WHASSUP?

I hope, dear readers, that you will be interested to learn of my latest venture in the world of blogging. The picture above shows the entrance to world of Ulysses “Seen” the amazing comic adaptation of the James Joyce novel Ulysses by our very own Rob Berry. That’s the same guy doing the most difficult book of the 20th century AND the violent revenge saga featuring a big pink bunny known as The Hammer over on Zuda. You got a problem with that?

Anyhow as you can see above there are three ways into the site. The comic itself is self explanatory – lovingly drawn and coloured and now hand-lettered too. You can go there directly by clicking on the comic link on the opening page above. Since the comic like the novel is more than a little difficult to appreciate without aid, then you can also navigate the page by page reader’s guide for which you simply click the middle link on the site entrance. Lastly, and indeed least importantly, is the third link. The blog, which is the means whereby we update you on all the goings on relevent to the comic. That’s where you’ll find yours truly, me,  making a fool of myself as I try and navigate both the novel and the comic.

The blog is also a portal into the many sections of the site which aim to provide a vast resource of Joyce related information using Ulysses as the common starting point for hopefully many different types of conversation – not only about the novel or this comic in particular, but about the relationship between the two media in general. Hopefully I’ll be able to direct you to all the interesting things going on – something for all tastes. And if it isn’t there already I’ll write it myself!

Of course the comic is Rob’s baby, but the Reader’s Guide is written by Mike Barsanti, that hand-lettering and the entire site design is by Josh Levitas, and there is another shadowy figure in the background Chad Rutkowski to whom all things legal devolve (uurgh!). That’s three capable Joycean brains complimented by my own one non-joycean half. Should make for interesting reading. Will I be converted? Join us soon to find out. Same Joycean time. Same Joycean channel. (Do you see what I did there?)

ZUDA EIGHTEEN

Today we kick off with another fatal colon malfunction and I’d hate to see it become a signifier of a bad comic but let’s look at the evidence. Kharon: Scourge of Atlantis by Jim Shelley and Pierre Villeneuve was a fairly straight forward adventure strip and the inclusion of sword fighting skeletons at the very end never fail to bring to mind the (by now ancient itself) Ray Harryhausen animated scene from Jason and the Argonauts. Everybody loves that bit – don’t they? That’s the point at which this should have started for, unless you are trying to appeal to children, you should never begin the beguine!?! That unfortunate structure always seems to mean that the whole thing comes over a bit flat. More Pierre Villeneuve art to be found here.

Similarly Planet X by Trey Causey and Chaz Truog with Blake Wilkie and Jim Shelley also fell a little flat in the competition. There’s not much wrong with either of these efforts in the separate elements, but I can’t help but feel both these strips could have done with a ‘director’ – someone to take an overview and tweak the direction of the strips in a more general way. They both lack impact. But at least Kharon had linear direction. Planet X seems to wobble about not knowing where it might stumble to next. Entertaining for each moment, but as a whole instantly forgettable. More Chaz Truog here.

Now we come to the man. Steve Steiner! He needs no introduction to Zuda regulars and today I’ll cover all four of his strips, but first the early ones he created on his own and that means we start with Everyone Laughs at the Crocodile Man. This falls very certainly into my most hated category since it is a fairly ordinary and traditional ‘webcomic’ -that thing that harks back to newspaper strips (yet seemingly without the editorial common sense). I saw it. I didn’t like it much. Apart from the fact that it IS by Steve Steiner it holds little interest. There is one thing. The title reminds me of Absurdity At Its Best! I can’t think of two more suicidal titles, but Steve’s is worse by a hair. Everyone? EVERYONE?

Now that I’ve got that out of my system we come to Colonel MacTagart Steve Steiner’s second entry. Now Zuda kindly provides a method of finding the best comic in any given month. You simply scroll to the bottom and read the one in tenth place. Guaranteed. OK, only kidding but at least in this case something closer to the truth. The cartoon figures against the painted backdrops are nothing new, but still it’s an unusual style to see on Zuda and Steve nails it. The comedy unfortunately is a gentle one-joke thing that is too stretched out to be effective. It reads better outside the hot hell of a competition.

