Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Webcomic Overlook #178: Space Time Condominium

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Hey, I’ve got a sitcom pitch for you: take one unlucky schmo. Put him in a house with four roommates. There’s a redneck, a nerd, a wigger, and a homosexual. But get this! All of them are alternate reality versions of the same guy! They’re on a collision course with wackiness!

Which, to be honest, isn’t that farfetched an idea for a sitcom. Isn’t there a comedy about a guy in a doggy fursuit currently on the air at this moment on FX? However, this sort of pitch probably works best in the crazy 80′s. I suppose you can point to the Sherwood Schwartz era as true cartoony cheese in sitcoms, like when two cavemen traveled through time and space and five passengers setting sail on a three our tour. And yet, those 80′s sitcoms tried everything they could do to top that earlier weirdness. Ah, that was the time when you had sitcoms about alien life forms, robot little girls, and nerdy next door neighbors who build Urkelbots. And the “dramas” (if you could call them that) were even more cartoony. Need I remind you about four soldiers of fortune touring the LA area in a black van or a couple of moonshiners in an orange Dodge Charger? Of course I don’t.

Dave Dwonch has the same idea. His webcomic, Space Time Condominium, frames the situation as a failed 80′s Canadian sitcom. Yes, not only is it a cheesy sitcom, it’s also Canadian. Sorta gives it a nice aura of shoe-string production values, off-kilter wholesomeness, and a heaping dose of whiteness, doesn’t it?*

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Finally, someone gives Kate Beaton an award

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Despite rampant fears (on this site anyway) that The Gutters was going to sweep every category at the Harveys like the frightening blob-creature that Tetsuo morphed into at the end of Akira, it turns out that there was a golden lining to the Baltimore Comic Con after all. Namely, that someone FINALLY gave Kate Beaton an award for Hark A Vagrant! Ms. Beaton went home with the award for Best Online Work, beating out the Eisner-nominated Guns of Shadow Valley; former Zuda Comic La Morte Sisters; last year’s winner PVP; and, yes, The Gutters.

The Gutters, in fact, did not win any awards, which gives me a little smidgen of hope that comic book fans aren’t so blind to recognizing actual humor.

Ms. Beaton was apparently attending the wedding and couldn’t stop by the lovely city of Baltimore. The emcee, PVP‘s Scott Kurtz, informed of her win via twitter, which seemed to make Ms. Beaton pretty darned happy.

The Webcomic Overlook would like to congratulate Ms. Beaton. May this be the first of many awards that you may accumulate, like the scattered Neo-Tokyo detritus that Giant Tetsuo absorbed into his massive skin folds.

(Note: header image replaced with a Kate Beaton comic of less questionable vinatage.)

The Hugo Trifecta

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You may have heard that, yesterday, recognition for the most prestigious works of art in a specific genre were awarded yesterday. And also the Harvey Awards were given out. But first, the Hugo Awards!

You may as well rename the Best Graphic Story Award the Foglio Award now, because Girl Genius has walked home with the trophy for the third year in a row. Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius, Volume 10: Agatha Heterodyne and the Guardian Muse beat out Fables: Witches, written by Bill and Mark Willingham; Grandville Mon Amour, by Bryan Talbot; fellow webcomic Schlock Mercenary: Massively Parallel, written and illustrated by Howard Tayler; and The Unwritten, Volume 2: Inside Man by Mike Carey and Peter Gross.

Awards were handed out at Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. Congratulations to the Foglios!

Not related to webcomics, Lev Grossman walked home with the Best New Writer award. Despite that name, he’s a science fiction writer, not the fictional movie producer that appeared in Tropic Thunder. I haven’t read any of his stuff yet, but I do have The Magicians on order from Amazon.com at this moment.

Random Quickies: Dubblebaby

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From the pages of “the comics that will always be compared to Perry Bible Fellowship” comes Sam and Toby Alden’s Dubblebaby. And you know what? It’s rather good. The Aldens go simultaneously high-brow and low-brow by goofing on a beloved René Magritte piece. They also do a faithful spoof of manga when we look at the unforeseen complications to building a robot maid. The twists at the end are not so much ironic as they are phenomenally goofy, yet they never fail to put a smile on my face.

Poll: Product placement in comics?

