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Literate Machine - new e-comics marketplace for small press and independant creators
Just discovered this new venue for independant and/or small press publishers:
Literate Machine is a place to upload your e-book or e-comic, usually PDF format is best, and then YOU choose the price and get to keep the vast majority of any sale (you can even give the book away for FREE, should that seem the proper strategy - and unknown newbies, I'm talkin' ta you, that IS the appropriate strategy for you!). Plus you can use their forums as a great marketing and scoial networking tool!
This is a truly nifty place. Just bought myself a copy of the DEFENDING TAYVR GN in electronic format to try it out. It's a high quality e-comic and well worth the six bucks it cost to support the creators and but the entire 150+ page graphic novel.
Check it out:
LM looks to be a terrific new resource for new creators to get their names and work out there and into readers' hands, not to mention to find readers in the first place! --Dave B.
Mr. Scootles graphic novel by HC Noel arrives today!
Don't forget, as I mentioned earlier last week, the incredible Mr. Scootles Volume 1: Mr. Scootles vs. The Inferno comes out today! Forgotten black-and-white cartoon character tries to escape from Hell, with Satan, angels, and psychotic film history professors all vying to use Mr. Scootles' soul for their own purposes! Really, really great new book.
Check out the review I did for it a week earlier:
PART 1
NOVO VOLUME 2 FOR ORDER NOW! Bestest find of last year continues!
NOVO 2 in October previews..order all month!
For those of you who frequent a local comic shop, this message is for you. All this month NOVO Volume 2: "THE PRIDE" is in the October issue of PREVIEWS. So go on down to your comic shop and place your order today!! To preview the book and read some reviews on the first installment of NOVO just go HERE
And if you can talk your LCS into carrying my books...EVEN BETTER!
For anyone who gets their books online or at a regular ol' bookstore, you can pre-order NOVO at AMAZON
NOVO is an amazing book, one of the best goddamn finds of the past year for me, so check this out if you like daring new art and storytelling techniques doing classic-mold adventure type yarns. This one rocks it out of the park.
You can read my "Inter-Review" (a review and interview intertwined!) of NOVO Vol. 1 by clicking HERE.
PLUS...read by review for creator Michael S. Bracco's NOVO prequel Graphic Novel BIRTH
and also his early works ATTY & MAX and finally THE COLLECTIVE (AND OTHER STORIES)
THE UNWANTED Graphic Novel $8 Halloween sale!
SOME REALLY COOL NEWS HERE....
The Unwanted Halloween Sale!
Attention all comic book fans and horror freaks, "The Unwanted" will be on sale for $8 thru October! Contact us at Itcho@aol.com or through myspace to order your special signed copy today!
Spread The Word...
» Blog this and/or Bulletin this!
To honor Halloween (our favorite holiday) - read the graphic novel that everyone is talking about!
HEY, MAN, I JUST BOUGHT A COPY. I'M EXCITED TO READ IT!!!
Armageddonquest and Ronald Russell Roach - A Forgotten Gem
Thought I'd take a mo' this morning to blog about one of my ALL TIME (we're talking Top 5 here) favorite comic book epics - ARMAGEDDONQUEST by the incredible (but entirely overlooked) Ronald Russell Roach.
Roach (or "3R" as he's been known to be nicknamed), is a child of the underground "Comix" movement, and his style is highly reminiscent of R. Crumb and Matt Howarth, solid black-and-white linework enhanced by extraordinary detail, intricate shading and crosshatching - basically the complete antithesis to the modern day style that owes more to cell animation than old-school quill-penned woodblock etchings of yore. 3R resembles the Comix guys not only in this, but also in his wonderfully unselfconsious, undisciplined use of text. For all that he might be an artist first, he nevertheless allows pages to overflow with oversized letters and hand-drawn captions and balloons, words that encompass, literally, I'd say two-thirds to three-fourths of any actual page, and yet the book is, stunningly, never a chore. The art is captivating, disarmingly charming, and the prose itself, in all its legions, flows like white water rapids until you have no choice - no choice whatsoever - but to topple right over and freefall down the waterfall that is AQ.