Middle-Aged Monster Steve’s third strip solves the problems above by coming out of the gate with yet another treatment. Steve’s trademark style remains – but another technique? This guy is unafraid to change things up and try something new – he’s fast too, which makes him a force to be reckoned with. One of the best comedy strips on Zuda this struggled despite having most of the old guard behind it – which was at least a good indication that Zuda wasn’t to become an ‘old boys’ network. We’ll come back to Steve in a moment. More Steve here and here.

But first one the most laid back creators on Zuda and his strip Untrue Tales. Sam Little likes to present a persona not unlike the rough and tumble characters that feature in his tales of untruth. He doesn’t care too much what you think, which allows him a certain confidence in presenting whatever he feels like with no pressure to conform or please. That first untrue tale was a classic. The second for the invitational was positively destructive. So if you are a fan of Sam’s work, like me, you’re probably in for a wild ride of unpredictable ups and downs. Sam’s style in the production of the work seems also to mirror this, from hasty scribble to loving detail to lazy repetition to careful collage – it’s all over the place, but somehow just works. More untruths here and here.

Teachers by Gabe Ostley has a similar couldn’t care less attitude towards the work. Honestly it’s sometimes hard to decide what is attitude and what is plain inability! Yet, either way, it has an attraction and an exuberance which with luck and the wind behind you carries you along. that is after all the function of a comic and frankly I’d prefer a lot less worthy drawing and shading and a lot more meaningful mark-making. Teachers displays a level of risk and my only criticism is that perhaps Gabe could take it even further. I see a tentativeness that holds it from going completely overboard. Much more teachers here and here.

But. Here’s where it all comes together. The Hammer by Sam Little, Gabe Ostley, Rob Berry and Steve Steiner. Recently finished the first season on Zuda and, while we wait to find out if there’s to be more, time to reflect on what impact it might have had. The update schedule was certainly entertaining though it might have effected the viewing figures somewhat. The story was linear thankfully, but the most important aspect of this was the overall ‘direction’ and ‘concept’. This is the kind of sixty screen story you explain in a sentence if need be or off the back of a napkin to an uninterested editor. It is an easy sell – and that’s what a lot of people are missing. Don’t get me wrong – this has subtlety – but it’s the blend of subtlty and obviousness that works here. Great comics often happen in the mix. More Hammer here.

And speaking of the mix finally we have Postcard by almost everyone – including a few hopeless talentless wannabees, but enough about Ron, Kwanza, Nika and Dave! There is a missed opportunity here, but I can’t give all my good ideas away

ULYSSES SEEN

In lieu of my Digital Strip Futures page, recently disappeared, here’s another extract of one of the comics highlighted.

Talking (as I was) of taking comics to the next level, Rob Berry and co have taken ‘it’ up two levels, along the corridor and out of the fire escape. We are only a few pages in and it might take ten years to finish – but what a project! A complete annotated rich new media adaptation of the classic novel by James Joyce. Ulysses Seen is the name. I thought this was crazy when I first heard about it and now I still think it’s crazy, but guess what – it’s happening. And you’re not getting the full effect if you don’t subscribe to the blog – so do so, now! It’ll take me ten years to make sense of it and I hope I’m still around to see the finish!

I know what it all means y'know! I'm not thick.

A STINKING CORPSE

Oh, my, god. Becky, look at her butt. It is so big. *scoff* She looks like, one of those rap guys’ girlfriends. But, you know, who understands those rap guys? *scoff* They only talk to her, because, she looks like a total prostitute …. whhuh? Zuda strip A Stinking Corpse by Furman gets the guest blog treatment now from that man with two whole vocabularies more than the rest of us, Mr Robert Berry. Go easy on those butts Bob, er … I mean, screens. Can’t seem to focus properly. Bhhuutttss …

IT’S POSSIBLE TO SPEND TOO MUCH TIME DRAWING (a cautionary review of A STINKING CORPSE for future contestants)

by guest-blogger Rob Berry

I do like good drawing and completely appreciate it when I see artists, like Furman, who love to draw. In painting this is a wonderful quality to look for; the sheer joy of moving materials around to create something from your own hand that nobody else has made. I love seeing the quality of negative space in a Morandi still life, the flat patterned space of Manet re-imagined by guys like David Hockney or Eric Fischl and the straight-to-your-eyeball perspective challenges of Matenga or lush contour of Pontormo coming through the fresh hands and eyeballs of my peers and contemporaries.

