Man of God #2 Review

Written by ScottWilliams on Jun 15, 2012
Filed in: Comic Book Reviews  |  No Comments »

Rating: 3/5
Publisher Name: Pinwheel Press
Publisher Website: http://www.facebook.com/manofgodcomic

Writer: Craig Partin
Pencils: Yvel Guichet
Inks: Stu Berryhill
Number of Pages: 27
Price: #3.50
Color: Black & White
Safety Content Label: T+ TEENS AND UP – Appropriate for most readers 13 and up, parents are advised that they might want to read before or with younger children.

Publisher’s Blurb:
When a church fire claims the life of John Morris, it seems like just another story for the 10 o’clock news. But when John is reborn and tortured by the sins of those he touches, it becomes so much more. Burned beyond recognition, John flees into the nigh leaving devastation in his wake as he begins his search for the truth.

Reviewer’s Comments:
Man of God #2 seemed a bit of a foundation laying issue but doesn’t come up short because of it. This issue brings what will surely be John’s mortal, or immortal nemesis and it’s hinted that the Four Horsemen of Apocalypse may soon be appearing in the series.

The forces of good and evil seem to be tied together somehow under what appears to be supernatural “Infinity Rings”.

Do the rings grant supernatural powers to John and all who wear them? Will Perpes attempt to bring about the end of the world? Will Braydon be one of his four horsemen? That’s my guess, but we’ll all have to keep reading to find out for sure.

The art in the book once again does justice to the dark tale that Craig Partin seems to be telling and I’m looking forward to the next issue. I love the fact that John is wearing a Halloween costume to hide his horribly scarred face and Guichet does a great job illustrating this.

Who is the man in the mask with the Pinwheel Press logo?

Batman and Robin #10 Review

Written by MQuannBoyd on Jun 15, 2012
Filed in: Comic Book Reviews, DC Comics Reviews  |  No Comments »

Rating: 4/5

Publisher Name: DC Comics

Publisher Website: www.dccomics.com

Writer: Peter J. Tomasi

Artist: Patrick Gleason

Colorist:  John Kalisz

Number of Pages: 22

Price: 2.99

Safety Content Label: Teen

“Terminus: Scar of the Bat”

Publisher Blurb:

Someone calls a meeting of the Robins, but who and why? And will the exiled and egotistical Red Hood answer the call? Red Robin learns of Damian’s betrayal—but how long will the youngest Robin’s lack of discipline stand? Many of Gotham City’s villains blame Batman for their downfall, but what happens when they stand together in a pact to bring the Dark Knight down?

Reviewers Comments:

There are a number of titles within the New 52 where Batman plays a vital role, so it’s a delight to find a title with his name in the headline where Batman is actually second fiddle to his co-star. With Batman and Robin the series could stand to be renamed: Robin featuring Batman… Occasionally as Robin has proven to be the breakout star of the series.

Say what you will about Grant Morrison’s run on Batman, but it’s tough to argue against the creation of Bruce Wayne’s son, Damian. The Son of the Bat is arrogant and rash with violent characteristics similar to one Jason Todd. But where Jason was an annoying cynical one trick pony, Damian has actually grown despite his short comings. With Batman and Robin #10, Damian takes another step in his personal development.

Coming fresh off the heels of the events of “Born to Kill” and the “Night of Owls” tie-in, this issue has all the markers of being a fill-in; meaning, nothing happens. This is a partial truth as there is more character development taking place on behalf of Damian as well as the introduction of a new villain—Terminus—who despite his name might present the Dynamic Duo with a future challenge.

Now back to Damian.

For his part in this issue, and without giving away all the details and being a spoiler sport, the current Robin lays out a challenge to the former Boy Wonder’s that Peter J. Tomasi, or other writers within the DCU, can take full advantage in both the short or long term.

Although issue #10 of Batman and Robin lacks the pulse pounding action moments of previous issues there is still enough character and plot development packed within the 22-pages of this series to warrant a look-see. If you claim not to be a fan of the current Robin, do yourself a favor and check out this book. Truths me, Damian might not warm your heart but through his cocky arrogance behavior there is enough friction to propel in story in which his (co-)stars in forward. And at the end of the day isn’t that what we want from our fiction: conflict?

The Trials and Tribulations of Miss Tilney #1 Review

Written by TaliAdina on Jun 15, 2012
Filed in: Comic Book Reviews  |  2 Comments »

Rating: 4/5
Publisher Name: Dusk Comics
Publisher Website: http://www.duskcomics.com/

Writer: David Doub
Pencils: Sarah Elkins
Number of Pages: 34
Price: 4.99
Color: Color
Safety Content Label: T+ TEENS AND UP – Appropriate for most readers 13 and up, parents are advised that they might want to read before or with younger children.

Publisher’s Blurb:
Plucky cub reporter Henrietta Tilney sits face to face with
accused mass murderer Lord Beowulf Harwood. An interview she hoped would launch
her writing career soon explodes into a whirlwind of deadly adventure, taking
Tilney and the mysterious Harwood across Victorian London.

Reviewer’s Comments:
The Trials and Tribulations of Miss Tilney is a tale of mystery, murder, dark magic, and adventure which readers will enjoy. Set in the Victorian age, the comic follows aspiring London Times reporter Henrietta Tilney who receives her first assignment which is to interview accused mass murderer Lord Beowulf Hardwood. What appears as a straightforward assignment, turns into the start of an adventure that involves a jail break, fist fighting and a tiger attack on Miss Tilney which ends the issue.

I found the comic to be a great read. David Doub’s writing was great and I like the fact that the main character is a strong female who is ready to handle the task at hand and helps orchestrate the jailbreak of Hardwood and his colleague Dr. Plum. My fellow Womanthology alums Sarah Elkin showcases her wonderful artwork on this book as well as Joamette Gil who did the excellent lettering.

This comic has potential and readers will make a good investment into this series.

Dracula World Order: The Beginning Review

Written by TaliAdina on Jun 15, 2012
Filed in: Comic Book Reviews  |  No Comments »

Rating: 5/5
Publisher Name: Ian Brill
Writer: Ian Brill
Pencils: Tonci Zonjic, Rahsan Ekedal, Declan Shalvey, Gabriel Hardman
Colors: Jordie Bellaire, Stephen Downer
Number of Pages: 28
Price: 3.99
Color: Color
Safety Content Label: MAX – EXPLICIT CONTENT – 18 years old.

Publisher’s Blurb:
Created and written by Ian Brill, DRACULA WORLD ORDER tells the story of how the greatest villain of all, Count Dracula, takes advantage of a world on the brink of economic collapse. In a world where the top 1% of the population are vampires, the rest of the human race are prisoners…or the 1%’s next meal. Dracula’s own son Alexandru leads the 99% in rebellion against the Vampire elite – in a battle that will leave you breathless.

Gathering Tonci Zonjic (WHO IS JAKE ELLIS?), Rahsan Ekedal (ECHOES, SOLOMN KANE), Declan Shalvey (THUNDERBOLTS, 28 DAYS LATER), and Gabriel Hardman (HULK, BETRAYAL OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) to illustrate the origin of this adventure, DRACULA WORLD ORDER: THE BEGINNING is available at a select retailers and on comiXology.

The world still bleeds. The adventure continues.

Reviewer’s Comments:
When I saw the title of this comic I knew I had to read and I wasn’t disappointed. This is an excellent original story that has a new take on the myth the legend of Count Dracula and that’s why it’s a story that readers don’t want to miss.

The top 1% of the population of the world have been turned into vampires who make the rest of the human race their prisoners. An unexpected leader arises to bring the 99% out of bondage-Dracula’s own son Alexandru who never forgot what his father is.

The fight for freedom begins in these first four chapters as Alexandru teams up with the last vampire hunter Vincent Macready and another human who was transformed into a snake humanoid Pham Phoung Mai. The trio head to recruit another for their cause and run into Alexandru’s father whom Alexandru attacks ending the book with a cliffhanger.

Ian Brill’s writing is brilliant and he teams with amazing artists Tonci Zonjic (WHO IS JAKE ELLIS?), Rahsan Ekedal (ECHOES, SOLOMN KANE), Declan Shalvey (THUNDERBOLTS, 28 DAYS LATER), and Gabriel Hardman (HULK, BETRAYAL OF THE PLANET OF THE APES) to illustrate this origin story and they do an amazing job.

This story is magnificently written and and beautifully orchestrated visually from beginning to end. I enjoyed it thoroughly and I’m eagerly awaiting the next chapter in the story as the world continues to bleed.

