David Yoder's Awesome Journal #7

By David Yoder

Diary comics are pretty popular nowadays, especially compared to the past (when they didn't exist at all!), but for the most part I don't really get them.

Well, that's not true. I "get them" in the sense that I understand one of the major reasons that people make them: it causes you to draw every day. And if you want to get good at anything, then you really do need to do it every day.

However, for the most part diary comics don't do much for me, and this is because most people's lives are kind of...boring. I mean, we complain about people posting pictures of the food they ate on facebook or twitter or whatever, so why should making a comic where "I went to a restaurant" is a major event (and yet no additional information is supplied)?

Artwise these comics don't do that much for me, but I think that's probably because they're made without any real planning. The borders are all shaky and hand drawn, and some of the panels are just whatever space is left on the page.

Of course, some people really enjoy reading diary comics. I guess they enjoy the view into someone else's day to day life, but I think I mostly find them kind of boring. But hell, it's not like if I made them they'd be any better (Saturday: Ate cake for breakfast, went to a thrift store with a friend, bought a kinda janky chest of drawers for $5, went to another friend's house to play Unexploded Cow and watch Striptease Samurai Squadron).

Oak & Linden #2

By Pat Barrett
patbarrett.com

The first comic in this issue of Oak & Linden is a pretty awesome one about people going to war with gods because they are jackasses who eat all of their goats (see below).  It's pretty great, and uses an interesting art style where the characters look more like palaeolithic art than what you would expect to see in a comic.

The other comics use art styles that are more like what you'd expect in a comic. The one I liked the most was a sort of bizarre dream type comic about a guy who steals a wallet and finds a woman inside it. It was pretty strange, but I liked how things happened for seemingly no real reason. Just like in a dream!

The longest story in here is about a jackass space captain who takes advantages of the aliens on the planet he crash lands on. I'm guessing it's supposed to represent how white people treat developing nations, but mostly I just think the space captain is a jerk.

Plus there's a diary comic called "The Trouble with Diary Comics", about how people keep asking to be in your comic once they know you make one. I thought it was pretty funny.

Polite Fiction 2

By José-Luis Olivares

joseluisolivares.com

So I go travelling for two months and manage to keep to my three times a week schedule despite sleeping on people's floors and couches and not having consistent internet access.

Then I get back to Vancouver, and immediately start missing updates. In my defense I was sick, and had to move house, and blah blah blah. If you're reading a zine review site you know that the combination of zinester with blogger probably produces more excuses than anything else. ; )

Anyway, before I left on my trip I scanned every single zine in my review pile, and now there are only 13 left! (Of course I got _a lot_ on my travels, and also people sent some to me while I was travelling, including my brother who sent me a huge box of old ones, so this site won't be going away any time soon).

This is a pretty strange little comic. It's made up of several stories, all but one of which are in black and white. Some of the "stories" don't really have a narrative, such as the first one "Running Bird". It's about a weird bird headed person that runs a bunch. They just run past abstract backgrounds and some of the pages remind me more of pop art (sorta like Keith Haring). It's kind of interesting to see this style of comic, though I personally don't really care for it that much.

The second comic, "Tree-Island Birds", makes more "sense" in that things happen in reaction to other things and there's a narrative. A person washes up on a desert island, and has to deal with being stuck there with the birds who make it their home. It's actually kind of depressing, though I'm impressed by the amount of emotion Olivares gets out of the artwork considering the person has basically no facial features (see below).

There's also a dream comic, and a diary comic that is actually about diary comics and why some people make them. These use a different style than the other comics, and actually have text and dialogue. I think the diary comic was one of the more interesting of that style that I've read recently, though more on that soon.

Three Wishes

By Jonathan Eaton
thisis65.com

Three Wishes is about a genie that appears to grant Jonathan wishes after he rubs a "random shitty old lamp". There's a catch (of course there's a catch! Genies are jackasses), and the genie will only grant two of Jonathan's wishes. The third wish is one that the genie decides upon, and Jonathan must live with that decision forever.

