Some time ago, I was helping some folks clean up an old building downtown. I was there with my wife and a fellow helper. It was getting late… and our companion did the one thing you should not be doing when it starts getting dark: she started telling stories. Namely, that she had seen ghosts here.

She told us of two occurrences. She said she once saw a young girl playing near the pulpit. She seemed like a little girl who was just playing around, laughing and giggling and the like. The girl ran off to the back room. The lady went to check on the girl, but, as you might guess, the girl disappeared. The other ghost she saw was a soldier. The lady had done some research, and she found out the building next door was once an infirmary at the turn of the 20th century. She said that these ghosts weren’t dangerous. They were, in fat, rather friendly. She wouldn’t have thought them to be ghosts except that when she’d run after them, they’d disappeared.

Now, maybe I’m not the type of person who believes in ghosts. Maybe I had nothing to be afraid of, since it was made clear that the ghosts were harmless. Friendly or not, though, you best believe we shut off the lights, locked the doors, and got out of that building as fast as we could. The very otherness of a non-corporeal being is enough to get your hairs standing on end.

Zack Morrison knows this. There are many ghosts in his webcomic Paranatural. Some are dangerous. Some are not. But even the friendly ones possess the sort of innate creepiness that makes you want to lock the doors and get out as fast as possible.

Max is a young, sarcastic 13-year-old kid who’s just moved into Mayview. He has an overactive sister and a very childlike father. Their new home is a convenience store. If you’ve ever seen the anime FLCL, the situation should awfully familiar.

Paranatural has the feel of a goofy Gainax anime. The movements are more exaggerated, and the characters explode with emotion. Max’s Dad, for example, can’t just be happy, he has to treat every new development as if it were the most fantastic thing to ever happen to him. It’s implied that Max rolls his eyes at these antics. You’d imagine that would make him more subdued than the rest of his family. Nope! Max may be surly, be he takes that to the extreme himself. When he changes for school, he does so with a seriousness that can only be described as over-the-top.

This puts him a little at odds with the rest of the town. Max’s dad may be eccentric, but’s he normal compared to the rest of Mayview. Everyone acts like they’re totally overdosing on Red Bull. “I’m starting to think crazy is the norm in Mayview,” Max quips. Now, I’ve mentioned that there are ghosts involved in this story. You’re probably wondering if maybe they have something to do with everyone in the town acting as mad as a hatter. Perhaps … but so far, all clues point to the more likely theory that everyone’s crazy.

The first student Max meets at the school, for example, is a high-strung girl named Suzy who’s rather militant in having Max join the Journalism Club… even though no one reads the school newspaper. She’s so obsessed with talking notes that, when Max forgets where his first period class is supposed to be, she retrieves his schedule right from her notebook. His friends are the sort of kids who will hinder a bully by scooting their desks together so he can’t pass. If he fails to sit next to them at lunch, though, they cry bitter, bitter tears.

Teachers are hardly any better. One rather odd fellow rewards his students with gold stars. He does so by skipping through class, opening a treasure chest full of stickers, and flinging a nice gold star right at your forehead.

After dealing with the weirdness of real life, the ghosts, then should be pretty much cake. Max gets his first clue when he hears strange hissing at his new home. He’s then greeted with a cavalcade of weirdness. Johnny, our story’s resident bully, suddenly has a cute slime creature perched on his head that only Max can see. He walks though halls, thinking that they’re crowded, only to realized in the next moment that the hall was empty all this time. And there are times when he’s staring out the window, there’s a grinning dragon staring right back at him.

The town really is filled with supernatural creatures — or shades, as our characters call them. Some are ghosts. Some are spirits, which never were alive in the first place. Most are friendly, polite, and pretty content to just staying out of the way. There are other creatures, though, who would like to have nothing more than treat other ghosts like delicious midnight snacks. Max has gained the power to be “dead without being dead.”

He can see these shades. He can touch these shades. He can also shape the environment around him with the help of a tool. As it turns out, his tool is a mystical baseball bat… the better for smashing. By pure chance, he grabbed the bat in a moment of duress and now it has given him superpowers.

Max’s gifts attract the attention of the Paranatural Activity Club (known to the rest of the school under the inscrutable title of “Activity Club”). The view the world of the shades as a fascinating ecosystem that can only be experienced by the privileged few. They’re also sort of a Junior Ghostbusters squad, protecting friendly shades from malevolent ones who can make them even more dead. They’re led by Mr. Spender, a teacher who always wears sunglasses and who gets pretty frustrated when people mispronounce his name. His star pupil seems to be Isabel, who boasts an array of powers. She can manipulate paper — which is more impressive than it sounds. Turning paper into a whirling morningstar, for example. She can also shoot energy blasts from her fingers and force spirits to stop being evil.

Her classmate, Ed, seems to be equally talented. His tool is a paintbrush, a humble implement that can double as a scythe. While Isabel is ambitious, Ed is a little more of a prankster. Bustin’ makes him feel good. Isaac rounds out the team. He doesn’t carry a tool. In fact, we haven’t really seen him fight yet. However, he doesn’t seem to be shy about laying down the theoretical side of ghost bustin’.

Max sorta waves off the Paranatural Activity Club at first. He’s not the sociable type, and he’s not sure if he wants to take his talents as a spectral any further. There are also politics to consider: the Activity Club is viewed suspiciously by Suzy, who seethes with accusations of betrayal when she sees Max with them. But soon, Max is pretty much forced to side with Isabel, Ed, and the rest. After all… there were those weird noises he heard coming out of his own house….

To sum it up, Paranatural is absolutely delightful. The wild, blustery gesticulations and exaggerated expressions burst with the crazy energy of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And speaking of cartoons, I love how Mr. Morrison unnecessarily gives a sequence, say, three panels that most cartoonists would give one. When Max falls down the stairs, his butt hits all the steps. He then does a backflip, he lands on his feet, and finally he confronts his dad. It really is like watching an anime.