(I often get chided for name-dropping, so let’s get that out of the way right now. If you went to art school to learn how to draw and were never were exposed to these guys you should demand your money back. If you’re interested in drawing comics but haven’t thought about such subtleties as negative space, pattern, point-of-view and contour then each of the artists mentioned above can provide a crash course in how to manage the space of a comic page. None of them, with the possible exception of Eric Fischl, could figure out how to work sequence into that space and make comics of course, but that’s quite another subject. Seriously, there’s no arrogance intended in dropping these names. If you don’t know these artists then you really should look them up.)

Making comics is as far away from making paintings as cricket is from baseball. The thing is, cricket looks enough like baseball that people trying to understand the one thing seek to solve it through comparisons with the other. It might work if you’re trying to explain a cricket match to your friend from New Jersey, but in terms of treating the artform as a unique language, well, that’s a bit like learning Spanish to take a trip to Rome.
A STINKING CORPSE, this month’s most elegantly drawn entry at Zuda, suffers from this one insurmountable problem of comics as a language rather than a pictorial art; too much goddamn drawing.

Anyone who has ever had to do a portfolio review (and the Zuda comp is very much like one big portfolio review) will testify to this; “do not fill your portfolio with a series of pin-up drawings. Pin-ups tell me nothing.”

This is true. But this is, ultimately, only good advice to newcomers that don’t know any better and doesn’t really address the unique language that is comics. Furman is a gifted illustrator who doesn’t need my advice, so I apologize for making him an example. Frankly, one of his earlier submissions, A SINGLE SOUL, is a really great example of balancing illustrative style with comics language and I really think people should give it another look. But his new submission, A STINKING CORPSE, moves away from that quality of story-telling and back towards the overt showcasing of skillful drawing.

Not many people can do this kind of work, of course. One of the great things about drawing reasonably well is that so few people can do it that it makes you special. Part of a unique group that has a discernible talent others do not. So if skillful drawing is one of the unique arrows in your quiver, why not use to win a competition?

Because skillful drawing is no more important to the language of comics than rolling your “R”s is to speaking Spanish. It’s inflection and style, lovely to witness when used well, but not the substance of the language itself.

Comics is not a series of pin-up drawings pushed together on a page and cluttered by word balloons. Comics are not about static moments of great and elusive detail, as painting often is, but about sequence. They are a language of moving the eye from one drawing to the next and pause, interruption, even the detail of background, are in service to this language. Specificity, verisimilitude, even patterning of textures or the direction and line weight of cross-hatching are all methods employed by masterful comic artists to establish the pace the reader takes in moving his eyes across the page. Sequence is everything and detail is just the method of establishing the right pacing for how we view that sequence. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here from modern criticism of painting, guys like Norman Bryson writing about “the gaze versus the glance” and all of that, but there are easier and less-dry ways to understand the theories as applied to comics.

In JIMMY CORRIGAN, Chris Ware (who loves to draw) strips the images down to a kind of bare bones map of what we’re looking at, reducing form and even expression to a kind typography. This allows the reader to look at the design of the page and the method of how time arranged into separate units. the page holds our attention and engages our imagination. Specificity in each panel in discarded because it would slow down the eyes of the reader and break the complete design.

Barry Windsor Smith, on the other hand, uses incredibly dense and elegant detail to draw his readers into each panel separately. Each panel is its own world of image like a painting and the page becomes a sequence of deep breathes and long pauses particularly suited to the romantic themes of his stories. But the panels have a cinematic sense that connects them in our minds so that the over-all impression is one of sequence moving through to a conclusion.