Seeing nothing problematic with this deal whatsoever Jonathan wishes that he could play the banjo, then he wishes for a banjo, then the genie brings back three people from the dead and makes Jonathan deal with them. Those three are:

• "Wickedest man in the world" Aleister Crowley!
• Sucidial, misunderstood poet Sylvia Plath!
• Popcorn mastermind Orville Redenbacher! 

What would you do if these people suddenly showed up and you had to deal with them? The clear answer is "go camping", and so they go out to the woods, and to be honest I'm not sure how they're all supposed to fit into that tent that Eaton drew. They make lots of popcorn, get lost, encounter wild animals, deal with a kind of lame and contradictory ghost,  and encounter a popping corn bandit.

Overall it's pretty good, and there are definitely some funny bits but it also reads like something that was created a page at a time with no real plan or goal (though maybe I'm wrong). Things just kind of happen, and characters disappear for pages at a time, only for everything to stop, presumably when Eaton got bored. That's better than it getting dragged out forever if the creator has no interested, and I enjoyed reading what was here.

Brain Parts

By Holly Foltz

Huh, so Americans like fireworks a lot. (Guess what day I'm writing this review on!)

This brief comic features a bunch of reasons why Foltz hates her job (or rather, why she hates the people she has to deal with at her job). The reasons themselves are nothing that fantastic, but the art style is accomplished enough that I think Foltz could produce some pretty good work. This is backed up by an amusing comic on the back page, which features Foltz pretending to be the Alien from the titular movie using a cat. It's cute, funny, and the art has good facial expressions and body language.

Deluge

By Eroyn Franklin

eroynfranklin.com

I've read a number of Franklin's comics over the past couple of months, and all of them seem to succeed in making me feel uncomfortable in one way or another. This one is hard to describe as it doesn't seem to be "about" anything, and not that much actually happens. Franklin's site says "The deluge is a struggle with burdens that appear overwhelming but by comparison to the problems of others they are surmountable, even welcomed.", but to be honest I totally didn't get that out of the comic.

The comic features the same two panel layout on each page, and opens with a person seemingly frustrated with an itch in their ear. Over several pages they begin picking at it, and what starts as almost nothing becomes a...well, a "deluge" or ear stuff. It's kind of gross, helped in no small part by the fact that all of the ear stuff is printed with a sickly green colour.

The comic continues with vomiting and a hobo (why is this word not recognized by my spellchecker?) and gets even stranger, but no explanation of what's going on or why is ever given. However, I guess I have to commend Franklin for creating a comic that has almost succeeded in making me taste earwax, and even writing that sentence is close to making me gag.

Heavy Flow

By Jen Vaughn
comicscurator.tumblr.com

Jen is no stranger to creating comics about menstruation (in fact, that's how I first met her!), but she's clearly got it down to a science at this point, as this comic about menstrual cups is both informative and entertaining.

The comic opens with Jen remembering her early experiences with periods, and how our society deals with them (generally poorly). Then Jen makes a discovery, paying for disposable tampons and stuff is expensive! (Especially when you also have to buy birth control, "creepy hair removal products", and unicorn figurines.) So Jen gets a menstrual cup.

The then talks about the invention, history, and evolution of the cups, answers common questions about them, discusses the problems of initially getting used to using them (a topic other creators have covered), and more!

Through art filled with visual gags, and ridiculous humour (what sort of cup does a giant use?) Jen creates a.... (I'm trying to avoid the use of the word "entertaining" again, to the thesaurus!) absorbing comic that is worth checking out if you're thinking about getting one of these cups, or even if you have no idea what they are at all.

Plus this comic gives me an excuse to post this video.

Sorry Sheets

By Eroyn Franklin

eroynfranklin.com

This comic makes me sad. It seems to be about the end of a relationship. A relationship that has actually been over for a long time, but the people involved in it are still living together (at least at the beginning).

The comic is mostly silent, and deals with really minor things. There's no big argument or major event or anything like that, but the absolute lack of positive emotions between the two characters is kind of distressing. I could almost feel the contempt and helplessness of the characters dripping off the page. It makes me sad that people stay in unhealthy relationships like this!