Now what's ARMAGEDDONQUEST about? In 3R's own words, it's: "a 900-page graphic novel about Tazio, the reluctant Antichrist. He is the paradoxical Good Beast of the Apocalypse, who challenges that Evil Destiny laid out for him." Yes, you read that right, this sucker is 900 PAGES, in three volumes of approx. 300 pages each! The story, ultimately, is inordinately complex, an absolute convoy of creative ideas. Tazio's childhood and young adulthood are explored in painstaking detail, with a nail-bitingly mysterious past, a wild supporting cast that is, I kid you not, bar none, and an approach that rears like a horse whenever it so much as smells a cliche. This is jam-packed, dense storytelling, that somehow manages to blow by. You sit down to read, oh, say, ten pages or so, and then 3 hours, 20 missed phone calls, and a full inbox of unanswered email later, you've read through a whole Volume, maybe even barked at your significant other for bothering you because you'll put it down in "just another minute, jeez!", but you don't, because it is that engrossing.
How engrossing? The only comic book epic, as a whole, that I've enjoyed more than ARMAGEDDONQUEST, is Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's PREACHER. Frankly (that's a pun, wait for it...) it far outpaces THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and only marginally loses to WATCHMEN in substance, intelligence, theme, and depth (I like AQ better than WATCHMEN, but Alan Moore's little masterpiece IS the more deft, all-around flawless work of creativity, I admit).
There's so much to love about AQ - the vast cast of memorable characters, I mean LOOK AT THEM ALL:
And then also the rich, textured artwork you simply won't find between many other covers, espeically not today. Also scripting that must be read to be believed, and lastly a story, a plot, a three-act structure that abides by every necessary standard of a cohesive epic as it does spurn formula and dive instead into its own waters - &*$k the ocean, I'll build my own man-made lake and swim there, 3R says. And it'll be fresh water, none 'a dis salt crap.
AQ was published in 1997 by Sirius Entertainment, in three volumes, in its entirety. Joe Lisner drew the covers for the three GNs, and published the short story prequel to AQ, "Mother Instinct", in his CRYPT OF DAWN #2. Lisner even let his DAWN character co-star with 3R's Tazio in this sweet little pinup:
You can nab all three AQ books by heading over to Amazon.com
Sirius is no longer around, but AQ volumes seem to be prevalent and cheap to come by, usually all three books able to be purchased for $3-5 each. Even better, 3R produced a few short stories and prose stories to flesh out small but significant moments and characters in the AQ world, and all of these can be read for free at HIS WEBSITE.
This book is amazing. BONE doesn't touch it, CEREBUS isn't nearly as readable, MAUS is practically trite by comparison. If you've never heard of Ronald Russell Roach, or his opus ARMAGEDDONQUEST, you my friend are in for a super-size me treat. --Dave B.
Inter-Review with Stephanie O'Donnell on "The Original Nutty Funsters"
THE ORIGINAL NUTTY FUNSTERS: A LIST OF GRIEVANCES GN by Stephanie O'Donnel
Check out the Inter-Review (a review and an interview in one!) in two parts:
Presenting...the INTER-REVIEW!!! First up, Finding Peace and Far Arden
THe Spacedog Entertainment job is over, so I'm freelance again, and back with Broken Frontier as a reviewer, although this time around look out for a twist: I'm trying out a new term/concept I'm calling an
"Inter-Review", a review and interview in one!
Wherein the cretaors get to talk and respond to all the points of a review as it goes. So far I'm only trying this with insanely positive reviews, to get the hang of it, but maybe I can make this something truly interesting in time. Still, I'm really happy with how they're coming out.Here's the first few:
FINDING PEACE OGN by Tom Waltz (Children of the Graves, Zipper) and Natahn St. John (debut)
FAR ARDEN by Kevin Cannon - You've heard of 24-hour comics, well this is the first 288-hour GRAPHIC NOVEL ever made!
REVIEW - Sullengrey: Cemetery Things GN
Original review posted here: http://www.brokenfrontier.com/reviews/details.php?id=1773
Sullengrey: Cemetery Things GN
Review by Dave Baxter, posted March 17, 2008
Words: Jocelyn GajewayPencils: Drew Rausch
Inks: Drew Rausch
Colors: Drew Rausch
Story Title: Cemetery Things
Publisher: Ape Entertainment
Price: $19.95
Release Date: March 12, 2008
Sullengrey follows the exploits of Grey, a fair-skinned, dark-featured lad whose best friend is a Grim Reaper plush doll. He’s a boy that wears a substantially wide scarf to cover an odd skin condition about his mouth (amongst other places), and he lives within a cemetery, talks to the dead, and remains tortured by his past. The town that he and his cemetery are a part of—Autumn’s Grove—is a pleasant place, though its pleasantness was long-ago carved into being by the locale’s many buried sins. Now, both Grey and Autumn’s Grove are about to be discovered and uncovered by young photographer Salam, a girl that’ll stop at nothing to determine the horrors that lurk beneath the surface of Autumn’s Grove.