A series of pin-ups like we see in A STINKING CORPSE doesn’t make a story. There is skillful drawing being showcased in each panel, but with direct relationship to one another, no sense of cinema or page design – it’s all movie trailer without any movie, all book cover and chapter headers without any paragraphs.

I know how harsh that may sound, but I hope Furman, and other potential contestants, take it as constructively as it is meant. There’s very skillful drawing here and I’d be anxious to see more of it. I wonder what he might do working from storyboards provided by another artist or writer?

Someone should suggest a team-up.

-Rob Berry

AZURE – A REVIEW IN WORDS

Time to make room for another guest review. This time of Zuda’s Azure, rapidly reaching a climax, and a warning the title below may be long but the review is much much longer! We don’t believe in short changing you here at mpd57 towers! Something for you guys at SDCC (San Diego Comic Convention) to read in the wee small hours!

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Dan Govar does AZURE, William Blake re-writes the Bible, there’s a secret to how ballet works, and HEAVY METAL opens our eyes to the New Machine Age. Where are we the whole time?

by guest-blogger Rob Berry

A discussion thread came up on the Zuda message boards recently about missed opportunities and it put me in mind of how many wonderful comic ideas go through the competition mill of this site and how often, after the contest is finished, we overlook what we’ve been shown.

If the attractive part of the Zuda model involves having each of us, as readers/members/voters being given an opportunity to involve ourselves in the selection of exciting new comics at the site then I wonder how we’d do as professional editors. Trying to choose comic work which builds a high-quality catalog of comics for a website these days is not an easy job and, sometimes, the really good stuff gets overlooked in favor of the comic which brings in the biggest voting audience. Even if they’re only there for the month of the competition.

Editors, if that’s how we’re invited to see ourselves, have bigger concerns. Building a deep and respectable catalog of comics from today’s potentially vast array of genre approaches isn’t an easy task. No one wants to pigeon-hole their product line into just one category, so smart editors have to be on the look-out for new ideas, new methods and, like with Zuda, unique ways to deliver them.

Which makes me think of what we may be missing by not paying close enough attention to Dan Govar’s AZURE.

(In the interest of journalistic integrity it should be mentioned here that Dan is a friend of mine. Since meeting at the New York ComiCon in February, Dan and I correspond and call each other fairly regularly to talk about comics and illustration. We drink heavily together when we get the chance to be in the same city, and have started to turn those conversations and energy into a couple of joint projects. He’s become a buddy. I actually felt some reservations about writing this review, thought I might come off as too bias, then I figured, “what the hell?” People usually expect me to speak my mind about Zuda, and Dan’s work is the thing I’m thinking about most lately. Plus, I’ve seen the last pages of AZURE while no one else has. I know better than to let good work like this escape our attention, even if I know that as an insider.)

Webcomics, in its really short lifetime as a medium, has been a pretty closed craft. By this I mean to say most of its look, methodology and expression comes not so much from how it operates as a new and web-based media, but how the web can be a distribution model for what is still essentially a print-based product. Most of the earliest success in the industry came from gag cartoonists using the web to distribute comicstrips in a dwindling print market and a lot of the current measures of success still rely on turning online comics into bookshelf properties. There’s nothing inherently wrong about this, but it does seem that most of us are following the HalfPixel tips about ‘How To Make Webcomics’ as opposed to Scott McCloud theories about how to see the web as an entirely different canvas. It works fine, but its a bit like designing jet-propulsion to make ground travel faster; a bit limited in scope.

Not sure if McCloud has used him as an example before, but theories on the possibilities artists are given by new media always put me in mind of William Blake. Blake and his brother opened a print shop which, dealing in Revolutionary material of the time, provided him a unique outlet for developing his own artistic voice. This allowed him to develop a process of relief etching placing words and images together in a style like that of medieval illuminated manuscripts and lead to Blake’s unique fusion of poetry and drawing. He saw how print allowed for distribution of art in new and more profitable way, as all engravers had been doing in his time period, but  he also saw past that to the uniqueness of book-making as object and artform.