Of course I guess it's possible that I have completely misinterpreted this entire comic.

Stranger Knights #3

 By Bill Volk, Casey Bohn, Mary Soper, and Bryan Stone
www.billvolk.com
bohnhelm.blogspot.com
www.bryan-stone.com

Good job Matthew, failing to scan the cover entirely...

Anyway! This is an anthology of sci-fi, fantasy, and super hero comics, and all of them are pretty good! Kind of surprising given I generally don't care for about half of any anthology I read.

In The Capsule's Promise by Volk, the world is invaded by a murderous alien who wants to kill everyone. Two of the Stranger Knights, presumably some sort of super hero team, are nearby and go to find out what's going on. There's Ninurta Frankenstein who is some sort of weird monster thing made of stitched together body parts (and what looks like half a giant baseball attached to his stomach) who appears to be at least partially based on a Sumerian god of war. However he's much more interested in welcoming the creature to earth and sharing culture with it, and isn't too impressed when they end up in a fight. There's also Little Headphones, the unpaid intern of the Stranger Knights who...shoots people? I think that's his only power. Anyway, I enjoy a healthy dose of philosophy in my fight comics, so I liked this.

The Orb of Shalla by Stone is a fantasy piece and probably my favourite story in the whole book. It features a robot and a cat girl who ride weird dinosaur/lizard creatures, acquire a treasure map, and head off to lands unknown in an attempt to loot abandoned ruins

I enjoy robots in fantasy settings, even if it doesn't make any sense or maybe because it doesn't make any sense. Stone's art in this story is attractive and uses good use of cross hatching and similar techniques to help create depth and contrast. Several pages of the comic are entirely silent, and yet they're easy to understand and follow. Plus there's a weird horned pig thing.

The other two pieces are another Stranger Knights story and a science fiction one, both of which are somewhat superhero-ish. While I enjoyed the stories in both of these, the artwork didn't appeal to me in the same way. But overall I enjoyed this, much as I did the first issue.

Expeditions and Adventures

By the Radar Friends and the Sonar Gang
(Two comics collectives which are now defunct, or at least their websites no longer work, I got this at contributor Jordyn Bochon's yard sale.)

It feels kind of weird reviewing older works by people who are still creating. Older works done by people who aren't that old are almost by definition not going to look as good as their current stuff. Drawing skills will improve, story telling will improve, hell, even knowledge about how to publish things will improve.

So yeah, I'm reviewing a five year old comic I got for free. How useful! Clearly my reviewing skills haven't improved in the several years I've been updating this blog.

This anthology features six different tales of daring do and thrilling undertakings. Tim Carpenter's Adventure Comics #371 is a tale of an early 19th century adventurer. Of course, as you can tell from the title it's also one in a longer series of stories that I don`t believe exist. This means that there isn`t really any beginning or end, though as I've definitely written my share of stories like this I can't really complain. Art-wise Carpenter has some nice use of shadow and blacks, though there's not much in the way of backgrounds.

Lydia Fu presents a tale of the pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny. I think by now this story has been done to death, though I`m sure someone will comment and say they've never heard of them before. Anyway, it features hard to read computer lettering (I`m guessing a font didn`t reduce/copy well), and full page lesbian sex. Woo!

Colleen MacIsaac does a comic about the Bathyscaphe Trieste, which is something I'd never heard of before! It's a neat story about undersea exploration in the 1960s, and the artwork manages to convey things pretty well. There are definitely some problems with the reproduction, but I'm glad I read this one.

Heather Verdin contributes a brief, almost wordless, tale about travelling by train, while Jordyn Bochon's story about rescuing a cat up a tree had some charm but definitely suffered from "I know your art gets better than this"-itis.

The final story by Kim Hoang and Mark Lee is a D&D inspired fantasy tale of a party of adventurers getting to a town and splitting up to get more supplies. Most of the story is about looking for hats, and I thought it was cute and funny. I liked the cartoony nature of the art, and the use of zipatone in the background. This was probably my favourite.

Sightings of Wallace Sendek

By Sean Azzopardi and Douglas Noble
www.strip-for-me.com
sean-azzopardi.com

When I started reading this comic I thought the pages that the pages were in the wrong order. Each page is dated, and the dates jump around backwards and forward through time. But each page can be taken as an independent whole and this seemingly haphazard order is the one in which Noble wanted this comic to appear (I guess some of the pages could be in the wrong order too, there's no real way for me to tell!). Taken together the pages begin to tell the story of '70s rock musician Wallace Sendek, his disappearance, and his later possible appearances.

Reading it in chronological order (yes, I did bother to do that) leaves me even more confused as all the dates don't seem to match up properly. But this could even be done on purpose, as the entire point of this thing is to make everything mysterious and ambiguous. Was Sendek killed? Was there some supernatural element in his disappearance? Is he still alive? None of these questions is answered, but that's not the point of this comic.

Instead this comic is all about creating an atmosphere and mood of mystery, and it succeeds admirably. (I'm a little jumpy and creeped out right now due to it being 2:30 am, reading this comic multiple times, and reading about Lord Lucan and other people who have disappeared.)

Artwise Azzopardi does a good job, using different styles and techniques on various pages. Some pages are quite sketchy, while others are considerably more detailed, and one even features edited photographs (is there a better term for this than "photoshopped"?). Azzopardi also switches between using solid bordered panels (often using a tight nine-panel grid to fit in the necessary dialogue and narration), and pages where various images meld into each other with no border in the way. Combined these two techniques help to add to the atmosphere of the stories and the events surrounding them, confusing the information and making the reader question what truth there might be in each story.

Overall this is worth checking out, if you're into ambiguous, frustrating works that have no real ending. I want to know who this person was, and what was going on with their disappearance, and hopefully one day, if Azzopardi and Noble decide to release another comic, I'll find out. If I don't though, that's okay too, as this comic has succeeded both in its narrative goals and in being entertaining.

Toasty Cats #6

By Magda Boreysza
www.magdaboreysza.com

Despite the title being what it is, this comic contains no cats, toasty or not. It does contain a number of short comics about other animals, some amazingly awesome drawings of monsters, and even a letters page!

Both of the comics in here are entirely silent, and sort of remind me of Masashi Tanaka's Gon series, if the animals in that acted slightly more like humans, and they were drawn in a less realistic way. Wait, I guess these have nothing in common with Gon, except they're both about animals not interacting with humans in any way. (And they're both good.) My comparison skills appear to be rusty.

I went into the first comic somewhat biased against the small, weird looking mammals with huge mouths and entirely too many teeth that star. Why? Because I have clearly been watching too many sci-fi horror films that feature horrible monsters eating people. Wait, what am I saying? That's clearly not possible, you can't have too many of those.

The dog-like creatures in this are, when they have their mouths closed, pretty cute. They live in some sort of forest society, playing with bugs, sleeping down holes, and mourning their dead. The story itself is pretty much just "nature happens", but it's drawn in a really lovely style that somehow manages to combine lots of small details, with a general cartoony style.

The second story is about a fox's life as it waits for a comet to pass by through the sky again. It is a tale of loss and longing, and kind of makes me sad. But, um, it has really nice art?

Both tales in this issue are good, though I hesitate to look for more, as while I enjoyed reading this comic there's definitely a morose feeling throughout, and I'm not sure I want to read more stories like that.

How to Make a Mini-Comic

By Matt Feazell

(Blogger is screwing up and not posting my scheduled posts. They've also stripped the labels/tags off the posts that have gone live. Plus they recently sent out the most spammy/phishing seeming official email I've ever gotten. Great job guys.)

This is a zine printed on a single sheet of paper and shows how you too can make and put together your own minicomics!

While it generally seems well put together, and many aspects are informative, I really take issue with part of Step 2.

"Leave ninjas, superheroes, and giant robots to color comics which specialize in that sort of thing."

I find this frustrating not because I love giant robots and might very well be happy if half of the things I reviewed on this site involved robots in some way, but because saying that you need colour to tell a science fiction or fantasy story is ridiculous.


The Preposterous Adventures of IronHide Tom is a fantastic black and white comic with simple artwork that was nominated for an Eisner Award. This is despite (or because of) the fact that it features pirates, mermaids (and mermen!), witches, and countless monsters. Another comic Priddy drew in the same style was called The Amazing Life of Onion Jack, and which was similarly award nominated, features superheroes and (if I'm remembering correctly) robots. These are both fantastic, entertaining, funny comics that are drawn in black and white with minimal detail (though a considerable amount of skill). Saying that you need colour to make comics featuring science fiction or fantasy elements is almost insulting to those that choose to make comics featuring those things.

But, uhm, back to the zine at hand. Holy shit! This was originally printed in 1988? I can't believe this has been going around for almost 25 years. I hope it has inspired someone to make and print their own comic, whether it contains robots or not.

Billy the Dunce

By Jason Week
www.duncepress.com

I really love it when a comic or zine I don't have high expectations for is really awesome. And Billy the Dunce is one such comic! (I wasn't going for a fake out with that opening line.)

This comic features an all to brief look at the world that Week has created. Billy is a not so bright guy who ended up at an incredibly prestigious school after he aced an IQ test entirely by luck. He's stuck hanging out with a few super geniuses, a magic user, a baby succubus, and a surprisingly friendly zombie.

In the few brief strips in here the characters that appear seem to be fairly one-dimensional (the idiot, the genius, the stuck up guy), but I think it's important to note that there isn't very much space to explore each of the characters.

Also (and more importantly), the comic is funny. While Billy may be a dunce, it's only compared to the other people he hangs around. He even seems slightly brighter than your average little kid, as he's capable of cooking pancakes by himself (and even manages to clean up afterwards). It's just that he isn't going to be curing cancer any time soon. The situations Billy ends up in, and the reactions of himself and the other characters, manage to be both amusing, and, in one case, kind of sweet. Awwwww.

The art is clear and manages to capture the emotions and traits of the characters who appear. Looking at Week's website it seems as though his art has gotten even better since this comic was printed. If you go and check it out you can see the sheer size of some of original art for this comic. It's huge! I certainly wouldn't want to draw that much.

The humour and talent involved in these strips has led me bookmarking Week's website. I'll definitely be back sometime soon to read this comic from the beginning. I can't wait!

Halifax Comix Jam Number 13

It's time once again for me to "review" one of these jam comics and tell you about this month's Halifax Comics Jam!

This month's is tonight (Tuesday, April 3rd), from 7-10pm, at the Roberts Street Social Centre, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. You should come! No artistic talent is required, and there are usually cookies or some other snack. Here's the facebook event.

For those that don't know, Jam comics are comics where one person starts a page by drawing a panel, and then another person draws the next panel, and so on until the page is finished. They usually don't make a lot of sense, but they can be pretty funny at times. This one actually has a remarkably coherent, and amusing story about the adventures of a soul. Hurray!

Here's a video you can watch that possibly explains it better.

The Robot's Cat

By Jen DesRoche
monasterylane.tumblr.com

I recently helped my partner print her first minicomic. It's a really sweet and funny series of stories featuring a robot and its cat, told entirely without words.

While I am slightly biased, I think it's pretty awesome and that you should check it out! You can see some of the artwork for the comic, plus lots of her other drawings and comics, on her tumblr. She'd really appreciate it!

Halifax Comix Jam #11/12

It's the end of the month, and so it is once again time for me to "review" an old issue of the Halifax Comix Jam comic in order to promote the comic jam happening tonight at Roberts Street!

Honestly, I think jam comics like this are probably more valuable to the people that made them than to random outsiders. This is because these comics rarely make any sense at all.

(If you're not aware of what a jam comic is, they're comics where one person draws a panel, and then someone else draws the next panel, and so on. They usually don't have any real narrative flow, and the art styles can change drastically between panels.)

Still, I think they're neat because the jam sessions themselves encourage people to draw and be creative, which is something I think more people should be doing.

But yeah, go to the Comics Jam at Roberts Street Tuesday, February 28th (tonight!), 7-10pm. It will be fun! I promise. There will be cookies.

