I’ve given out the first 4 drawings from the “Like ALL CAPS, get a drawing” giveaway. Here’s a little preview. I’ll be posting the rest of the drawings as people receive them, so stay tuned!
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Webcomics Wednesday (better late than never!): Cloud Arcadia
on July 28, 2011 at 3:24 pmPosted In: News
Cloud Arcadia, by Adam Fotos, is a surreal, colorful strip featuring frequent nerd culture references and a slyly off-color sense of humor. The strip is published irregularly, but you’ll find new content shows up about 2 or 3 times a month.
Each panel in Cloud Arcadia is packed with detail. There are very few if any episodes with bland, uninteresting backgrounds. In fact, the environments that Fotos designs often upstage the characters, who tend instead to be simply but expressively rendered. Oh, and the colors! Did I mention this strip was colorful? Seriously, reading Cloud Arcadia is like being assaulted by tropical fruit Skittles. That’s not a bad thing – I quite like tropical fruit Skittles, and I’m also a big fan of rich, eye-popping color in comics. Sadly, it’s rare to find someone in webcomics who has such a strong sense of color and is able to pull off the vibrant palettes that Fotos uses in each comic.
Those bright colors also compliment the subject matter of Cloud Arcadia quite well. The characters are generally blissfully nonplussed by the absurd and magical things that happen around them. While there is a recurring cast in the strip, there’s not much in the way of continuity here; in other words, no character or plot development, meaning the emphasis here is on the one shot gag. On top of the recurring cast of characters, Cloud Arcadia also features occasional cameos by classic video game characters and the like, but thankfully, this is not specifically a videogame or nerd culture comic (lord knows there are already plenty of those!). Instead, the nerdy references are generally used as a jumping off point for thinly veiled sex jokes or mild dark humor.
In closing, I should probably disclose that I know Adam Fotos: I audited a class that he taught on comic making while we were both grad students at the University of Illinois. I also went to his wedding. He’s a good guy and very dedicated to his craft. I remember when we first met that I wasn’t entirely sold on his cartooning style; however, I’ve found that it’s grown on me over time. There’s an almost child-like exuberance to his art that often belies surprisingly mature humor and evokes a simpler time when Gameboys were awesome and Legos could build anything you wanted. So forget about the federal deficit for a few minutes, and take a little vacation to Cloud Arcadia. It’s worth a visit.
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Questionable Content, by Jeph Jacques, starts out following the misadventures a sad sack hipster kid and his fat talking computer. In fact, if you start at the beginning, it’s almost like reading a slightly edgier, web culture savvy version of “Garfield” featuring sarcastic emo girls and ham-fisted music references; however, as the story progresses, it also broadens as more characters are added to the fold on a regular basis. While rereading the first 50 pages of QC for this review, I began to ask myself what it was that kept me reading the almost 2000 pages (not counting guest strips) that have been published so far. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure, but somehow QC has become a part of my life to the point that it sometimes seems like an addiction.
QC is a character driven strip featuring loads of relationship melodrama and occasionally some humor. It’s the soap opera of webcomics, and every time I read it, I feel like a housewife, sipping my mimosa and tuning in for my daily fix of “Days of Our [fucking] Lives.” In this case, just replace the mimosa with a pretentious craft beer or a white Russian (those are suitable hipster drinks, right?). The melodrama is a consistent presence in the strip and is definitely an acquired taste. The humor, on the other hand, is hit or miss. When it hits, it’s very funny, but for every hit, there are an equal number of jokes that fall flat for any number of reasons.
At the outset of the comic, none of the characters are incredibly distinct or compelling; however, as the story progresses, each character becomes more recognizable and complex. Perhaps that’s what keeps me going – the fact that I’m not just reading about the development and interactions of these characters, but I’m also getting to see Jacques develop into a better, more confident storyteller.
In spite of the improvements, one of my main frustrations with QC is Jacques’ somewhat notorious problem with “losing” characters. The strip can go for months without a particular main character showing up and without any explanation for their absence. Eventually, Jacques recognized the problem and reintroduced one of the offending characters with a tongue-in-cheek explanation for the absence, showing that, thankfully, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. However, other characters who disappeared from the strip have never returned. Hopefully as the strip continues, Jacques will further develop his ability to juggle multiple characters and plot threads, but so far he’s no George R. R. Martin (although, that’s probably a good thing).