And then there’s the ludicrous dialogue, full of needless dramatics and ridiculous, made-up slang that makes absolutely no sense:
“Ride, my child, to the top of the hill! To your education!“
“He’s gonna need a whole lotta yeast to rise after one-a your punches!“
“Huh? D’joo scone the local protein already?”
“I’m a-rustlin’ your blankets! I’m a rustler!“

At the same time, the general air of silliness doesn’t detract from the moments of dread and unease. Now, Paranatural never really gets too scary. This is Poltergeist levels of horror, where the main event is suspense and not gore, blood, or violence. Generally, I think it’s fine for kids to read. There are moments that can be pretty unsettling… and, at some moments, Grade-A nightmare fuel. The fun art and the odd characters can catch you off guard, putting you in a mood for whimsy before hitting you with something a little more haunting.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

There’s something about editorial cartoons that can be incredibly dangerous. Offend the wrong groups, for example, and you might find yourself running for your life. With televised, audio, or print media, you can build up or soften your argument by surrounding it with empirical evidence. There is rarely such a safety net for one-panel editorial cartoons. They are immediate an powerful in their brevity. The concise format strips the opinion to the stark naked core.

Josh Neufeld’s Eisner nominated webcomic, Bahrain: Lines In Ink, Lines In The Sand, follows the struggles of two editorial cartoonists living in Bahrain, a country caught in a politicl turmoil that, as of this writing, is still making news at the Bahrain Grand Prix. Neufeld has previously reported the personal stories of people caught up in Hurricane Katrina with AD: After the Deluge. Now he uses the same techniques, applied on a smaller scale, to take at look at the Arab Spring. It’s fairly short at 17 pages, but perhaps that’s as long as it needs to be.

Mr. Neufeld went to Bahrain on a State Department sponsored trip. There, he met two cartoonists whose works are included in the comic: Sara and Mohammed. Sara, in particular was the only female cartoonist that Mr. Neufeld met. Mr. Neufeld had been impressed by the country. It was a modernized nation, “incredibly liberal — by Arab standards.” Women had the write to vote. Political prisoners had been freed. Parliamentary elections had resumed. Mr. Neufeld didn’t sense any underlying tenions. But then the protests hit, and things unravel.

Neufeld shares the points of view from the two cartoonists he’d met, who’d independently friended him on Facebook. Mohammed would naturally seem to be the sympathetic one. He sides with the cause of the protestors, whose grievances stemmed from the years of second-class citizenship the Shia majority had felt at the hands of the Sunni elite. He was at the protests, where his friend, Ali, was one of the unfortunate casualties. Mohammed would publish cartoons mocking the government’s version of events. Eventually, the cartoons got Mohammed in hot water. He would be suspended from the University of Bahrain.

But each story has two sides. Unlike other comics about the political climate in the Middle East (like The Revolution Will Be Televised and Zahra’s Paradise), Mr. Neufeld doesn’t present the opposition as a one-dimensional bogeyman. While Sara published cartoons supporting the revolution in Egypt, she’s not so kind about the protestors in Bahrain. What she sees instead is betrayal. She had seen Bahrain come so far through peaceful means. She sees the protests being fueled by “racist and terrorist groups,” undoing the progress that had taken years to achieve. The protestors, to her, were not innocents. They were the agitators.

The protests tear Bahrain apart. “I imagine Bahrain like a paradise,” Mohammed says, “but unfortunately now it’s the opposite.” Hammering home the point is an event that turn out to be incredibly symbolic: the Pearl Roundabout, a monument where the protestors gathered, is torn down by security forces. It’s a stark reminder that things can’t go back to that way things were.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5).

Loneliness is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s kinda nice to be away from people. You can be alone in your thoughts. You never have to worry about behaving or others looking down on you. You are your own master.

And then there’s the flipside. It’s unnerving when the only voice you can hear is your own. There’s no one to help you if you get in trouble. There’s no one to comfort you when you cry, no one to laugh at your jokes, no one to tell you if you look good today.

Loneliness is both alluring and frightening. Thus, it’s a natural theme for most post-apocalyptic stories. Take the movie I Am Legend, for instance. Sure, an abandoned New York can be a pretty cool place where you can play golf on an aircraft carrier or break into houses and rummage through other peoples’ drawers or drive whatever exotic car you want. It’s such an alluring fantasy that there’s even a term for it: “cozy catastrophe.”

It’s also soul-crushing. When Will Smith is forced to kill his dog, you can sense that he lost something even more valuable than his utter surplus of freedom: companionship.

Which brings me to Ben Fleuter’s webcomic, Derelict.

Merriam-Webster has two main definitions for derelict. The first is “something voluntarily abandoned; especially: a ship abandoned on the high seas.” This would seem to be the one most apt to fit this comic. After all, it very prominently features a small boat. The boat is not, technically, abandoned, but it’s assumed that it had been by a previous owner. Considering the main character, though, the second definition would be fitting as well: “a destitute, homeless social misfit” … because that the position our heroine, Dang Thu Mai, finds herself in. A vagrant of the seven seas.

Dang roams the oceans, trying to survive in a world that’s been flooded. Kinda like Kevin Costner in that one movie … Field of Dreams. The story starts off with Dang salvaging parts from a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that has sunk to the sea floor. It’s a silent sequence that lasts a few pages, but it effectively sets up Dang’s situation. She’s out here by herself. If anything goes wrong in this risky operation, there’s little chance anyone is rescuing her. And the world is quiet. Unnervingly, eerily quiet. So quiet that when Dang first speaks, it feels curiously out of place, like she’s disturbing the dignified stillness of the world around her.

It’s a burden on her mental state. She passes the time reading a book that is partly unreadable because the pages are stained. She opens and closes her hands, reaching out at the stars with a look of heavy weariness on her face. In a later scene, she cuts her hair, sees herself in a mirror, and compliments herself. A beat later, her face falls; it’s a sad reminder that the only friend she has in the world is her own reflection.

Eventually the story unfolds in a rather unconventional way. We skip around in time. It can, honestly, be a little confusing. I’ve read Derelict twice now, and I can’t say for certain which is the correct sequence of events. Mr. Fleuter sprinkles clues here and there, and it shouldn’t take too much brain power to piece things together, but for whatever reason I still scratch my primitive monkey brain. It’s best not to dwell on the details and let the mood of the story take you.

Our first clue as to what’s going on happens when, in a very haunting and atmospheric scene, Dang’s boat crosses the path of a drifting container ship. She tries to radio the other ship, but there is no response. She scrambles, and she barely steers her boat out of the way. As the ship passes, drifting like a mindless hulk, Dang hears gunfire on deck. There’s someone out there. But what would normally be a beacon of hope in this bleak, lonely world is now a cause for anxiety.