A Fan Zine

By Sarah Cai
www.thegirlwhoateink.com

This is a short, cute zine that is based around a pretty good pun. Fanzines have been around since the 1940s, and the zine scene of today grew out of those early science fiction fanzines. Sometimes I read an actual scifi/fantasy fanzine, and it’s strange, though kinda neat, to see that the same type of things is still being made almost 75 years later.

This zine however is not about science fiction at all, instead it is filled with pictures of fans. There are a bunch of different fans (such as "ceiling" and "desk") included in this zine, and the drawings and text on each page combine to be pretty amusing.

I’m just sad that fan death wasn’t mentioned.

The Adventure Journals of Sin Cat #2

www.milliondollaryack.com/meszcomics

If nothing else The Adventure Journals of Sin Cat isn't a quick read. It takes quite a while to read it all, because every page is filled with huge amounts of tiny text.

The comic itself is confusing. While each page looks quite nice as a whole, and I quite liked the art in some individual panels, reading it as a comic is pretty damn confusing. It's not always obvious what panel to read next, text can be too small to read (and frequently makes no sense when you can read it), and the plots (or whatever passes for plots in these comics) is frequently just ignored for bizarre jokes and other things.

Sometimes when the way the plots go into completely random places it reminds me a bit of Jamie Smart's Bear, but that has much more comprehensible art, and is far more enjoyable over all.

On some pages it seems as though the comic is an attempt to create a narrative around doodles that were already on the page, while most of the time it seems as though the creator is just making it up as they go. It's kind of funny how some of the pages reminded me a bit of Chris Ware, as his pages are incredibly over designed, and the only real similarities are lots of small panels and each page looking nice as a whole. And that, while I can appreciate them both as "art", I don't really like them that much.

Confusing, at times hard to read, but still at times interesting. I can't really say much more than that.

Stranger Knights

By Bill Volk, Casey Bohn, and Mary Soper
billvolk.com
bohnhelm.blogspot.com
mandk.deviantart.com

The introductory page of this anthology says that it's a collection of comics about "brave men, women, gods, and radiation beasts who venture into an unjust world and punch those things that need to be punched", so you can probably already guess that I'm going to give this comic a good review.

Despite reading lots of zines and minicomics for this site, I still read a surprising amount of superhero comics (I'm currently rereading Ed Brubaker's Captain America run, hurray libraries!), and I still _like_ superhero comics, even though most of the stuff from mainstream publishers is pretty awful. One thing I do enjoy are indie comics creators versions of superheroes. I've dug the Strange Tales collections that Marvel has put out, James Kochalka's SuperFuckers, and similar books.

Of the three stories in here, the first (pictured below) is written and drawn by Bill Volk and features the god on earth Shamash as he fights infinity robots (yes, that many), teams up with other superheroes, and travels to other dimensions. It really combines a lot of my favourite things about comics, mostly that it is full of bizarre creations, humour, and fighting. This story reminds me of superhero comics I enjoy like Incredible Hercules, Atomic Robo, SuperFuckers, and Invincible (I cannot believe that Robert Kirkman hasn't created a character called Jillhammer yet).

The art is mostly good, and while one of the gods that appears is kind of weird looking, it didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story.

The second story in this anthology is also written by Volk, but is drawn by Mary Soper. This one is a sort of space-fantasy hybrid whose interstellar princess hero reminded me of some of the magical girl anime and manga I've read. The comic features the princess fighting both dinosaur-men and sexism, and has her using her powers in a pretty cool way to avoid a major battle. My only real problem with it is that I'm kind of sick of rich and idle superheroes and/or royalty being the focus of stories. Screw them! Even if they are fictional. Also the story ends on a cliffhanger, and I don't know how to find out what happens next.

The third story is about a guitar player who's probably into transcendental meditation and stuff like that as he says that "The echoes from that planet are all wrong." The art style in certain panels was interesting to look at, but the overall piece didn't really come together.

But still! Two out of three stories is pretty good for an anthology, and I'd be interested in reading future issues.