There’s really obvious connections to draw on here in thinking about Blake’s development as an artist and the field of webcomics, sure, but what’s that got to do with Dan Govar and AZURE?

Dan, unlike most webcomic practitioners, doesn’t come from a background in sequential art. He’s done some, sure, and he loves comics, but he’s not really a comic artist. He’s an illustrator using a unique skill set balanced between traditional and digital tools. For those of you don’t know this or haven’t seen his other work, take some time and visit his on-line portfolio and you’ll see what I mean.

New media is a machine and, as such it needs unique perspectives to help it get past the obvious conventions of the media that proceeded it. Webcomics has plenty of comic guys, but can probably use more illustrators to kick it in the ass. Dan manages to do that.

Not many successful illustrators come into the comicbook field, and certainly not many come into it through webcomics. Historically, comics have been an estranged, ghetto-dwelling step-child of illustration. Comics is a labor-intensive job that illustrators, good illustrators being given paying jobs to do, can’t rationalize in an affordable hourly rate. There’s just too much more money in game design and cover illustration to spend time drawing all those little panels. Illustrators who work here make a much lower rate of pay but do it because comics, such a unique and attractive artform that so few people really understand, is in their blood. Comics for them is a labor-of-love.

The same is true of Dan’s approach to AZURE. This is not what you’d expect webcomics to give you. Its what Dan wants to make webcomics into.

Dan, as I said, ain’t a cartoonist. His work is not reductive, simplified  or stripped to its inherent symbol as cartoonists are trained to do. Dan likes to draw things, fantastical things with a sense of illustrative detail comics does not generally employ. He brings a lushness to the page, using a combination of traditional and digital tools, that cartoonists don’t seek or provide. His exploding sun on page 44 and the world in fire on page 45 bears no resemblance to the exploding world of Krypton that began the long strange journey most of us cartoonists have been taking. Building from soft-edged pencil drawings for his first dramatic figure studies and employing methods that only an illustrator with a secure background in digital effects knows how to achieve, he creates a kind of depth and deeper level of detail at the rate of speed that makes comics possible. He doesn’t use a simple bag of photoshop effects to speed things along, mind you, but paints with photoshop as a serious illustrator does with a brush in service of bringing a unique look to his work. And it looks like something no one else can manage which is, of course, the big secret superpower of art. There’s no art in standing en pointe or leaping around like a ballet dancer. Anyone with an inclination to that kind of thing might learn that much at least. The art is in making the physical demands of that activity look beautiful and effortless.

But does Dan’s work on AZURE, certainly beautiful, look effortless? Or does he, through a deep bag of painterly tricks, slow our eyes down just a bit more than we expect or want a comic to do? Comics are a ‘fast-read medium’, a sequential form that is often as much about accelerating the reader’s eye as it about slowing it down and giving it something to look at. I know many fans of Dan’s work who’ve referred to AZURE “the best example of why Zuda needs a full-screen viewer”. I agree. AZURE is beautiful on the big screen (oh, and all the pages have wide-screen version at 16X9, by the way). But is it a bit like those early painted graphic novels of the ’90’s in this way, the ones that don’t really feel integrated between words and pictures as comics should and more about photo-likeness or painterly affectations? You know the ones I’m talking about, so don’t make me name names.

No, somehow no, it isn’t. Dan does use some small bits of photo-referencing, but largely he’s got this strange sensibility of capturing the kind of space and foreshortening we see in photos to create a familiarity for the reader. This is a hard and precise point to discuss and really, really a formal issue painters talk about often. It’s not easy to nutshell but trust me, this kind of treatment is a hard road to go down as an illustrator because most times what the client is looking for is something that reminds one of painting rather than photography though that same client might have little understanding of how the space in a painting works. Conversely,  what every Indy film-maker looks for is that voyeuristic closeness that comes from snapshot photography. Dan manages to balance that closeness with expansive wide-angle, world-demolishing establishing shots that show us a new world and one we feel that we know within the same page. What he might lack in knowing how the camera moves as other cartoonists do, he more than makes up for by being very smart about what the camera shows us as a talented painter or illustrator should.