The story flashes back, and we are gradually introduced clues as to what’s going on. We see Dang scavenging through an abandoned farmhouse. Her activity has attracted attention, and we learn that strange creatures are walking the Earth. They have heads like cattle skulls, vulture-like claws for hands, and wear big, bulky robes. They are called “Gargoyles.” I’m not willing to call them aliens yet. Coupled with the rugged, Wild West trappings of the rustic barnyard, these creatures could just as easily be malevolent spirits straight out of Native American folklore.

Fortunately, Dang is equipped with a crossbow and a UV bolt, which causes searing damage to our pursuers. This is, incidentally, one of the greatest strengths of Derelict. Very little is outright spelled out to the readers. Building an almost oppressive mood of the unknown and forcing the reader to pay attention at all times despite the dearth of dialogue adds to story’s aura of gloom and mystery.

Dang eventually does come in contact with another living human. Unfortunately, it’s under less than friendly circumstances. Dang finds a downed airplane and goes to sleep in the pilot’s chair for the night. She wakes up to see the barrel of a shotgun pointed in her face. The newcomer has one of the creatures as partner, who, unlike his brethren seen in previous pages, communicates with Dang in English. He’s also a bit of a Sherlock Holmes: he deduces that Dang has a boat because of her calloused hands and her soft feet.

So he does what any gentleman would do and … steals her boat. Well, like I’ve always said, human companionship is overrated. However, while Dang may have a permanent hang-dog expression on her face, she proves to be very, very persistent.

This becomes the story’s turning point. The slow, melancholy mood of the first act gives way to scenes where Dang wastes her enemies with frightening confidence and murder in her eyes. The juxtaposition between two time periods accelerates, too, driving home the point that Dang has transformed into a totally different person, from a shrinking scavenger willing to let the events of the world pass her by to a fierce, deadly warrior. It’s a frightening change… however, you can be sure that this new Dang isn’t the sort of person moping in front of a mirror after cutting her hair. The circumstances behind Dang’s transformation, by the way, have yet to be revealed. It’s perhaps a more important mystery than who the Gargoyles are.

With very little dialogue, the burden of storytelling falls on the artwork. Fleuter pulls the task off fantastically. The hazy colors and the focus on the even-changing nature of the mist and the waves from the early chapters establish the cold loneliness of being adrift in the ocean. Later, a bold red and orange color palette are paired with the stern metallic trusses of an industrial setting, heightening the sense of danger and urgency.

Derelict is a very deceptive webcomic. It’s deliberate pace and lack of dialogue can fool you into thinking that there’s nothing going on, when, really, plenty is being established with an expression, with small actions, and with tiny images that seem like tossed off background images that later prove to be instrumental in understanding the entire picture. It’s time-jumping may at first seem gimmicky, but they are techniques that effectively establish character. We seem to be building up to an answer to a big mystery, only to discover that perhaps it wasn’t such an important mystery in the first place.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

P.S. Can anyone read the title of this webcomic and not think of this? No?

Tom McHenry’s Noncanon is one of those single panel webcomics that feels like they were tossed off on a LiveJournal. They feel sporadic and of the moment, as if they’re just ideas that popped into Mr. McHenry’s mind that were given life on pen and paper (or Cintiq) mere moments later. They’re also quite funny in a way that’s both randomly absurd yet so classy that they look like they belong in the New Yorker.

Heck, maybe they are in the New Yorker. Maybe, just mabe, Mr. McHenry worte a song about it, too.

Noncanon is full of silly notions like dancing bird character for a children’s movie or bounty hunters who are also artists. A few of them seem like Mr. McHenry has two buckets: one filled adjectives and the other filled with nouns. Then he puts on a blindfold, reaches inside, and, voila, a comic is born.

Clown seduction!

Jazz dog!

Cool alligator!

At the same time, Noncanon is a webcomic that’s capable of making droll observations about life and its daily absurdities. Some can be sad, like when he observes how, no matter what the generation, we seem to be a prisoner of possessions. He observes the grim reality of vacations, and how we feel obliged to stand around and enjoy nature to justify the money we spent getting there. The comic ruminates over how back cover book photos in the 1980′s all looked alike and how nerd culture is as fleeting as everything else. Noncanon can get surprisingly deep, especially for a comic that features an alligator popping a wheelie.

There also seems to be a gentle disdain at the conventions of the avante garde and poseurs in general. The youth rebelling against the status quo are listless and arrogant. It’s almost a commentary on how we feel obligated to rebel and how we want things to change, yet no one wants to spend any measurable amount of energy doing it. (And it’s not just the youth Noncanon pokes fun at; older people in his comic seem to be living out a life of quite desperation.) Noncanon also takes a jab at those people (you know, THOSE people) who will, no fail, always resort to the age old “Why do you care about sports so much when there are problems in the real world?” chestnut. Noncanon takes a jab at the art world, too, with its pretentiously worded descriptions that are borderline parody.

The comic can get weirdly experimental. Sometimes it pairs photos of models with his crude doodles. The effect is a little unsettling; the photographs are clearly incongruous with the rest of the image, leading your brain to tie itself into knots upon knots. Sometimes his illustrations are more hastily done than usual. Some are just text. Some look like they belong on a T-shirt. And, of course, some feel like they belong in a sophisticated magazine about literature and fine dining. While oftentimes crude, Noncanon always appears more cosmopolitan than it should be.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5).

Every time I come across a reference to Maritza Campos’ Power Nap, there’s always a reference to College Roomies From Hell. I’ve never read that comic. I suspect it’s a blind spot that will prove to be my undoing, like that time I didn’t know what Penny Arcade and Ctrl+Alt+Del were. (Oh, to return to those blissful, innocent days.) It’s long, and it never really seemed something that was up my alley, anyway. I’ve never really been a fan of college roommate comics, let alone one where they’re apparently from the eternal netherworlds of the damned. So I’m not the guy to go ask if this is better or worse than CRFH.

It doesn’t much matter, anyway. First of all, it’s visually distinct from CRFH. This time around someone else is handling artistic duties. Power Nap is penned by Bachan, a Mexican illustrator who also does Vinny. It seems to be about a werewolf of sorts.

At a quick glance, Power Nap looks to be catered towards Bachan’s well-honed skill set of drawing monsters. It’s a highly visual story filled with fantastic images of monsters and giant hands. Some of these are induced by the three-dimensional production values invested into getting the man on the street to pay attention to loud and intrusive advertising. Some of it, though, is going on in the mind of our main character, a harried office worker by the name of Drew Spencer.