That sounds serious, and it is, but Sullengrey is not a straight-forward horror book. It’s flavored by the more glamorous elements of the genre, the gothic and the goth, the kitschy and the comedic. Creator Drew Rausch is best known for working on SLG’s The Haunted Mansion and Tokyopop’s The Dark Goodbye, and any who’ve seen his highly expressionistic Cabinet of Doctor Caligari style angular art will have a solid idea on what to expect. Think the metaphysical and urban-surreal qualities of Ted McKeever mixed with a hefty dose of irreverence and true-blue horror à la Little Scrowlie and Dogwitch.
Scripted by Jocelyn Gajeway, she pens this inaugural volume with a disconcerting (though arguably effective) blend of sincerity, dramatic credibility, and schlock-fest B-movie banter and bathos. The story is staunchly self-aware of its style and intent, its goals and its genre influence-provenance. In a way, this makes for a nearly deconstructionist goth horror epic, a story that is to the dark and weird sequential what Cemetery Man was to the giallo. Often, I wanted less whimsy than Gajeway and Rausch chose to pack into Cemetery Things, as I found the rhythm of serious to flippant to be executed in too haphazard a fashion, but then this flip-flop is a part of what Sullengrey owes its existence to: a genre that mashes cute and utterly moribund into one seamless whole. There are moments to chill the blood, to raise an eyebrow at the writers’ overly wry modernist flourishes, to gasp at for sheer cool and well-played shock factor.
Though chock full of excellent sequences, Sullengrey, at least in this first volume, does fail to establish a voice and stick to it. It a way, the creators seem to flounder now and again at trying to define what they’re ultimately going to be - what part horror and what part humor? Where to establish the expository backstory, in what form, with what sensibility? More than once Gajeway and Rausch poke at a story element a few times before simply spitting it out in exasperation, and in all such instances, the revelations fall flat, too sudden and offered in a method unbecoming to the rest of the saga’s nuance. But in both story and art, Cemetery Things does manage a steady growth and maturation from issue to issue (or in this collection’s case, chapter to chapter), both creators noticeably coming into their own by the fourth and final installment.
This transitions us nicely to a paragraph about Rausch’s artwork: it begins as eye-catching, though comparatively (comparative to where it arrives at the end) it’s an awkward thing. Rausch has since become a smooth, polished, and atmospheric illustrator, though three out of Cemetery Things’ four chapters are pre-Rausch-the-Amazing and lean more toward Rausch-the-Overly-Hyper. His early pages are kinetic and overworked to the point of appearing like Keith Giffen on something decidedly illicit, and his digital coloring, while nothing offensive, is simple and flat in the way most early digital coloring appeared, once upon a time (and still often does). However, Cemetery Things is Rausch’s caterpillar cocoon, and by the final episode he bursts forth from an artist’s chrysalis as a 
Final verdict: Sullengrey is going to be pretty goddamned cool from hereon out, and it is, in the final moments of Cemetery Things, but its beginning bits may be too raw for some. If you’re already a fan of gothic horror and especially the more fanciful small press and manga-derived "cute" goth horror, then even the early chapters will hardly have you batting an eye. Cemetery Things suffers from certain storytelling potholes, an uneven narrative that rattles as often as it offers a smooth silky ride, but by and large, the creators do seem to get it under control before the back cover is closed.
The story itself is engaging, and the sequel looks to surpass the beginning in every way. I’d recommend CT mostly for what’s to come, rather than on its own merits alone, but that’s still a mighty big merit, and depending on how much does come after this, perhaps a bigger and better merit than being the only good volume of a longer, poorer epic. I get the feeling this’ll be the reverse: a shaky beginning to an awesome ongoing.
Be sure to check out the book’s official website: http://www.sullengrey.com/
REVIEW - ALIMIGHTY Original Graphic Novel ( OGN )
Almighty OGN
Review by Dave Baxter, posted February 25, 2008
Pencils: Edward Laroche
Inks: Edward Laroche
Price: $10.00
Publisher: Edward Laroche
David Lapham and Eduardo Risso team up for a gorgeous new OGN, a fast-paced, action-oriented, sci-fi chase across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Oh…wait…no they don’t.
