Comic-con Links, Round 1
Friday evening offered up these delicious treats for my banquet of comics. Yum! I try to get links and notes and business cards and map out the floor on the first day/evening of the con, and today will be all about going back to the places that were worth it. Here are the highlights and some others that were intriguing enough to pick up cards for:
New (for me) Highlights:
Goats. I've been reading them sporadically since their first few months, and it was cool to see the faces behind the comic. They are much more pleasant and polite than their characters. And now you know where those "Republicans for Voldemort" stickers come from.
I have a card for "Fred Van Lente, >>writer at large", who is one of several people on Action Philosophers, which looks like a pretty smart and funny trip through philosophy in the form of an action-hero comic. They had a board-game board out tracing the Campbell's Hero's Journey with reference to good examples from movies and books, and I really want a poster of it.
Mark Conyea of MrOblivious.com has a neat book out about basic graphic design called Complicated Doesn't Make It Good
. It looks like it's aimed at middle school, but could work for many ages on either side of that. I wish I'd had it in art class instead of sequins to glue onto things.
Sean Wang's Runners is listed on their posters and signs as "what Star Wars comic books should be like." I think that that's mistakenly ignoring Clone Wars, which was awesome, but that's not what they meant. It's smugglers fleeing bounty hunters and pirates in space, and it looks decently drawn. What really caught my eye is that a 3D animation class took on the first issue as a project and came up with a beautiful 6-minute episode. Both are worth a look.
Sexy Chix is a comic book that Ali picked up a few weeks back that's all by women artists. I have mixed feelings about the book, but I'm not the target audience. I think that it's too bad that when women artists are "finally given the chance to tell the stories they want to, 75% of those stories are about the horrors of men. bhanesidhe has said that she will read it in installments or else she will be man-hating for months and I think that's sound advice. There are some good stories in there, some great artwork, and certainly more variety than you usually see in a single volume.
I met Phil Foglio and got him to sign Girl Genius. Again, I narrowly avoided fanboidom, perhaps because the frustration of Volume 4 being there only in preview kept me conscious. Alas, he signed GGv3 to me, not to ali_wildgoose, and I gave it to her as a Christmas gift.
There are some great booths there that happen to be run by friends; please don't discount their awesomeness because of who they're willing to be friends with. ^_- I really enjoy their work, or else paid-for copies wouldn't be sitting on my shelves and being reread every month or so:
yaytime and crypticpress are there (waaay in the back left corner) selling Jax Epoch, Astronaut Elementary, and Teen Boat. I like them all! Also, they are the only comics table I've seen selling a CD.
Euralis is there with Combination Platter, a worthy sampler book out through Chaotic Unicorn.
Also worth a first look:
I keep seeing stuff by Leland Purvis of Pack Rabbit Press. I'm not sure where, but it keeps catching my eye. His style is fairly detailed, and not what I tend to go for (I like smoother, cleaner, iconic, stylized), but I do keep seeing it and remembering it. His style is different, that might be what does it.
Purvis is in act-i-vate, an LJ community of artists who update their stories there once a week. I haven't seen enough yet to see who in the community I like, but htere it is.
Lovely Monkey Comics had just one thing out, a comic called "We can't all and some of us don't" by Tara Heusner & Jan Wu. Interesting style, very ethereal, and I picked up a copy.
Roxbox Comics had an interesting promo comic out. They're very polished but Kee-fu Fighters looks like an attempt to go straight to merchandising. It's got a set of martial arts bears with elemental special powers and a plucky human to keep them in line. It's manga-style and no one including the villain looks older than 15. There are even pseudo RPG/TCG stat pages in the back. Considering every page has "copyright 2003 Roxbox Entertainment Group", I'm intrigued but skeptical. It drives me crazy when people clearly do the art and the work for the sole purpose of making mad cash, and they attempt to sell out and cash in before they've actually done anything worthwhile. Is this holier-than-thou of me? Probably, considering I don't produce art myself. What frustrates me about it, though, is a bit redeemable: I think that approach produces crap that caters to the LCD of the supposed market, rather than producing anything meaningful. You might as well go work for the Elemenstor franchise or Ben Ten.