The world of Power Nap is … well, not necessarily dystopian, per se, though it does share a lot of similarities to the beloved cracked-mirror future societies of 1984, Brazil, and Fahrenheit 451. A new drug called Z-Sups has hit the market that has made sleeping a thing of the past. Unfortunately, Drew is allergic to Z-Sups. His sleeping, once an accepted routine of the human condition, is now seen as an abnormality. It’s the sort of premise that almost screams to be taken seriously. Perhaps it should be presented in a black-and-white indie comic format with art by David Mazzucchelli or Dave Gibbons. Campos, instead, plays things for laughs. Bachan complies, with cartoony, almost Looney-Tunes-style artwork filled with bulgy eyes and exaggerated features.

And somehow, it works.

By setting the story in the future, Campos introduces an element of uncertainty towards Drew’s condition. We’ve all experienced the effects of sleep deprivation. The jumpiness. The irritability. The hallucinations of a serpentine dragon with an umbrella. The new technology, though, introduces an element of doubt to Drew’s life. Is he imagining things? Or are they the newest visual technologies, capable of generating intimidating glowing hands, that only merely seem as if they’re self-generated figments of a tired mind? In a future where marketing has gotten so viral that some ads are reenacted using real props and devil cosplay is a regular thing, there’s no way to be truly certain whether or not something you’re seeing is the real deal or not.

And yet in the humor is a touch of despair. Drew can’t hold a relationship because he’s seen as abnormal. He keeps getting bumped down the corporate latter, because — while his condition acts as a disability that keeps him from getting fired — he’s seriously under-performing compared to his fellow employees since he can’t function 24 hours a day. Hence, his job as a guy stapling papers. No one understands why his IQ keeps falling, or why he can’t stay awake for some whoopee. It’s problem after problem after problem… one that, in a flashback, caused him to snap and burn the office down.

And, like all decent sci-fi stories, it re-contextualizes real world problems and makes them personal. Deep down, beyond the cutesy references to JJ Abrams Jr. and the silly dragon that keeps trying to offer Drew and umbrella, Power Nap is about struggling through life’s indignities and the stomach-churning realization that no one has any idea what you’re going through.

Rating: Five stars (out of 5).

There are two ends of the reviewing spectrum that make me a bit nervous. The first, as I mentioned in the previous review, is when a webcomic looks so amateur that you’re a bit hesitant to talk about it.

Then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum. Sometimes a webcomic is so polished that you’re sort of taken aback by how good it looks. “Wait,” I say, “is this even a webcomic, technically? I’m pretty sure this was always meant to go straight to print.” I’m not slamming the art in webcomics, by the way, which can be quite stunning. However, most have a distinctly non-commercial flavor, where the art is geared close to the heart of the creator. I’m talking about comics that seem so ready for prime time that you’re surprised that there isn’t already an animated adaptation airing on Cartoon Network with a live-action movie deal in the works.

That’s how I feel when I read Tony Cliff’s Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant (not to be confused with Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch), a webcomic about swashbuckling adventure in the 1800′s.

Our action begins in Constantinople (Istanbul). Our point-of-view guy, Selim, serves as a Lieutenant in the Turkish Jannisary Corps. It is a highly thankless job. When it comes time for bonuses to be handed out, Selim has to strip to his skivvies and fight for the wealth in a humiliating exercise that provides amusement to the higher-ranked officers. He’s also a pretty mellow guy, preferring the simple pleasures of a good tea to war and swordplay.

Enter Delilah Dirk. Accomplished assassin. Saboteur. She trained worldwide so she can punch higher than her weight class. As a child, she learned archery in France, survival in India, acrobatics in Indonesia, swordplay in Japan, and a few unspecified skills among the American Indians. She has fought against Sikhs, conquistadores, aborigines, lions, and one large Mongolian man.

She’s also totally unassuming, especially in the culture of Constantinople where the male-dominated society view women as weak and timid. In fact, chauvinism is so prevalent that Selim is sentenced to death for merely repeating the story that Delilah tells him about her background.

Fortunately for Selim, this is all going according to Delilah’s plan. In a True Lies moment, Delilah tells the prison guard how she’s going to escape, does it, and drops the mayhem. She rescues Selim from being executed. Selim, having nowhere else to go, reluctantly follows Delilah on her quest to tick off as many nobles as possible by stealing their stuff.

At the star of the story, I admit I was a little nervous Delilah might turn out to be a Mary Sue. She outfights all the jannisaries with very little effort. She is nigh indestructible. Plus, she has a flying boat that makes travel a breeze. She is, to coin a phrase from Mary Poppins, “Practically perfect in every way.”

A hero without flaws, though, runs the risk of being a tad boring and a little hard to relate to. Indiana Jones, for example, is a cocky superstar archaeologist you can trust to find the ancient artifact. However, he’s an easy guy to relate to. Sometimes he gets savagely beaten down by more powerful opponents. Sometimes he’s paralyzed by his crippling fear of snakes. Flaws may seem a sign of weakness, but weaknesses are what humanizes characters.

We learn later, though, that despite her physical acumen, her confident attitude of derring-do, and her flying boat, she does have a flaw: it’s her confidence. Does that sound like the sort of flaw that you’re supposed to point out when interviewing for a job? Yeah, sorta. But it’s just as paralyzing as Indy’s fear of snakes. Things go badly for Delilah when pirates track her down and shoot down her flying boat. Faced with a scenario where everything goes wrong, Delilah loses it and freaks out, waiting instead for a Great Space Goose to scoop her up and take her away.

It’s not clear, initially, why Delilah keeps Selim around despite the fact that he’s quite inept at a lot of things. She claims it’s because he makes great tea, though there’s probably something deeper than that. Twice Delilah not so subtly hints that Selim is free to go with own way, but Selim cannot, mainly because he’s a marked man and he’s safer under Delilah’s protection.

However, I think the most interesting aspect of the relationship is that Delilah can’t dismiss or kill Selim because he’s too gosh-darned nice. She rescues him from execution because he, quite meekly, got into that position because he tried to speak highly of her abilities. Later, Selim suffers a crisis of conscience when he debates whether or not he should let Delilah continue with her criminal activities. Ultimately, he decides to side with Delilah and turns down an offer of hospitality — which raises suspicions and puts him into trouble even further. Delilah even suspects that Selim may have considered betraying her — perhaps even planned on it as an excuse to ditch Selim once and for all — but Selim’s good heart comes through in the end and botches everyone’s plans.