So…who made this thing? Edward…Laroche? Okay, well, what publisher? Edward…Laroche ?!? So, no company, just him, all on his own, a full 180-page OGN, stylish, slick, pro production values indistinguishable from any Oni or Viper Comics collection, but he just…made it? And…uh…printed it?
Yup: and he doesn’t even pretend he’s a “company”, but instead just puts out his first published work, Almighty, a book that follows a hired killer and the young girl she’s hired to save, and protect from an onslaught of other killers. “Fale” is this savior-warrior-woman’s name, a person of questionable origins, apparently having been raised inside “Zone 1”, a place where only the most impossible mutations of post-nuclear holocaust reside. Armed with abilities perhaps biological, perhaps cybernetic, she carries her young charge across miles of dangerous road, an ensemble of mad kidnappers at their heels, mercenaries, mutants, and more at their toes.
Almighty is a sweetly conceived first offering from Laroche, self-contained and wholly its own, yet set in a fully-realized future world, one that looks to be revisited and fleshed-out in upcoming sequels, starting with Remember Amphion (for which there’s a one-page preview ad in the back). Even better, Fale (the killer-for-hire) seems to be Laroche’s “heroine”, his protagonist, Remember Amphion being a book that appears to peer into her past, and so I’m assuming she’ll likely continue as the focus for the many books to come. Which is a good thing: Fale rocks ass.
Comics could use a few more strong, well-established female heroes, even if they are, more often than not, anti-heroes or femme fatales, and Fale, while not really much of a pure-bred heroine, swiftly proves a fascinating lead, complicated and yet simple-minded and therefore focused in her own way. Her past is tied to the unique aspects that make Laroche’s post-apocalyptic world worthwhile, and not just a rehash of a zillion other similar After-the-Fall clichés, but rather its own distinctive setting. She’s a matchless foil to the world’s amoral side, and a character whose dichotomies allow her to become more than just a hero in an otherwise self-serving future. Instead, she’s one of them, through-and-through, and yet she’s more, but only just, which is where the entertainment comes in.
Fale is good at what she does, but not unconquerable, and there’s plenty of others with the exact same qualifications as she, superior beings all. In Laroche’s world, Fale is literally one of the best, but the total number of “bests” is pretty damn high. So the action is breakneck, the threat level extremely elevated, and the cool factor through the roof, and despite it all, Laroche never loses the thread of the story or the characters’ own arcs in favor of simple eye-candy. The story of Almighty is a straight-forward thing, and kicks right off with action and ends with the same, but there’s a lot of nuance packed in-between, and even during, marking the book a complete and total package.
Laroche’s art is, as I sort-of joked about up at the beginning there, very similar to Eduardo Risso’s, fluid and dynamic and utterly appealing. There’s traces of Jason Pearson, Brian Stelfreeze, and Phil Hester as well, though any which way you cut it what it equals is an extremely beautiful and high-quality graphic novel. The action is glorious and perfectly rendered, the quieter moments suffering not a jot in comparison to the fight scenes, and the presentation is obviously one schooled on the best that modern comics has to offer, as it manages to match them, panel for panel.
With writing somewhere between Lapham and Brian K. Vaughn (the cross country chase scenes and the talking-head scenes interspersed reminds me, in their execution and quality, entirely of Y: The Last Man) and art straight from popular Image or Vertigo books, Almighty becomes both the title and description of this thickset gem. Affordable, with a higher page count, and frankly better than most $20 GN’s popping up out of the mainstream and even the small presses, I really can’t recommend you spend your money on anything else. Laroche may not be a name, as this is his first, and it doesn’t yet have penny one behind it for marketing purposes, but there’s no possible way talent of this nature can go on in this secluded vein for long. I’ve rarely read anything so good from a purely self-published source before, and the last time I did, the book was picked up by Slave Labor Graphics within the year. So mark my words, and think of this as an advanced limited edition.
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The only place to order Almighty for a meager $10 US is at Edward’s MySpace site: http://www.myspace.com/blackhalo51 Drop him a message and he’ll be sure to get a copy out to you. Preview pages are also available at the MySpace site.