The world Dan has introduced us to in these first 60 screens is barren and stripped down through flood and cleansing fire. Its a self-discovery story that is, like any good post-apocalyptic tale, a set-up for what can happen next. In this, and in the uniqueness of the way its crafted, AZURE reminds me of the kind of work brought to America by HEAVY METAL magazine in the 1970’s. To my mind there’s a lot of similarities beyond the scantily-clad heroines, mutant wild-life and water-logged ruins of once-proud cities.

In the 1970’s comics were seeing a boom and a cross-over potential that they’d not seen since the early 1950’s. And at the time the big companies weren’t in the hands of a few gangsters with trucking interests but owned by multi-national media corporations much like today. American comics were looking to break the conventional market of the spinner rack and grab a hold of some of that sweet magazine money their corporations believed was the brass-ring of a new ‘adult market’. Sound familiar, Zudites?

France and Spain, two countries they were looking into for expansion of their American properties, had really great comics already and, guess what, the art was already paid for.

As a kid growing up loving comics, those early HEAVY METAL issues taught me just how far things could go beyond the four-color, spandex-wearing superhero fare I’d already seen. They were made differently, read differently and, certainly, weren’t about developing the same audience into a slicker, more expensive repackaging of their regular favorites as something like SAVAGE SWORD OF CONAN or RAMPAGING HULK. It wasn’t the same old John Buscema/Roy Thomas architecture given a fresh set of black and white drapes by Alfredo Alcala and Rudy Nebres. HEAVY METAL, far more successful than most magazine comics of the time, showed me and a generation of people who would grow up to consider comics as a legitimate artform how to re-think the machine. How the stories, artwork and even the damned methodology could be changed for a new audience and new distribution method. It was on the shelves next to TIME and PLAYBOY and, later INTERVIEW  and RAW rather than on the spinner rack where it might’ve died a slow death buried behind BATMAN FAMILY and six SPIDER-MAN titles.

So, yeah, a long article, I know, but there you have it.

For my two cents, webcomics is about exploring new media methods unique to presentation and most of us don’t do that. Not as HEAVY METAL did and certainly not with the freedom of invention that makes William Blake a good example of what Scott McCloud was talking about in the realm of new possibilities open before us. Dan, coming from the outside just a bit, gives us something extra to think about but also something really lovely and uniquely centered in webcomics and what it can be rather than just a step on the marketing chain for successful graphic novels.

Slow down and look at it. Think about HEAVY METAL  and Barry Windsor Smith’s STORYTELLER and BIG NUMBERS and MISTER PUNCH and MYSTERY PLAY and MOONSHADOW and STARDUST and all those other fantastically, artistically rich attempts to bring illustration into the world of successful print comics.

Then think about webcomics and how William Blake might’ve felt signing that deed to his first print shop and looking over the presses stroking his chin and saying, “hmmmmn…”.

Then look at AZURE again. Not for the tricks, not for how things might look a certain way based upon photo-referencing or illustration or because Dan has a deeper knowledge of photoshop than you do, but how its not what anyone else is giving you. For free.

Then think again about webcomics.

-Rob Berry

BLOODY PULP

I have no idea why this entry is at the top of my personal list this month – I didn’t even read it properly first time out. Whatever appealed (and it certainly wasn’t genre) it must have had some weight behind it. Perhaps my subconscious asking the same question over and over – “What does he do with the heads?” Fortunately Rob is around to explain everything but the heads. I’ll take notes and listen … probably.

Bloody Pulp and Period Versus Genre

by guest-blogger Rob Berry

Mike and I were talking about H. G. Wells this morning and it seemed a particularly good way to start a conversation about my favorite Zuda submission this month; BLOODY PULP by Jorge Vega (writer) and Jeff McComsey (artist).