Plus, unlike Delilah, Selim actually stays cool under pressure. There’s a scene where they’re stuck in an aqueduct with rubble falling around them as they’re bombarded by artillery. It’s Selim who formulates a plan to fake their deaths and pick off the scouts sent to look for their bodies. The adventure is the first indicator to Delilah that the Turkish Lieutenant may actually prove to be a useful companion. Selim may not be much of a fighting man, but he is a strategist.

The artwork is absolutely outstanding. Let’s start with the character designs. Delilah Dirk, while attractive at some angles, is not drawn like a conventional heroine. The first thing I noticed, in fact, was her prominent Grecian nose. This is surprisingly rare; most cartoonists seem to be ashamed of large schnozes on women, opting instead to render them as minuscule dots. The other thing you’ll notice is that Delilah is almost always sleepy-eyed. It doesn’t matter if she’s just chilling on her boat or mowing down soldiers through expert swordplay. The heavy-lidded eyes convey that everything is routine, the challenges are beneath her, and she’s totally cool and in control. However, when her eyes are wide open, Delilah takes on a wild quality that shows how badly she reacts when things get out of her control.

Selim, on the other hand, has soft, almost delicate features. Just by looking at his placid face, you get the sense that he’s out of place in the military.

And the backgrounds… oh, the backgrounds. Everything in Delilah Dirk is illustrated, inked, and colored with masterful confidence and a draftsman’s keen eye and expertise. The sweeping panorama of Constantinople is so lovingly drawn that you can almost feel the ocean breeze on your skin and hear the hustle and bustle of the crowded 19th century marketplace. It makes me want to take a vacation in Istanbul, something I had not ever before considered.

Everything here is so wonderfully detailed, from the steep columns of the aqueduct to the intricate pieces of armor. Delilah Dirk is a pure visual feast. Tony Cliff is especially adept at rendering scenes from multiple angles, lending a sense of drama and movement to the breathtaking action sequences.

So strap yourself in for adventure and treat yourself to Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant. It’s a Turkish delight on a moonlit night.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

“But wait, El Santo,” you say. “Aren’t you taking a break?”

I know. I’ve got to admit something to you: I’m terrible at this whole taking a break thing. And the worst part of it is… I’m breaking hiatus for something that is not, technically, a webcomic.

Twins Peter and Bobby Timony’s The Night Owls is, in fact, closer to being on the digital comic side of the scale than on the webcomic side. It could have been considered a webcomic when Zuda was around. But then Zuda died, a good number of my Zuda-only webcomic blogger compatriots disappeared, and the remaining Zuda issues have been banished to the nether realms of Comixology.

If you want to read The Night Owls anymore, you must download it for $0.99 an issue … though the first issue is free. The Night Owls has since ended, capping off at 9 issues, so a full run of The Night Owls is going to cost you $8 (and a bit more more if you’re going to spring for the print version on Amazon).

I suppose a site called “The Webcomic Overlook” should probably let this one go… but then who would review it? From my experience, most sites reviewing digital comics are focusing on much the same things as their print comic sites … namely DC’s New 52 initiative.

As fate would have it, though, I rediscovered The Night Owls whilst downloading the newest issues of Green Lantern, The Flash, Suicide Squad, and, yes, Aquaman on to my brand-spankin’ new iPad. While I’ve been pleased for the most part, I’m a little miffed that much of the actual content has been very light on story. Aquaman, for example, has been my favorite thus far … but really, he spends the entire issue deflecting criticisms at a fish n’ chips place. If I submitted that as a chapter in NaNoWriMo, someone would probably and inevitably shoot back: “Too much padding.” Are these issues really worth the $2.99 to $3.99 cover prices?

It’s all part of the general trend of decompression. I entered comics in the 90′s, so every issue was just one part of a three part storyline, so stretching things out to six issues seems overly self-indulgent. But I sure that in those days, there were old timers who were railing against the three-issue arcs, reminiscing of the days when you could have a whole story in one (which, to my eyes, just weren’t epic enough). And before then you had three-in-one stories, and before then, the adventures serialized in newspaper strips.

Which brings me to The Night Owls, which hearkens back to the tight, fast paced newspaper strip structure that you’d fin in Terry and the Pirates and Little Orphan Annie. First, let’s compare prices: it’s $0.99. But that’s one thin dollar that’s worth it. For that price, you get pretty much two and a half fun storylines, a bunch of enjoyable characters, and quite possibly a ham sandwich thrown in. Now that, my friends, is a bargain!

The Night Owls (who, incidentally, have a swank as heck logo) are a team of paranormal private investigators. They consist of Professor Ernest Baxter, a bespectacled poindexter who’s the brains of the operation and who can’t go out into the daylight; Mindy Markus, a chipper and athletic young woman who’s seriously rushing on our clueless professor; and Roscoe, a gargoyle who talks like a cabbie. Looking for character development? The Night Owls does have it, but not in the ways you’d expect. In the spirit of retaining a free-wheeling cartoony aesthetic, so developments are often non sequitur and tongue in cheek. Want to know something more about Mindy Marcus? We do find out about her father… or should I say fathers. One of them, her adopted father, is Rumpelstiltskin. The other is a very chauvinistic king of a magical realm. It’s a pleasant surprise, mainly because it runs so contrary from the personality traits that we grow so familiar with and fall in love with.

The cartoonishness of The Night Owls is a big part of the charm. It’s got the innocence and manic creativity of a Golden Age comic. There’s a storyline concerning a villain by the name of Mr. You, who looks like Dick Tracy villain The Blank. He has the frightening power of stealing people’s identities and taking on the appearance of his victims.

Well… he just straight up rips the entire face of a dude like it was a rubber Halloween mask. While the pain is probably excruciating, the victim turns out to be OK (Mr. You can kill his victims, because dead they can’t impart their identity to him), and they have no problem reattaching their faces back on. The biggest problem, in fact, is if Mindy delivered a shiner while Mr. You was wearing your face. But that’s more of a cosmetic issue than anything. Nothing a little Maybelline can’t fix.

The rest of The Night Owls treats us to other goofy otherworldly concepts such as a gangster with a magical lead pipe that can dispel banshees, a werewolf being framed for murder, and vampire gangsters. Seriously, they had me at the vampire gangsters. Everything is rendered in glorious sepia (except for the issue where the team enters a technicolor fantasy realm), getting me in a very Charlie Chaplin mood.

