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Septagon Studios News Blog Nominated for "BEST COMICS BLOG" - and well deserved!
Head over to the SEPTAGON STUDIOS NEWS BLOG, now more than ever because their superb ground-breaking blog has just been nominated for "Best Comics Blog" Award at the BlogNet.com awards site!
Go HERE TO VOTE. All you have to do is register for the Awards site and then cast your vote by rating the site 1-5 stars (oh, come on and just give 'em 5 already! - no equivocating on this one!)
SS offers essay-esque coverage on comic news and thought-provoking and utterly enlightening editorials on starting up a small press comics company in the modern age, marketing, printing, etc. Their design sense is insane, too. The blog looks GORGEOUS. But for once, it's pretty AND has content. 200% more small press coverage than your average blog to boot.
So VOTE FOR THEM! Huzzah! --Dave B.
MyEbook - the alternative to Wowio.com?
Well, super-awesome find of the day - MYEBOOK.COM, a place that may replace WOWIO.COM for the ultimate in finding free reads. Registration is free, and while you don't get to download the material offered, MYEBOOK sports an intensely superior "Reader" to the Platinum Studios derived letdown used over at Wowio. The pages are big, bright, crisp, and MyEbook is even interactive, allowing you to leave comments about the book, join in communities, share with friends, and even more, though honestly I just found the site and I'm not aware of all that it offers yet. It seems kind of like MySpace if Myspace were a library - THAT MAKES ME SO HAPPY :)
Myebook even allows you to embed a particular book in a blog, like so:
That's the first issue of the Archaia Studios Press' critically-acclaimed, highly unique spin on the zombie tale, AWAKENING. Really guys, do check this software/website out. There's only 49 comics up on the site right now, but I expect the list to grow much as Wowio's did, from 100+ to the 1000+ it has today. THE BOY WHO MADE SILENCE #1 is even up on Myebook now, and an affiliation like that is enough to recommend anything. --Dave B.
"Die, Byron! Die!" and Krumpholz Hit the Web!
Here's an interesting piece of news, and a bloody "about time" one at that: Karl Christian Krumpholz's BYRON: DIE, BYRON! DIE! has at long last made the move from a downloadabe e-comic to a totally free, effortlessly accessible webcomic!
BRYON is a comic about a Goth kid wannabe who finds himself tumblind head-first into real true-blue horror evil dark-thing Yog-Sothothery. It's charming, freaky, and funny all at the same time, which is a difficult blend to achieve. Krumpholz and his BYRON have been an intriguing new work I've championed for about a year and a half now (you can read my review of the first series "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous" HERE, and then my lengthy Inter-Review of the sequel "Die, Byron! Die!" by going HERE.
Here's an excerpt from that last review, so in my own words *ach-hem-hem-hem-hem*:
"For all those cool story beats, Krumpholz can likely be called an artist first and foremost, regardless of the strengths inherent in his writing, and Byron can stand alone as a truly visual—and a packed one at that—warehouse of black-and-white elegance. M, B, and D is a chock-a-block collection of square-shaped characters, sharp-teethed critters, and nearly panel-less pages. D, B! D! wields the same, though wherein the first series had moments of opaque action and compositions sometimes difficult to dissect, the second series shows Krumpholz already finding a far more elegant and easily sub-divided number of layouts, with clearer action, more distinctive characters, and a clean and polished line to every finished page. His style is incredibly suited to Byron's subject matter, being a cousin to Mexican folk art..."
-Dave Baxter, Broken Frontier
So take off and go read BYRON for free at http://www.slgcomic.com/Byron_ep_60-1.html It's now in duo-tone COLOR (Blue and white) and if you like what you see in the webcomic then go purchase the e-books for ony $0.89 a-piece.
Yeah, the webcomic is chapter 4 of the second series, but said second series is largely episodic and easy to jump into, even in the middle. And anyway, it's a great way to get a tast before spending *gasp!* less than a dollar for awesome small press entertainment. Not the best of all worlds (that would be totally free webcomics beginning to end that somehow, magically, the publisher and artist could earn a living from), but it's a step in the right direction, a direction BYRON and Krumpholz have needed to take for a while now.
Well, here it is! Enjoy! --Dave B.
ORCUSVILLE - A webstrip for gamers, geeks, and gods
Today I'm going to plug a buddy of mine's webstrip: ORCUSVILLE!!
Starring the arch-demon baron duke dude fiend from literal Hell, Lord Orcus, and his one secretary, Velia; his lone torturer, Vis, who's also a lawyer and eternal demon of arbitrary retribution; the only torturee of Orcus' domain, named Victor, forever strapped spread-eagle to a wooden block and suffering (in-between witicisms and/or pleas for mercy); and finally the unforgettable Doctor A. Thoth, the pan-dimensional Chaos Theory specialist of all the known multiverse!
The webstrip is updated near-daily, usually riffing on gamer-related humor, or just geek-related humor in general. Por ejemlpo:
And:
Pretty funny, n'est ce pas? Even better, Lord Orcus himself sometimes steps out from behind the black HTML'd border of his own webstrip to interview comics pros in a Space Ghost Coast-to-Coast style, such as his latest chat (read: ridiculous harrasment of) superstar artist Carmilla d'Errico, of Nightmares & Fairy Tales fame as well as her latest little diddy, Burn (see images below).
AWWWWW! Don't Orcus and Carmilla make a sweet ol' couple?
So go read ORCUSVILLE!!! There's a TON more stuff on the site (it's quite comprehensive). Written by Steve Saunders and art by Julio Falkenhagen and Freedom Drudge and, hey, for those of you who read the gods-beautiful awesome FICTION CLEMENS mini from Ape earlier this year, Orcus is co-written by that book's very author, Josh Wagner! Ah, yes, sometimes life can be so syrupy sweet... --Dave B.
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 $3-5 each. Even better, 3R produced a few short stories and prose stories to flesh out small but significant moments and characters in the AQ world, and all of these can be read for free at HIS WEBSITE.
This book is amazing. BONE doesn't touch it, CEREBUS isn't nearly as readable, MAUS is practically trite by comparison. If you've never heard of Ronald Russell Roach, or his opus ARMAGEDDONQUEST, you my friend are in for a super-size me treat. --Dave B.
THE PROCESS - Incredible webcomic from Joe Infurnari
This is probably one of the prettiest damn webcomics I ever did see. Very surreal, yet highly epic and accessible in a classic Jungian sense. It really works.
Yeah, and that's just a TASTE of what's at the site. Understadably nominated for an Eisner for Best Digital Comic 2008. And god, there's so much to be learned from the page design alone! This &*$^er's beautiful. --Dave B.
Dark Roasted Blend: Weird & Wonderful Things - A Thrilling Wonder Publication!
This site is proof that we have probably never, in fact, dreamed up anything that is in truth "alien", but rather our imaginations are limited to cold stone reality.
Here's a taste of picures taken from the very real, very visitable (if not easily so) Socortra Island:
