Monthly Archives: March 2011

Eagle Awards voting is open

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The Eagle Awards voting is open as of today! According to the Eagle Awards site:

INTRODUCED in 1976, the Eagles are the comics industry’s longest established awards. Acknowledged as the pre-eminent international prizes, they have been featured on the covers of leading US and UK titles across the last 30 years.

Of course, the Eagle Awards are more international than that. There is a separate category for “Favorite European Book,” as well as the presence of several prominent Canadian comic book creators, as proven by both the multiple nominations scored by Bryan Lee O’Malley and the presence of one of the nominees in the “Favorite Web-based comic” award:

Favorite Web-based comic
• Hark! A Vagrant! by Kate Beaton
• Freak Angels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield
• Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques
• Axe Cop by Malachai and Ethan Nicolle
• xkcd.com by Randall Munroe

As this is one of those “voting is open to the public” type of deals, I imagine xkcd is more or less taking this one home. Or… is it? You are the judges, and the fates of the nominees rest in your hands, comic reading public.

(h/t Robot 6)

One Punch Reviews #42: Dream Life

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Dreams are a fascinating theme for a writer to tackle. It gives carte blanche to play with surreal imagery, such as, oh, a Duchess who plays croquet using a flamingo and a hedgehog or a huge cityscape falling in on itself. It lets you explore the realm of your mind that you should control, but for some reason slips beyond your grasp. Our dreams represent a highly personal and private experience, so it’s embarrassing enough when we let slip the events going on in our slumber. How do you react when someone’s peeking in on your most unguarded moments?

This fragile mental ecosystem that you enter when you close your eyes at night is one of the major themes of Dream Life: A Late Coming of Age, a webcomic written by comic artist Salgood Sam (a.k.a. Max Douglas, but in reverse). It’s also about mystery, the crises we go through as we age… and Charlie Brown, surprisingly.


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Know Thy History: Polly and Her Pals

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The Roaring Twenties saw the rise of the free-spirited, liberated young woman known as a “flapper.” They wore short skirts, bobbed their hair, and listened to jazz. Though this was seen by some gray hairs as being very offensive in their day, I have to say that being known for listening to jazz seems kinda classy these days. Wait… does this mean that, fifty to seventy years hence, our modern day hellions will be known for their fantastic forward-thinking taste in Ke$ha?

Time will tell whether a future Gershwin will adapt “Blah Blah Blah” into a celebrated orchestral rhapsody. In the 1920′s flappers captured the public imagination, as sexy young ladies from every era are wont to do. They even managed to inspire an entire genre of comics centered around young, independent women. The comic that started it all was Cliff Sterrett’s Polly and Her Pals, It began in 1912 as Positive Polly, but eventually the name changed after the focus included her “pals” … which were, actually, her family. (Poor Polly… a child of the Suffragette movement, yet still being controlled by her folks.)

After Polly, there was a boom of flapper comics that featured ladies in skimpy outfits doing some pretty racy things for the 1920′s. They had colorful names like Boots, Fritzi Ritz, Dumb Dora, Jane (OK, maybe that one’s not so colorful), and Blondie.

Yes. That Blondie.

But there was more going for Polly and Her Pals than simply featuring the first pretty face. You see… it had style to spare.

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One Punch Reviews #41: How I Killed Your Master

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The title to Brian Clevinger and John Wood’s How I Killed Your Master is a reference to the CBS sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. On the TV show, the narrator, Ted Mosby (voiced by none other than Bob Saget), recounts the adventures of his younger self to his future children, which supposedly leads up to how he met their mother. (And, frankly, it gets a little disturbing, since most of it is about his and his friends’ sexual exploits. Call me old fashioned, but that doesn’t seem like appropriate bedtime story material.)

How I Killed Your Master employs a similar framing device: Master Chan Sen and his army breaks into the home of Master Liu Wong, seeking vengeance for the death of his master, Xu Li, long ago. Master Liu, though, strikes a deal: Chan Sen can strike him down now, or he can learn how to become even more powerful than his dead master. Chan Sen, figuring that Wong is a dead man either way, decides to take Wong up on his offer and sits down with him for some tea. And thus begins How I Killed Your Master, which flashes back to when the currently elderly Wong is just a young boy in the service of Master Fei.


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Deadpool to get the McNinja treatment

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As mentioned by Grey in the comments section, Marvel’s Deadpool — a character created by Rob Liefeld, played by Ryan Reynolds in the Wolverine movie and perhaps the world’s most overexposed Deathstroke the Terminator clone in history — is going to be written by Chris Hastings (The Adventures of Dr. McNinja) in Fear Itself: Deadpool. Given that Deadpool is a rather wacky assassin who typically breaks the fourth wall, I gotta say that putting Chris Hastings on a Deadpool story makes so much sense it hurts.

Random Quickies: F*ck Yeah Headlines

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Back in 2007, Strong Bad memorably made fun of webcomics, including one sort where you just “ask for input from your viewers and rip that off for content. Pfff. What a cop-out.” The Cheat then makes comics based on spam e-mail names the readers send him. (ex: Knowingest J. Drawbridges.)

Weirdly, that’s the first thing that came to mind when I viewed Eric Wedlum’s F*ck Yeah Headlines, which takes newspaper headlines and makes a comic out of them. Like “Australian Brewery Invents ‘Space Beer’” shows and astronaut getting drunk with aliens. It’s really, really corny … but in a way, it’s like a better drawn version of the comics the Cheat was making fun of, and it makes me feel rather nostalgic of webcomics past.

Wait. Is it possible to get nostalgic about something from only four years ago?

Savage Chickens book is now available

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Savage Chickens (reviewed here) is out in book form! And no, it’s not just a stack of yellow Post-It notes with pictures of chickens and such. It ‘s actually available in 144 nicely printed pages (which include 65 never before seen strips) and published by respectable book publisher Penguin. Plus, creator Doug Savage informs me that the Webcomic Overlook was mentioned inside, which is pretty neat admittedly. Anyway, I’m a pretty big fan of the comic (I still have a Savage Chickens strip hanging at my cubicle at work), so check it out when you can!