The format and the generally light-hearted tone, in fact, made The Night Owls always feel a little out-of-step with the rest of Zuda. Bayou, High Moon, Azure, and the others were far more somber and serious. The Nights Owls is also ostensibly about horror. However, if the rest of Zuda was My Chemical Romance, The Night Owls was The Charleston: lively, upbeat, and made you want to kick up your heels.

If there are any flaws, it’s the way The Night Owls ends. They were setting up an intriguing love quadragngle between Prof. Baxter, Mindy Markus, handsome detective Bill McRory, and sexy Apache woman Hekalu. But then, as of issue 8, everything seems to have gone into wrap-up mode. Loose story elements were re-introduced just to be hastily tied up. I imagine that the Timonys had a longer term plan, or perhaps plans to keep The Night Owls going on indefinitely, when Zuda folded last year. Perhaps, caught a little off guard, they plowed forward to the all-too Hollywood ending where Baxter faces his greatest challenge with all his friends cheering him on.

Rather than cheer along, I was left with a sinking feeling of, “Wait, that’s it?”

Almost as an added bonus, The Night Owls turns out to be one of the easiest comics to read on the tiny screen of an iPod. The pan-and-scan option feels unnatural for most comics. Not so the case for The Night Owls. Each page is roughly 6 panels long — which makes The Night Owls the most webcomic-like of all its Zuda brethren. When the reader zooms in on them and you slide your finger across the screen from one panel to the next, the transitions feels seemless. No more having to tilt your iPod sideways and having to zoom in on microscopic speech balloons!

And, well, it looks great on the iPad, too. Zuda Comics were designed with the reader held horizontally, and the images generally come out nice and crisp.

So there you have it! The Night Owls: a steal at $8, and definitely a better bargain than most of DC’s overpriced new comics.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

The artwork for Gigi Digi’s Cucumber Quest is so adorable that you start to wonder why this isn’t a webcomic that has a hundred different kinds of t-shirts on display in its virtual storefront. In an alternate universe, shirts sporting different kinds of Cucumber Quest characters would be seen on the racks at the local Fuego, on iPad slipcases, on backpacks, wallets, and purses, and on a baby’s disposable diapers. Cucumber Quest characters would give Hello Kitty and My Little Pony a run for their money.

Cucumber Quest is filled with cute rabbits with big fuzzy faces and rounded ears. Ms. Digi’s art makes you just want to cradle their soft, huggable heads of our two principle characters, Cucumber and Almond. You want to nuzzle their hair affectionately, which no doubt carries the refreshing fragrance of fresh cut vegetables or the faint sweetness of roasted nuts. Ms. Digi doesn’t ink the outlines and renders her characters in soft tones and brush strokes (or whatever passes for brushstrokes in the computer art world), which increases the adorability by a factor of squee.

Some cute touches slip your attention initially, but when you catch on, you can’t help but smile. One character named Carrot, for example, has hair that’s bundled up to look like carrots. Cute! But then you notice that another character named Dame Lettuce has lovely locks that look like lettuce leaves. And then you notice Sir Bacon’s coiffure, which looks like little strips of everybody’s favorite savory breakfast. The visual and verbal cues engages senses beyond the visual. It’s hard to see and read about Sir Bacon without also imagining the smoky, alluring aroma of sizzling pork fat. In a way, the food’s characteristics subliminally add to his personality.

As you might expect of a place where the characters are all bunnies who are named after foods, the color palette is bright and sunny and maybe even a little girly. But, really, what can you expect when one of the principle locations is a giant tiramisu? The world is awash in baby blues and sherbet orange and strawberry pink. You half expect Strawberry Shortcake to show up at some point. (She very nearly does.) It also gives you a nice warm feeling inside.

But lest you think you wandered into the webcomic equivalent of a baby shower, let me tell you something important: it’s all a front. The highly adorable visuals — I think this is the third time I’ve used “adorable” by the way, and it’s hard to describe this comic in any other words — are meant to distract you from the fact is dripping with some unexpectedly snarky (but never mean-spirited) humor.

Cucumber Quest starts with our villainess, Cordelia, planning no less than WORLD DOMINATION! This involves collecting a bunch of Dragonballs Disaster Stones to summon a large, horned fellow called the Nightmare Knight, an ancient terror who has currently been sealed away. A noble named Cabbage, who’s stationed in Doughnut Kingdom, panics and shoots off a letter to his family. He calls for his son, Cucumber to put an end to this and to become a man.

Cucumber, though, doesn’t want to go. He wants to go to Puffington’s Academy for the Magically Gifted And/Or Incredibly Wealthy, partly to prove to his father that higher education is no waste of time. Unfortunately, everybody wants him to go on this quest. His mom kicks him out of the house. The magical, fairy-like Dream Oracle bestows upon him the status of legendary hero who must restore peace to the world.

However, Cucumber figures that, really, it’s not his problem. After all, shouldn’t a person called “the Dream Oracle” be the one doing the heavy lifting? Wouldn’t it be easier to destroy the Disaster Stones to prevent the resurrection of the Nightmare Knight? Cucumber is too clever for his own good. He’s the legendary hero who can unfortunately see all the plot holes in Campbellian mythmaking. However, he also sees that he doesn’t have much choice in the matter, so he goes along begrudgingly.

There’s a bit of a feminist undercurrent in Cucumber Quest. Cucumber is incompetent, but everyone pushes him to be the hero of the story. Meanwhile, his spunky little sister, Almond, is forbidden to join him on his adventures. “Little sisters aren’t legendary heroes,” says the Dream Oracle. So of course, Almond does all the butt-kicking with little to her credit while Cucumber is reduced to the role of spectator.

The rest of the men are pretty useless. When we first see Carrot, a sort of secondary hero on a quest to rescue the Princess Parfait, we see him hiding in a tree from a scary bear … who really isn’t all that scary once you get to know him. Cucumber’s dad is lazy, manipulative, but overall ineffective. The only guy who isn’t useless is Sir Tomato … and he’s really just acting as a henchman for the much more powerful Cordelia. Women, on the other hand, are the clever ones: conquering kingdoms, thieving priceless weaponry, fighting battles, etc.

That may be a point of contention for some. I assure you, though, that none of it is preachy. Besides I’ve read enough fantasy novels to know that, for a lot of them, the female characters are usually annoying traveling companions that are tolerated, there for the sole purpose of getting the hero to move to the next spot, or non-existent. Yes, even plenty of the ones with a female protagonist. But a fantasy epic where the men are stuck in those roles? That’s actually a pretty clever inversion of the standard Campbellian formula.