Right Place at the Write Time #6 – Storytelling Styles & Pacing

Written by Wes Locher on Jun 15, 2012
Filed in: Right Place at the Write Time  |  No Comments »

In the last Right Place at the Write Time column we talked about taking the germ of a story idea and developing it into a comic book script. I hope you had fun reading it, and I hope you found it useful.

In this round I wanted to spend a little bit more time dissecting the comic book page itself.

You mean, there’s more to a comic book page than words and pictures??

You’d better believe it. The key points I want to touch on are as follows: pacing, layout, dialogue, and the page turn.

In my brain, these are the four main things that I keep in mind when constructing each of my pages. At times, these elements come easily and at other times they are a burden that I’d like to carry to Mordor and toss into a volcano.

Because there is so much to be covered within each element, today I’m going to stick to some thoughts on Pacing in two parts.

PACING – PART 1: Compressed versus Decompressed Storytelling

Let’s start big picture. Here are some broad stroke thoughts for you to keep in mind when planning out your story as a whole.

Pacing is the area of writing where most new comic book writers struggle. I’m including myself in this. I’m still trying to get the hang of it. In fact, now that I think about it, I read comics every week where even veteran writers struggle with it.

Think back to a simpler time where comic creators had anywhere from five to ten pages to tell a complete origin story for a Superhero. In fact, lets use my favorite hero, Spider-Man as an example.

Take this infamous page from Marvel Comics’ Amazing Fantasy #15, better known to geeks around the world as the first appearance of Spider-Man.

Stan Lee managed to accomplish Spider-Man’s origin story in eight panels. EIGHT.

Stan only had about eleven pages to work with so he couldn’t spend a whole lot of time on the spider, what it looked like, where it was born, and its motivation for biting Peter Parker. This is compressed storytelling at its finest.

Now, let’s take Brian Bendis’ Ultimate Spider-Man comic which debuted in 2000 and featured an alternate take on Peter Parker growing up in our current world. I love everything about this book, but what I want to point out is that it took Bendis several issues for Peter Parker to even be bit by the spider, and countless more before he ever got Peter into the classic outfit. This is a prime example of decompressed storytelling.

If you look at any comic book from the 1940’s up through the 2000’s you’ll see that compressed storytelling is the traditional writing method of the comics medium. Somewhere along the line a lot of this changed and readers decided that they were tired of watching the same superheroes fight the same villains to save the same people. Luckily enough we had publishers who were willing to take chances on smaller books where the writers were all about the character. The fight scenes were no longer as important as knowing who the story was about and seeing a genuine emotional arc for them.

Let’s use Ultimate Spider-Man again… if you really break it down, you’ll notice that the book isn’t actual about Spider-Man at all — it’s about Peter Parker. There are issues where you never see the kid in his costume and issues where he never throws a punch. When young Peter finally reveals to Mary Jane that he’s Spider-Man we have a book that’s essentially 22 pages of them sitting together on a bed talking. And that’s okay.

These stories are more like soap operas than traditional comics, but readers tend to make a bigger investment and buy the subsequent issues as they follow characters that they care about.

Which way is right and which way is wrong? Neither.

Each method of storytelling has its advantages and disadvantages and will likely depend on the book itself. If a writer is only given three issues (or 66 pages) to tell their story, they have to strike a balance between those decompressed character moments and then speeding things up in order to advance their plot.

Hey, I never said that any of this comics writing stuff was easy!

Grab some of your comics. See what types of books you’re naturally drawn to. Once you start writing, you’re going to figure out which storytelling style you prefer.

The easiest way to consider these methods is to stop and think about what you, as a storyteller, come up with first.

If you come up with your characters first, you’re likely going to be drawn toward a decompressed style. If you create your plot first and inject your characters later, you’ll probably be thinking in a compressed manner.

Again, it’s valuable to be able to write in both ways so that your readers have an investment in your characters, but eventually they’ll want your protagonist to stop talking and do something.

PACING – PART 2: Panels on a Page

There’s a lot of what happens in comic books that is subconscious to the reader. Things are happening all over those pages that you don’t even think about.

For instance: those white or black lines that separate the panels on a comic page? Those things are called gutters and without even thinking about it your brain is filling in everything that happens between them.

