Cages?
Well, alright. Here's 5 finished pages from Chapter 2. This is about a quarter of the way through the book; our heroes, the three children, have just escaped from the lab and met a group of survivors, who are led by a slightly-crazed shaman:
But that's not enough for you, is it? You'd like to see even more art from the brush of the prodigious Miss Cook, wouldn't you?
Well, because I can't say no to you, here's the cover art for Mysterious Visions Anthology #12, to be released next year and containing our story Ho Versus Joe. It's a blood-drenched black comedy that answers the eternal question: Who would win in a fight between Zombie Ho Chi Minh and Zombie Joseph Stalin?
(Dimestore Productions have taken down the project pages for some reason, but you can still see the fantastic Ho Versus Joe Round 2 character illustrations here.)
This concludes our 50th post. I wish I could promise you that the next 50 will be witty, erudite and bursting with content, and that they'll enrich your lives in hitherto unimaginable ways... but that'd probably be lying.
Cross-posted to my Comicspace and the official Cages website.
Of course, 50 posts isn't very impressive for someone like, say Josh Hechinger, who gets in at least 20 before breakfast. But for me? Well, it's rather big. 50 posts in 3 months! That's, like... some number of posts per week. I no can do math. :(
Anyway, I thought I'd celebrate by giving you all first look at the cover to Cages, soon to be my first published comic book. (For those just waking up in the back: It's a dark future story presented as a self-contained graphic novel, it's coming out next year from the fine folks at Insomnia Publications, and the art is by the wonderfully talented Mel Cook.)
We wanted something really different and eye-catching for the cover, so we contacted Jonathan Hickman -- iconoclast, comic artist and soon-to-be-superstar -- to see what he could come up with. And, yeah, it pretty much blew us away:
But that's just whetted your appetites, hasn't it? What's that you say? You'd like to see some more of Cages?
Well, alright. Here's 5 finished pages from Chapter 2. This is about a quarter of the way through the book; our heroes, the three children, have just escaped from the lab and met a group of survivors, who are led by a slightly-crazed shaman:
But that's not enough for you, is it? You'd like to see even more art from the brush of the prodigious Miss Cook, wouldn't you?
Well, because I can't say no to you, here's the cover art for Mysterious Visions Anthology #12, to be released next year and containing our story Ho Versus Joe. It's a blood-drenched black comedy that answers the eternal question: Who would win in a fight between Zombie Ho Chi Minh and Zombie Joseph Stalin?
(Dimestore Productions have taken down the project pages for some reason, but you can still see the fantastic Ho Versus Joe Round 2 character illustrations here.)
This concludes our 50th post. I wish I could promise you that the next 50 will be witty, erudite and bursting with content, and that they'll enrich your lives in hitherto unimaginable ways... but that'd probably be lying.
Cross-posted to my Comicspace and the official Cages website.
August 14, 2007
All My Idols Are Insane
I was reading this excellent 1978 speech by Philip K. Dick, and it had me nodding along in agreement, enthralled by the power of the great man's ideas.
Right up until the bit where he says the year is actually 50 AD, and we're all living in the Bible, hallucinating these last couple of millennia.
And it got me to thinking: A lot of my idols -- the people whose art has had the biggest influence on me -- were/are completely insane, by any reasonable standard.
In the 'still alive' category there's Grant Morrison, who travelled to Tibet to have a UFO encounter experience, wrote himself sick with a flesh-eating virus, and who has publicly stated that humanity is only a years away from making first contact with a fictional universe.
Then there's Alan Moore, who smokes 60 joints a day, worships a snake-god, and conducts rituals in a magic cave he had excavated beneath his house.
Further back in the 20th century, there's Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who for much of his life was too afraid to sleep at night, lest he be carried off by the flying anteater-bats from Pluto.
Lovecraft was good friends with Robert E. Howard, who would write all night in the belief that there was a barbarian standing behind him ready to behead him if he stopped, and who shot himself in the head following the death of his mother.
And, of course, there's my favorite author of all, Cordwainer Smith (not his real name), a world-renowned professor, psychological warfare expert and military advisor to Kennedy, who also happened to believe he was lord of an interplanetary empire.
This is not about me deriding these artists. This is me saying, where can I get some of this crazy? Because it looks like a lot of fun.
As the Tick said, "Sanity is a one trick pony -- all you have is rational thought. But when you're good and loony, the sky's the limit!"
Right up until the bit where he says the year is actually 50 AD, and we're all living in the Bible, hallucinating these last couple of millennia.
And it got me to thinking: A lot of my idols -- the people whose art has had the biggest influence on me -- were/are completely insane, by any reasonable standard.
In the 'still alive' category there's Grant Morrison, who travelled to Tibet to have a UFO encounter experience, wrote himself sick with a flesh-eating virus, and who has publicly stated that humanity is only a years away from making first contact with a fictional universe.
Then there's Alan Moore, who smokes 60 joints a day, worships a snake-god, and conducts rituals in a magic cave he had excavated beneath his house.
Further back in the 20th century, there's Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who for much of his life was too afraid to sleep at night, lest he be carried off by the flying anteater-bats from Pluto.
Lovecraft was good friends with Robert E. Howard, who would write all night in the belief that there was a barbarian standing behind him ready to behead him if he stopped, and who shot himself in the head following the death of his mother.
And, of course, there's my favorite author of all, Cordwainer Smith (not his real name), a world-renowned professor, psychological warfare expert and military advisor to Kennedy, who also happened to believe he was lord of an interplanetary empire.
This is not about me deriding these artists. This is me saying, where can I get some of this crazy? Because it looks like a lot of fun.
As the Tick said, "Sanity is a one trick pony -- all you have is rational thought. But when you're good and loony, the sky's the limit!"
August 13, 2007
Prattle
I'm currently resisting the urge to turn this place into a political blog -- because, fuck it, there are a lot of things to get angry about right now, most of them beginning with 'APEC' and ending with 'Liberal Party death throes'.
But, no. This is a workblog. Stay on target...
So I now have Facebook, and you can find me on there if you're so inclined. So far I haven't spent more than 10-15 minutes at a stretch on there, because the interface is clearly a freakish black hole of time waste-age.
My first Elephant Words image has gone up, and already the fictional responses are more inventive than I'd expected.
I found this page today: New York Surveillance Camera Players. Now, that? That's provocative art. Their site is a goldmine of weird mind-expandiness. Check out the FAQ, for instance.
But, no. This is a workblog. Stay on target...
So I now have Facebook, and you can find me on there if you're so inclined. So far I haven't spent more than 10-15 minutes at a stretch on there, because the interface is clearly a freakish black hole of time waste-age.
My first Elephant Words image has gone up, and already the fictional responses are more inventive than I'd expected.
I found this page today: New York Surveillance Camera Players. Now, that? That's provocative art. Their site is a goldmine of weird mind-expandiness. Check out the FAQ, for instance.
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