Okay. That was just one evening! Now I have to go get ready for Day 2, and I'm running late already...
New (for me) Highlights:
Goats. I've been reading them sporadically since their first few months, and it was cool to see the faces behind the comic. They are much more pleasant and polite than their characters. And now you know where those "Republicans for Voldemort" stickers come from.
I have a card for "Fred Van Lente, >>writer at large", who is one of several people on Action Philosophers, which looks like a pretty smart and funny trip through philosophy in the form of an action-hero comic. They had a board-game board out tracing the Campbell's Hero's Journey with reference to good examples from movies and books, and I really want a poster of it.
Mark Conyea of MrOblivious.com has a neat book out about basic graphic design called Complicated Doesn't Make It Good
. It looks like it's aimed at middle school, but could work for many ages on either side of that. I wish I'd had it in art class instead of sequins to glue onto things.
Sean Wang's Runners is listed on their posters and signs as "what Star Wars comic books should be like." I think that that's mistakenly ignoring Clone Wars, which was awesome, but that's not what they meant. It's smugglers fleeing bounty hunters and pirates in space, and it looks decently drawn. What really caught my eye is that a 3D animation class took on the first issue as a project and came up with a beautiful 6-minute episode. Both are worth a look.
Sexy Chix is a comic book that Ali picked up a few weeks back that's all by women artists. I have mixed feelings about the book, but I'm not the target audience. I think that it's too bad that when women artists are "finally given the chance to tell the stories they want to, 75% of those stories are about the horrors of men. bhanesidhe has said that she will read it in installments or else she will be man-hating for months and I think that's sound advice. There are some good stories in there, some great artwork, and certainly more variety than you usually see in a single volume.
I met Phil Foglio and got him to sign Girl Genius. Again, I narrowly avoided fanboidom, perhaps because the frustration of Volume 4 being there only in preview kept me conscious. Alas, he signed GGv3 to me, not to ali_wildgoose, and I gave it to her as a Christmas gift.
There are some great booths there that happen to be run by friends; please don't discount their awesomeness because of who they're willing to be friends with. ^_- I really enjoy their work, or else paid-for copies wouldn't be sitting on my shelves and being reread every month or so:
yaytime and crypticpress are there (waaay in the back left corner) selling Jax Epoch, Astronaut Elementary, and Teen Boat. I like them all! Also, they are the only comics table I've seen selling a CD.
Euralis is there with Combination Platter, a worthy sampler book out through Chaotic Unicorn.
Also worth a first look:
I keep seeing stuff by Leland Purvis of Pack Rabbit Press. I'm not sure where, but it keeps catching my eye. His style is fairly detailed, and not what I tend to go for (I like smoother, cleaner, iconic, stylized), but I do keep seeing it and remembering it. His style is different, that might be what does it.
Purvis is in act-i-vate, an LJ community of artists who update their stories there once a week. I haven't seen enough yet to see who in the community I like, but htere it is.
Lovely Monkey Comics had just one thing out, a comic called "We can't all and some of us don't" by Tara Heusner & Jan Wu. Interesting style, very ethereal, and I picked up a copy.
Roxbox Comics had an interesting promo comic out. They're very polished but Kee-fu Fighters looks like an attempt to go straight to merchandising. It's got a set of martial arts bears with elemental special powers and a plucky human to keep them in line. It's manga-style and no one including the villain looks older than 15. There are even pseudo RPG/TCG stat pages in the back. Considering every page has "copyright 2003 Roxbox Entertainment Group", I'm intrigued but skeptical. It drives me crazy when people clearly do the art and the work for the sole purpose of making mad cash, and they attempt to sell out and cash in before they've actually done anything worthwhile. Is this holier-than-thou of me? Probably, considering I don't produce art myself. What frustrates me about it, though, is a bit redeemable: I think that approach produces crap that caters to the LCD of the supposed market, rather than producing anything meaningful. You might as well go work for the Elemenstor franchise or Ben Ten.
Okay. That was just one evening! Now I have to go get ready for Day 2, and I'm running late already...