Besides, Cucumber is not totally useless. It’s just that he’s not cut out for the particular task of saving the world. He’d probably be much happier going to school. Or baking a cake. Being the Chosen One, though? That’s not his thing. To coin a phrase from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, sometimes you got to know your role.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

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.

After a prologue that ties the story to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (which had massive effects on the Tenderloin), we’re introduced to Bob. Bob has been seeing strange creatures all his life. As a kid, he thougt they were his imaginary friends. His concerned parents, though, had him see an psychiatrist, and with the help of some pills, Bob stopped seeing the creatures. Later, when Bob started experimenting with psychedelic drugs in college, he saw the creatures again. He wrote them off as after effects of the strange brew.

Bob got a nice job, married, and raised a kid. The creatures who only he could see wouldn’t stop coming, though. These were grotesque but generally friendly, and they told him that he was destined to save the universe. Bob was reluctant. He wasn’t sure that these creatures weren’t a result of a mental breakdown, and, besides, he had a family to take care of now. But they eventually got to him. One night, Bob just walked out the door, abandoned his family, and began living on the streets, reluctantly embracing his role as The Chosen One.

What follows is a clever parody of every Campbellian hero’s quest saga ever. After one of Bob’s friends get killed when he’s swallowed by a light that explodes from somewhere in his chest, Bob undertakes a mission to bring his killer to justice. He must venture to the far off land … of Sacramento!

As he goes on his journey, he’s joined by several of his fellow homeless. Fernando is sort of his Sam Gamgee, a jolly former insurance adjuster who knows which dumpsters hold the best scraps of food. Peaches is a crack addict who becomes Bob’s love interest. There’s also a large, childish Black man who the group imagine is a mighty barbarian warrior.

It’s never clear if these visions are legitimate or if they really are just hallucinations. It reminds me a lot of Slaughterhouse Five. You generally trust Billy Pigrim’s recollection of events (which portrays of author Kurt Vonnegut’s real world horrors in Dresden) until you get to the part where he talks about getting kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore… which makes you wonder if the narrator was off his rocker after all. Similarly, Transient Man play with the same contrast between stark reality and fanciful imagination to the point where the reader can’t be too sure if Bob’s recollection of events can be fully trusted. It simultaneously puts us both in the shoes of Bob and how friends, family, and strangers view Bob.

Take, for instance, one of the comic’s most visually arresting characters: an man whose entire body is covered in a cloak made of pigeons. Bob sees him as a dangerous bounty hunter for his main enemy, and that his pigeons are his eyes and ears (like Saruman’s crows in Lord of the Rings). Now, the guy is clearly dangerous. He’s seen brutally killing several innocent people who get in his way. He smashes one guy’s face in with a blunt object and wields a security guard like a baseball bat. There’s no question that the threat itself is real.

But is he magic, or is he just a garden variety homicidal maniac? After all, just because pigeons follow him around doesn’t make him magic. There’s a scene where Bob has to fight off a flock of these pigeons, and it can be interpreted as either a standard fantasy scenario where our hero valiantly fights off mystical creatures … or, as seen through his friend Fernando’s eyes, it’s just some crazy homeless man getting freaked out by pigeons.

This uneasy divide gets to a very interesting truth: Bob’s world, whether real or not, is a far more fascinating place than the “real” world that he left behind. So what if it turns out to be an elaborately constructed fantasy world? And then you get into the delicious conundrum of what should or shouldn’t be regarded as realistic in fiction. Is a homeless man being guided with transdimensional aliens really all that more bizarre than a knight in shining armor who takes magical weaponry from a lady who lives in a lake?

But let’s take a step back from the philosophical and let’s talk about the art a little.

Holy crap, is it good.

I’m not sure who to praise here, since I didn’t see any credits listed for Transient Man beyond Massive Black Entertainment. Maybe that’s all I need to know. Massive Black provides concept art for some highly regarded games. Games with titles like BioShock, inFamous, and Dragon Age. If you’ve ever played any of those games, you can probably guess that the art feels grimy, rusty, and worn … but yet it still inspires a sense of wonder. You get the same sense in Transient Man.

Dark alleys, freight cars, and freeway underpasses are so realistic that I instinctively swat at imagined houseflies. At the same time, the thick, painterly brushstrokes and the generally warm colors bring forth a subtle touch of magic realism. There’s a point in the story where, after pages and pages of anticipation, Bob and his friends finally arrive at Sacramento. The palette has generally be faded and yellow, but now it bursts into green. When we catch a glimpse of Sacramento it’s … basically what you’d see from someone’s travel photos or something included in a travel brochure. It’s normaller than normal. But you also see it from our transient’s eyes as a strange, far-off Emerald City. The remarkable thing is that by this point, seeing misshapen monsters are no big deal. Sacramento is approached with the same fascination as when Sam Gamgee almost fainted from joy after seeing an elephant for the first time.

The creators behind Transient Man bill it as a graphic novel, and, for once, I’m going to say that this moniker is apt and well deserved. Once you start reading Transient Man, you start discovering the depths of the many different layers within the story. It’s never pretentious — presenting the narrative from Bob’s humble point of view presents that — but it can be pretentious if you want it to be. By the end of the comic, I had several ideas about literature, psychology, and mythology stewing around in my head like some crazy academic stew.

At the same time, it remains delightfully tongue in cheek. The creatures that interact with Bob lose their ethereal aspect once they open their mouths and talk in a matter-of-fact dialect. Magical artifacts take the form of cheap-looking trophies. Fortune-telling Native Americans mark maps with delicious pudding. It’s quirky. It’s unexpected.

It’s black comedy.

For a story about someone who may or may not be a crazy homeless man, Transient Man has a lot of heart. While there’s a chance that all might not be right in Bob’s head, he remains sincere and likable. We sort of forgive him every step of the way, even when his friends are put into peril or when his son, who has grown into a good man, gets brushed aside as he pursues his quest to save the universe. He inadvertently causes pain to the people around him, yet he remains sympathetic.

More sympathetic than those PETA activists who wanted to changed the name of the Tenderloin because it was insulting to cows, anyway.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Back in the day, when I entertained my wild-eyed dreams of becoming a New York Times bestselling novelist, I used to take part in NaNoWriMo. Oh, but for the riches I would have reaped if I could only write more than 10K words in a month! I even went to a meet-up, where prospective writers would meet at a bar on the first day and talk about the stories they would like to write. Typically, most would be sci-fi, fantasy, or horror stories. If you’ve ever taken a glimpse of the typical NaNoWriMo story, this should be a surprise to absolutely no one. You have to wonder, why would we be rehashing the exact same themes?

There are many theories, but one guy at that meet put it best. He said he didn’t know what kind of story he wanted to write. However, he wanted there to be monsters. Not the allegorical human kind like serial killers and corrupt government officials, which, I am told, is the most frightening kind of all. Actual monsters with bumps and scales and may or may not breathe fire. The ones that are as big as a house. Maybe even bigger. They grab the imagination. They elicit awe and wonder.

I mean, you can see regular human beings every day. You can see the “human monsters” every night on CNN. But big dragons, weird space aliens, Cthulhu-inspired tentacle creatures and other assorted monsters that are larger than they should be? These are the sorts of creatures that can only be brought to life through the power of imagination.

It’s one of the things that catches the eye when you read through Ashley Cope’s Unsounded. She hits us with one big beastie after another. In chapter one, our heroes encounter a large, hulking beast made of earth, rocks, and plant matter. Later on, we see more docile beasties: big dogs that serve as beasts of burden. There are also giant half-frogs, half-robot things that can lift trees with one hand.

However, if the “humans are the greatest monsters of all” theme is more up to your speed, then you’re also probably the sort of person who likes to argue why Gormenghast is superior to Lord of the Rings. Surprisingly, Ms. Cope has you covered.

Before I get into that, let’s talk a little about Ms. Cope’s art. It is, to put it simply, is absolutely breathtaking. It’s done in a manga/anime style that’s crisp, clean, and colorful. It’s one of the better examples of the form I’ve seen. Ms. Cope especially does a fine job with the fluid and dynamic action scenes by effortlessly illustrating the characters from different perspectives. It brings home both the emotional and physical impact of each stirringly choreographed sequence.

Ms. Cope also does a great job drawing faces. I like how expressive she can make them. She also does a great job drawing characters with facial features that don’t fit strictly within the Toonami-approved guidelines of how to draw an anime character. There are, for example, characters who aren’t strictly pale-skinned, a rarity in both the manga/anime and fantasy genres. OK, sure, she does throw characters here and there that look like they were lifted from previously existing works, like one delicate-looking platinum blonde who sort of looks like Lucius Malfoy as drawn by any number of DeviantArt members. Yet, in the same comic, Ms. Cope also draws diverse physical characteristics and successfully populates her fantasy world with people of different races, namely those of African ethnicity. Her artistic style remains consistent, though, and the subtle variations don’t look out of place standing next to characters using more traditional designs.

The world of Unsounded bridges both European and Japanese influences. The woodland and town settings wouldn’t look out of place in either medieval Europe or feudal Japan. Heightening the romanticism us the color palette. Depending on the mood, it can be eye-catchingly vivid or drearily somber.

Maybe the colors get all swirly and mystical when someone casts a spell, and you’re all, “That sh** is correct!” But then Ms. Cope goes gets all creative. She takes advantage of the slightly-larger-but-not-infinite canvas and comes up with some dope as hell page layouts. And then she gets all painterly on your ass, and it is off the hook, yo.

Unsounded‘s main character is Sette Frummagem, a young girl with a tail. She’s proud to be from a very rich (though legally disreputable and highly duplicitous) family. Sette can be quite grating, at least initially. She’s brash, loud-mouthed, and more than a little greedy. The words coming out of her mouth are nigh inscrutible:

‘ere, I’ll present me bac to ya, like so. Ya get a sniff’ve the potent brainal odour comin’ out me ears. Nibble, if you’re brave. Nibble!

It’s the comic equivalent of Jeff Bridges’ marble-mouthed ramblings in True Grit. (“It astonishes me that Mr. LaBoeuf has been shot, trampled, and nearly bitten his tongue off, and yet not only does he continue to talk but he spills the banks of English.”) The longer you spend time with Sette, though, the more you grow to like her, and by the end of Chapter 2 I was genuinely enjoying her presence. She’s like a spunky little sister.

She’s joined by the gray-skinned Duane Adelier, who fit more closely to the grim, swashbuckling fantasy action hero type. He’s a sorcerer who is ethereally patient with his motormouthed companion (most of the time). He may or may not be a zombie. While he was hired by Sette’s father on a mission to confront Sette’s cousin on behalf of the family, you get a sense that he’s got an agenda all his own. He ignores his original mission when he discovers the existence of Unsounded‘s human monsters: slavers.

There are several countries in Unsounded, some where slavery is legal. These slavers, though, deal in a particularly despicable sort: child slavery. Ms. Cope really sells the horror of it. There are uncomfortable scenes of child slaves suffering abuse at the hands of their captors and moments of desperation when a slave realizes that freedom is out of his grasp due to a language barrier.

However, the children aren’t the only slaves. Perhaps you’re a little tired of zombies in comics, and I don’t blame you if you are. Unsounded takes a fairly novel approach, though: the zombies here aren’t a terrifying horde, but are, instead, forced labor. It’s probably closer to the original concept of a zombie from voodoo mythology. There’s nothing to suggest that they’re anything but mindless monsters… except that Duane, whose smarter and more articulate than most other characters in Unsounded, isn’t all that different from them. And he’s visibly distressed when they’re whipped.

The two clearly need each other. Duane, though level-headed most of the time, isn’t always in control of his rage, and he needs Sette to calm him down from time to time. While Sette is strong-willed, is seems like some of Duane’s innate honor is rubbing off on her. They’re a Dynamic Duo of the fantasy era. They share several great character moments, and they’re fun to follow.

(And if Sette was older, it would be almost romantic. It’s not like Unsounded is unaware of that: Sette, many times, calls that sort of relationship out on being highly inappropriate, even playfully chiding Duane for being a “child-lover” … so let’s just say that the two have a father-daughter relationship, hmmmmm?)

In addition, Unsounded‘s story is a real page turner. There’s danger at every corner, especially from “good guys” who think our duo are dangerous highwaymen. Ms. Cope’s suspenseful pacing keeps you on your toes. So there it is: great art, great characters, and an involving plot. If you liked The Meek, you’ll enjoy Unsounded.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)