I have not read very much manga. My only experience with it is Tezuka’s Buddha, of which I read the first volume about a month ago. Nonetheless, I have a passing familiarity with its elements, having read plenty of Scott McCloud, and I can see its influence spreading throughout the comics scene. McCloud was possibly the first to adopt its tropes in his Zot! series of the eighties, but today there is probably not a single comics artist alive whose work is not at least indirectly influenced by manga. Amateur cartoonists are especially prone to creating work that would be indistinguishable from actual Japanese manga were they not drawn with complete ineptitude. This is not to say that it’s impossible to create good work in the manga tradition, though. Jonathon Dalton’s A Mad Tea Party is proof of that much.
Circuit Reader #5: A Mad Tea-Party
May 22nd, 2011
Circuit Reader #4: Freewheel
April 12th, 2011Freewheel is one of those extremely rare webcomics that inspires comparison to prominent creators of the print world. The artwork somewhat reminded me of Kim Deitch in its meticulous and sometimes disturbing detail. The writing is reminiscent of Hans Rickheit’s surreal underworld of The Squirrel Machine. Ultimately, though, these kinds of comparisons are a waste of time, as Liz Baillie’s webcomic stands beautifully on its own.
Circuit Reader 3: reMIND
March 1st, 2011Pacing is one of those things that no one notices unless it’s not working. It’s tricky to strike that delicate balance between too slow and too fast, and many webcomic writers never quite seem to get the knack of it. They particularly seem to fall prey to what is charmingly called “glacial” pacing, in which weeks’ worth of real time elapses while narrative time proceeds at a crawl. I am happy to say that reMIND by Jason Brubaker does not have this problem. Unfortunately, it has the opposite problem.
Circuit Reader 2: Namesake
February 3rd, 2011There is a type of story which recurs again and again. In it, someone is suddenly transported to another world, one which she had believed to be fictional. This is in some ways an offshoot of the fantasy-transposition story (that is, one in which people from the “real” world end up in a different world), but it also implies an interesting truth about writers. Writers create worlds through their work, but not even Tolkien-scale efforts can make these worlds actually exist, no matter how much their creators may want them to. I think stories like Namesake grow out of this frustration.
Circuit Reader 1: Outsider
January 5th, 2011The concept of being an outsider is an important one in science fiction. The idea of being the only human in a group of aliens is possibly the most dramatic example of isolation imaginable. For writers of SF it presents a vast array of possibilities to explore not just the possibilities of alien cultures but also what it means to be human.
In Outsider, Jim Francis enters into this longstanding tradition with an epic of war and politics, depicted through attractive anime-style artwork. Francis obviously spends a considerable amount of time on both art and writing, and the world-building is extensive–but does the story hold up?
Circuit Reader intro
January 5th, 2011Well, it’s a new year, and hopefully the blog will be better than ever. Along those lines, I’m reintroducing a feature I attempted a while ago on a different blog: Circuit Reader, a series of overly-lengthy reviews of webcomics in the style of The Webcomic Overlook. These take a while to write, so I can’t promise them very often, but I will put one up when the mood strikes me.
See above for the first Circuit Reader post, in which you will find out my feelings on Outsider by Jim Francis.