We see a panel of Spider-Man’s face. We cross the gutter and suddenly we’re in Spidey’s point of view seeing exactly what he’s seeing. Our brains subconsciously have made that transition along with the character. We didn’t need to give a panel by panel breakdown of Spider-Man turning his head and then more panels of us zooming into the item or object.

Our imagination fills in the gaps. Powerful stuff, right? As a writer, use this to your advantage when visualizing your stories and writing your panel breakdowns.

Legendary Batman writer and editor, Denny O’Neil once said, “a comic book world is a world lit by a strobe light.”

As you visualize your story, pretend that a strobe light is going off over top of it. Pull the most effective “frames” and use them to build your sequential story.

I know I touched on this next part in my Story to Script column, but I think it bears repeating.

You must be conscious of how many panels you put on a page as this too has a direct impact on the pacing of your story.

A comic book page can have any number of panels on them. Again, these aren’t by any means the rules, but rather the guidelines I’ve set for myself when I write.

1 Panel – For those big shocking reveals or blockbuster action moments.
2 Panels – Usually a juxtaposition of two ideas or two people talking.
3 Panels – Gives room for an establishing shot along with significant moments.
4 Panels – Spotlights certain actions and gives the artist room to play. Action sequences.
5 Panels – Moves the plot along. Keep the talking heads here. Also good for action.
6 Panels – Advances the plot. Gives the artist room to do some clean, even panel work.
7 Panels – You’d better be advancing the plot.
8 Panels – You’d better have a darn good reason for still advancing the plot.
9 Panels – Geez, you sure have a lot of plot to move. You’re probably Alan Moore.
10+ Panels – Your artist probably hates you.

Important things to remember:
* The more panels you have on a page, the longer it will take to read and thus it will feel like more time has passed.

* The fewer panels you have on a page, the quicker it will read and the faster the time passes in story.

Let’s use a few examples to highlight the points:

In Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s classic comic, Watchmen, a large percentage of pages utilize a nine panel grid. Notice how long it takes you to read all of the text, and how much happens within the art. I mean, Doctor Manhattan ends the sequence having made it all the way to outer space!!

If you have a lot to say and a lot that needs to happen within a particular set of pages, then the nine panel grid might be for you. Be careful though about requesting too many details within the individual panels. The artist doesn’t have a whole lot of room to work with!

What happens on this page? Doctor Manhattan is given his name and outfit and told that he will be a symbol of power to be used against the Russians to avoid nuclear war. Doc also comes up with his symbolic logo.

Now, let’s watch what happens when we cut the panel count down significantly. Take this three-panel action sequence from Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart’s Batman and Robin.

Think about how quickly you make it from the top of this page to the bottom. It was probably three to five seconds, right? We have no copy to read until the final panel so there’s nothing to slow us down.

What happens on this page? Even though it’s just three panels, there’s a whole lot going on! Batman jumps from an explosion, civilian child in hand. He lands amongst the debris. He safely delivers the child to her parents and keeps on moving in pursuit of the villain.

Let’s compare… on each page, a lot happens, but it’s up to the writer and artist to pace the page so that everything you need to say is included, but the space is not wasted. When a comic book is only 20-22 pages in length, space is precious.

A great piece of feedback I recently received on one of my scripts was to very the amount of panels on each page. Let’s face it — people get bored and have short attention spans.

What I found myself doing was falling into a trap of overusing pages with five panels. They worked for the pace of my story and moved things along well enough, but once I saw the finished pages, the story looked very predictable. If you’re going to have three consecutive pages of nine panel grids in which your evil genius is going to pontificate his master plan to the hero, be sure that the next scene is full of action with as few panels as possible. This rewards the reader for having to suffocate through the exposition.

I’m going to pause here and we’ll all marinate on these ideas and suggestions. In a future column we’ll cover the remaining elements: Layout, Dialogue and the Page Turn.

As always, please utilize the comments and let me know if the advice has been helpful. Let me know if you agree or disagree. Also, feel free to ask questions so we can continue learning together!

Until next time…

Wes Locher
June 2012

If you didn’t already guess, Wes Locher writes comic books. Learn more about his projects at weslocher.com, follow him on Twitter @weslocher, or email him about wiring millions of dollars to his bank account at weslocher@gmail.com.