Along with the improvements in characterizations and plot, Jacques has made dramatic improvements in the art of QC. Just try flipping between the latest comics and the first few comics, and you’ll see what I mean. The backgrounds and characters have become more detailed, coloring and shading has improved, the line work is more steady and consistent, and Jacques’ rendering of gesture and facial expression has also improved. Along with those improvements, the strip style has metamorphosed into something akin to conventional manga style, but there’s still a decidedly Western feel to the art. Again, if I could point to anything that has kept me following this strip, it’s the continuing improvement of and experimentation with the style. Jacques never seems content to rest on his laurels, and that tenacity is definitely admirable.
In the end, I suppose QC has become an addiction for me. It’s become my ritual to check the site every morning to see the strip that was posted the night before. Sometimes, the story makes me shake my head or roll my eyes, but in spite of that I can’t deny that I enjoy reading it. If you’re looking for tightly woven, well-plotted out stories or accurate, psychologically compelling characters, I’ll forgive you if you give Questionable Content a pass, but if you’re in the market for a comic about a bunch of goofy hipster kids and their relationship melodrama, then go forth, gentle reader, and enjoy this guilty pleasure.
Yesterday Kim and I received our preordered copy of Any Empire, the new graphic novel by my comix man crush, Nate Powell. I’ve powered through it twice as of this morning and am already looking forward to a third read (after I get some work done, of course!). Published by Top Shelf, the book is scheduled for release in August, although if you order directly from Nate, copies will be shipping out on July 19th, and you’ll also be giving your money directly to the artist (which I always find preferable).
Any Empire is set in the fictional town of Wormwood, which was also the setting of Nate’s last big solo project, Swallow Me Whole. The similarities between the two books don’t end there as the observant reader will also notice that minor characters from each story overlap and bump into each other; in fact, one of the main characters in Any Empire is the kid brother of a marginal character from Swallow Me Whole. Both books are also coming of age stories, but while Swallow Me Whole focuses on teenage angst, alienation, and struggles with mental illness, Any Empire is a story about violence in American culture told from the perspective of a series of young adults individually and collectively reminiscing about their connected childhoods in an attempt to understand the people they’ve become.
Each character’s childhood is defined in relation to their attitudes toward and experience with violence, and the effects of those experiences are reflected in the choices that each character makes later in life and the identities that they assume. As the story progresses, Nate draws us backwards and forwards in time in order to show these connections with a clarity that standard chronological story-telling might obscure.
The book culminates with an ambiguous ending that borders on magical realism (although nowhere near as much as Swallow Me Whole). Nate trusts his readers to make up their own minds about the story and to hopefully learn something about themselves, much as the characters do.
There’s poetry in the way that Any Empire unfolds – both visually and textually. There’s never a wasted line or syllable, which makes multiple reads almost a necessity. Nate is a master of visual storytelling; in fact, some of the best sequences in the story feature little to no dialogue, but you’ll be too busy falling in love with his characters to even notice. That’s not to say that the art is better than the writing – the dialogue is masterfully written and distinct, and text and image often meld together in inventive and evocative ways, turning the writing itself into a part of the landscape. In fact, it’s difficult to comment on the visuals without addressing Nate’s treatment of the text, and vice versa, as each element is so closely married.
Without a doubt Any Empire is a personal story featuring elements of autobiography woven into the fictional world that Nate has crafted. This is evident not only from the fact that one of the characters is clearly an avatar for the author, but also from how much he obviously cares about his characters. This care translates into a story that is both intimately introspective and broadly reflective of our culture – Nate is careful not to point a critical finger at American attitudes toward violence without revealing his own history and relationship to the same.
The intimate nature of the story also allowed me, as a reader, to connect much more closely with the characters in Any Empire than I have with characters in any other story I’ve read recently. There were a few moments where I saw myself reflected in the pages of this book as a nine or ten year old boy, watching GI Joe cartoons; playing Kung Fu and Double Dragon on our old Nintendo; “sword fighting” my younger brother with found sticks from the woods behind our house; yelling, “Bang! You’re dead!” as I fired an old wood and aluminum toy rifle with an orange plastic cap on the barrel… and in that moment I felt like I knew those characters – Lee, Purdy, Sarah, the twins – because, just like Nate, their story was my story.