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Last week, Scott Kurtz made some waves about how he was selling product placement in his comics. Pay a fee, and you get a mention in the illustrious PvP webcomic. (Details on his blog and at Comics Alliance.) Here’s Mr. Kurtz’s take on it:

And I asked myself, why *DO* I keep the strip off limits to advertising? I mention real products all the time. The PvP gang has played Dungeons and Dragons, gone to see every Star Wars film, quote Trek non-stop and choose Coke over Pepsi. I’m already doing it, I’m just not getting paid for it. And if you do it right, like in Mad Men, who would care? You know the dirty secret is that as comic strip creators, we’re really not supposed to mention actual products in our strips. That’s why when you watch reality TV, the producers go out of their way to cover up logos, and place gaffers tape across tee shirts. But we do it all the time and get away with it because as geeks, most of the products we mention are created by companies that “get it” and are excited to be a part of the culture at large. And the big corporations are…well…too big to notice. Or care.

So I started talking about it with my advertising guys. Mike and Jeff are smart cookies and they are very keen when it comes to navigating these unspoken relationships between creator, client and fan. We started to brainstorm and we decided that if we were to try something like this, a lot of things had to line up:

- The product would have to be something I believed in.
- The product had to be something I would comment on in PvP anyway.
- The client would have to be forward thinking, and geek savvy, and be able to poke fun at themselves.
- The client would have to understand that the inclusion of their company into the strip would have to serve the greater story or humor.

So what do you think, Webcomic Overlook readers? Savvy business decision, or selling out? Frankly, I’m not quite sure if Kurtz’s logic hold up here. It would be like the MST3K deciding that they’ve mentioned Smucker’s Jelly in their jokes so much that they deserve a sponsorship. In a way, it curtails the spontenaiety of the humor.

But that’s just my opinion. What do you think?

Know Thy History: Metropolis

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If you bring up the word “Metropolis” among your average cineaste, the first thing that will come to mind will be Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent expressionist sci-fi movie where a robot woman named Maria causes sexual havoc among the ruling class and inspires the working class to revolt.

There’s another Metropolis, though, that may just be as wildly embraced by anime and manga fans. That would be the landmark manga created by Osamu Tezuka, a.k.a. “The Godfather of Anime,” a.k.a. “The Father or Manga.” Metropolis was published in 1949, back when the manga scene was inundated with low quality comics. Tezuka set out to change all that by creating a full-length sci-fi epic.

So to what extent was the manga Metropolis was directly influenced by the Fritz Lang Metropolis? From an interview with Tezuka:

This manmade person was based on the image of the female robot in the famous pre-war German film Metropolis. That said, I hadn’t seen the movie at the time and I didn’t even know what it was about. During the war, in Kinema Junpou, or some other such magazine, there was a single still from the movie of the female robot’s birth scene. I remembered it and it just gave me a little hint. I also really like the sound of the word “metropolis” so I used the same title, but other than that there was no real connection to the movie.

of course, he could’ve just said this to appease the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation (which means that, in Germany, Metropolis has to be released as Robotic Angel). Hey, being the Japanese Disney ain’t easy.

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The Webcomic Overlook #177: Transient Man

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There’s a place in San Francisco called the Tenderloin. It’s a sketchy area filled with crime, drugs, and prostitution. In its past, the neighborhood was filled with boxing gyms, gambling establishments, and speakeasies, and today it remains the same, only replaced with liquor stores and strip clubs.

The seediness is almost a point of cultural pride. Dashiell Hammett, author of the Maltese Falcon, immortalized the area as the base of operations for hard-boiled detective Sam Spade. He elevated the Tenderloin to mythical proportions by transforming it into a place that seethed mystery and danger.

When I visited San Francisco a few years back, I stayed in a hotel a block west of The Tenderloin. Trust me, I wasn’t quite so well versed in San Francisco geopolitics at the time. One thing you notice immediately is that the place is full of homeless people. Generally non-threatening homeless people (at least from what I encountered), but quite numerous nonetheless.

Massive Black Entertainment’s Transient Man is a romantic adventure about the homeless of the Tenderloin. The story is told through a homeless man named Bob who talks to interdimensional beings that aid him on his journey in saving the universe. This high concept premise is already so inherently intriguing that it would have to work incredibly hard to fritter away any goodwill.

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