H. G. Wells, as Mike pointed out, wrote social commentary and not a “word of science fiction”. True. But science fiction as such hadn’t really been establish yet as a convention or, much more damaging to its potential, a genre.

Comicbook fiction thrives on the tropes and audience expectations created by genre writing. The larger history of American comics at least is based on the idea of presenting readers with uniquely written stories from a handful of categories of fiction that they’re already familiar with: superheroes, horror, adventures in fantastical locales, space opera, funny animals, out-spoken children, etc. As the industry moves it’s focus off the spinner racks of retail comicshops and into the potential for a new audience on the web, the same questions still arise as to what new genre is likely to be most successful in the new market. Unfortunately, there’s a predilection for narrow-minded thinking in adapting the old stuff for new markets that brought us such greatly innovative approaches to re-packaging as Lois Lane: Superman’s Girlfriend. Still, it does mean that people are looking beyond the capes and cowls to find some other vein of industry gold in comics, some new category of what comics can be about.

Any decently well-read comics fan can tell you how frustrating it is for them to explain that comics are a language and not a genre. No news there. But lately comic creators have been falling into the same trap by presenting historical settings as a genre or sub-genre for audiences to better understand what they’re selling. Period fiction has become a part of the pitching machine in the absence of a clear genre-style to dominate the scene.

Then along comes something rare in handling, a pitch that presents readers with a quick overview of when and where to establish context, but pulls off a flip on the preconceptions we might hold that limit period to genre. In television that was Deadwood. This month at Zuda it’s the eight clean and straight-forward pages of Bloody Pulp.

This comic seems, within the first couple of pages, to be another terse gangland period piece in the style of Collins and Rayner’s Road To Perdition, but it takes that energy and flips it around to present us with a Utopian character drama about building a better world and life outside of the city. The kind of social criticism that H. G. would’ve gone for using the trappings of science fiction to bring thrills and adventure to the story.  Its notable here that this was, in fact, a big sub-genre of 1930’s fiction by the way, these rural Utopian societies of artists re-imagining America. Its lies at the core of all the noir-style detective stories that there’s a cleaner, better world someplace to be had and life in the Big City has hardened our ability to be a part of it. The blend here works perfectly and, as rarely happens with Zuda entries, I’m certain after reading those eight pages that Vega and McComsey have a lot more to show us. That is, after all, what a pitch is all about; showing me a little bit of something I know to make me want to see more of how it could be different.

That’s what comics, as an industry, needs to do more of – stepping out of the expectations and narrow-mindedness of genre style and becoming what it’s meant to be, a language of stories.

-Rob Berry

“WHAT’S GOING ON” WITH SUPERTRON

by guest-blogger Rob Berry

Looking at the intense, saturated color scheme in Sheldon Vella’s SUPERTRON in preparation for this review I was hit, quite unexpectedly, with a childhood memory. Unexpected because, as some of you might know, I’m a bit older and my teenage years were spent in Detroit in the 1970’s. So how is it that Sheldon, born in 1984 in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia should be able to connect to my childhood so directly?

The memory, from when I was twelve in 1973, is of rushing to finish the mowing of my grandmother’s lawn on a hot summer day so that I could hurry inside to watch the R&B dance show, SOUL TRAIN on the television- something I looked forward to each week and miss a lot more than yardwork. In this particular memory my trucker-tanned, teenaged, lily-white ass sat drinking fresh lemonade in my grandmothers musty old four-story, Victorian house while Al Green, black and proud and buff in a wine-colored, rayon wife-beater, wearing huge gold chains and red felt top hat, came on singing “I’m so Tired of Being Alone.”

I mention all these imagistic details of my memory because, at first, I thought it might be the crazy, high-chroma color work in SUPERTRON that brought it up now, some 35 years later. The color on the strip is certainly one of it’s most immediate and potent features hitting the casual reader. From the moment it appeared in a competition I and some other Zuda fans knew that what Sheldon was doing with the design and color was fresh and energetic even if we couldn’t quite tell where the story was going.

