Ayre Force
Written by Adam Slutsky and Joseph Phillip Illidge
Art by Shawn Martinbrough
Bodog Entertainment
$19.95
Ayre Force is one of the silliest and most blatant examples of “comics as ego-boosting pr tool” I’ve ever seen. It’s an absolutely horrible, incomprehensible book, awash in tiresome cliches and abysmal dialogue, but at the same time I found myself admiring its chutzpah. That’s all I admired, but at least it’s something.
Perhaps Bodog can find a way to turn it into a blurb for the eventual paperback edition: “Chutzpahriffic! sez Chris Mautner.” (more…)
As if we needed further evidence how tough it is out there for new newspaper comic strips to get started, Spot the Frog creator Mark Heath announced on his Web site that he plans on ending the strip soon:
I’ll be bringing the strip to an end July 5 (dailies), June 29 (Sundays). This will be six month’s shy of the five year contract. The reason is the usual one: too few client papers, the need to earn money to replace my missing socks. I spoke with United Media and they were sympathetic to my odd sock fetish.
A shame. It was a really charming strip. I can’t say I’m too surprised though. Judging by the hate mail I’ve been getting about the new sample strips we’ve been running in my local paper, newspaper readers are loathe to change. (link: Tom Spurgeon)
Over at the First Second blog, Nick Abadzis emphasizes the importance of sketching:
Sketching is like play — it exercises certain creative muscles that would otherwise either atrophy or snap from overwork. It’s important. It frees up the mechanism in your brain that usually stays focused and produces tight drawings as part of a comics narrative, and I think it’s wise to allow it some downtime, so to speak. Otherwise, you run the risk of going stale.
Apparently Abadzis has is own sketch blog too, which is nice to know.
I’m not going to pay a lot for this comic. Well, OK, I am
Tuesday May 13, 2008, 8:02 am
Tom Spurgeon wonders if all them there funnybooks ain’t too blamed expensive:
I’ve always been loathe to throw my lot in with the crowd that constantly yells, posts and cavils that comic books cost too much. They remind me of those people that complain about gas prices but drive everywhere they possibly can in giant sports-utility vehicles. I suspect that for a lot of those people it’s not that comics cost too much as much as comics no longer are as cost-effective to enjoy in the very specific way they demand to enjoy them. I tend to be more of a mind with people like Jeff Smith, who’s argued in the past — and if I’m misremembering this, please consider the substance of the argument without the pedigree — that comics have value as a permanent, perpetual resource for entertainment that buttresses the temporary nature of that first, sweet read. And yet if I’m honest with my own reaction to the way things have progressed, I have to admit that maybe there are points on both sides of the argument.
All kidding aside, it’s an impressive bit of gauntlet-throwing that’s well worth reading.
Vice magazine has collected all the assorted strips Ryan has done for them recently and thrown them up online. Do I have to say it’s completely NSFW? It is.
The author behind the ongoing Ernie Pook’s Comeek, as well as the soon-to-be-released What It Is from Drawn and Quarterly, was given some nice feature treatment in yesterday’s NYT Arts & Leisure section:
On a balmy spring day she stood at the front of a classroom, effusively greeting 25 strangers who had signed up for her two-day workshop, “Writing the Unthinkable,” which is also the basis for her new book. “I can’t believe you’re here and you look so 3-D!” she said, grinning toothily at them from beneath thick black glasses. “I was wondering about you all last night!”
On a table behind her she had laid out scores of scribbled 3-by-5 note cards, each of which held a nugget of information that she would relay over the next several hours (like “Don’t read it over” and “An image is a pull toy that pulls you”). On the blackboard was a chalk drawing of Marlys, the spunky pigtailed kid protagonist of “Ernie Pook’s Comeek,” the strip about growing up that made Ms. Barry a star of new-wave comics soon after it began running in alternative weeklies in 1978.
“Dang! I’m in Pittsburgh!” Marlys was saying in a word balloon. And Ms. Barry, who at 52 still has the habit of twisting her own curly red hair into Marlys-like pigtails, addressed her students in a similarly exclamation-mark-studded style. As they snapped open their three-ring binders, she said delightedly, “That’s the only sound I want at my funeral!”
It seems rather unfair that the first thing you want say about a comic like Hercules is “Well, this is nowhere near as awful as I expected it to be.” Nevertheless, that was the first thought that ran through my head after reading the first issue of this debut series from the newly christened Radical Comics.
Which is not to say that it’s any good. It certainly isn’t something I can feel confident recommending, even to the sort of folks who might gravitate to this sort of blood and sandal affair. No, Hercules exists on some blah middle ground, too rote and dull to warrant merit, but not nearly incompetent or disastrous enough to deserve scorn. Honestly, the best thing I can say about it I never had any trouble figuring out who the characters were or what was going on. Considering the sort of storytelling that enters my mailbox at a regular clip, that’s a higher compliment than it sounds. (more…)
Blair Marnell emailed me the other day to let me know of Comics on Comics, a West Coast video blog where three comedians and one comic book creator get together and talk about sequential art — sorta like the NYC-based Comic Book Club, or Politically Incorrect.
Their first episode, featuring Brian Lynch (Angel: After the Fall, Everyone’s Dead) and comedians Chris Mancini, Ken Cosby and Pat Evans, was taped yesterday and should be up online now. The group was also at the Image founders signing in Arizona last weekend and plan to put the footage of that up by the end of the week.