Well now we’re 82 pages in and color, as it should be, is just the rhythm track here giving us the solid dance beat behind a story with deeper lyrics.

The storyline of SUPERTRON is every bit as funky as the color and, like lyrics to any enduring pop song, well worth repeating to better understand the nuance. Fortunately, Sheldon saves me from having to do that here as he conviently and wisely teleports a a cartoon version of himself (naked, hairy, beer-bellied and baby-cocked) into the future world of the comic to explain “the story thus far…”

This exposition from cartoon-author-as-mad-scientist ends abruptly, just as it should, because the world of SUPERTRON is too mannered, too absorbed, too frenetic and too playful to let a narrator slow things down. Still, it helps us take a quick look at some of the themes at play in that first season of the comic so you can see just what kind of a mad scientist Sheldon really is:

Avarice. Hatred. Group power struggles. Sibling rivalry. Puberty and adolescent angst. Intolerance. Fear of the future. A world at the cusp of change and struggling against it.

If the wild energy, fantastical situations and crazy, candy-cane coloring is a rhythm track that attracts us to the work here then it’s clearly got some deeper issues going on behind that beat. Closer consideration of that makes me think SUPERTRON strikes a chord with me not so much for how it reminds me of not only the look of Al Green but of the work of Marvin Gaye.

Like Marvin’s work from the “What’s Going On?” album, Sheldon has taken some large sociopolitical issues as the themes in his comic and enmeshed them into the solid backbeat formed by his wild color, frenetic design and “anything can happen” sense of humor that attracts readers; its the funky dance beat over the serious lyrics from the ’70’s music of my childhood. Now if that sounds too clever or overtly methodical, and it might, let me assure you, it sure doesn’t read that way. Like Marvin’s soul and earnestness, Sheldon’s seriousness and sense of playfulness fit tightly, naturally together. Its never affected. Just his own clear and unique voice coming through the work which, to my thinking, is the goal of any kind of artist.

The comic is filled with commonplace ’70’s tropism; heavy metal guitar hero bands, chopper motorcycles, bold geometric logo art and campy, wise-cracking dialogue. But it uses a tremendously rich set of storytelling tricks; puppetry, breaking the fourth wall, drop-in expositional characters and a remote, yet unrevealed nemesis as well as an interesting cast of goofy, comical supporting characters. The world, for all its transparent ’70’s facade and its barren and dystopic wide-open landscapes, is incredibly rich and. like any good comic or enduring pop song, we can read miles of stories into it’s terrain. It has the raw energy and wit of old underground cartoonists like Kaz and Kricfalusi, but still, goddamn it, looks totally his own. How does he do that?

I think that I know. He’s not so much the mad, hairy-assed, stunted-shtuuper, he paints himself to be in those first few screens of SUPERTRON Season Two. That was the plush-toy model we should all laugh at and not worry about taking seriously. He is instead the surprisingly smart and sensitive mayor of this living landscape, the guy that makes us feel that we’re safe, that a big, bad witchiepoo like Mombot can’t really harm us. That with his guidance we’ll grow up and we’ll have friends that are different from us, and we’ll coexist happily. That danger or hatred or the growing pains of our weird new world, like a brightly-colored page design or crazy bikeride through “the Devil’s Vertical Smile”, are just the plot device, the rhythm that moves the show along for four minutes on a Sunday afternoon in 1973 or four pages at a time in 2009, or, now that I think of it, 30 minutes on a Saturday morning. He’s not so much Marvin Gaye or Al Green to my middle-aged eyes looking back at my childhood memories of the 1970’s, though he’s certainly got the flair and sincerity to remind me of them and I envy him for that. No, he’s more this guy, who takes a dark, dark story, cartoons and all, and makes it feel somehow brighter, not through innocence but through awareness. Don’t know how he manages it being born in 1984 and a world away, but Sheldon’s work reminds me mostly of this guy

H.R. Pufnstuf

And I’d follow him anywhere.