Month: November 2022

10.

A Life Through Selfies— Arianna Arris’s depiction through selfies of a fashion model’s life is mysterious and addictive.

9.

Lemons— Paige Walsh’s enchanting four-episode fable about the title citrus fruit is rendered in pulsating color and dance-like grace.

8.

Giant Nerd Boyfriend— Everyone needs something silly and clever they can turn to for a chuckle. Artist/writer Fishball’s Ringo Award-nominated saga about a short Asian girl and her scruffy tall boyfriend fill the bill better than most.

7.

Vattu— Rousing action, muted color and terse dialog come together perfectly to depict a mind-bending odyssey of a nomadic race. Artist-writer Evan Dahm pursues the epic world-building with total commitment in this Ignatz Award-nominated series.

6.

Ten Earth Shattering Blows— A petite noblewoman and a brutal amazon escape together from a desert outpost in this sly-humored interplanetary saga by artist/writer Nuclearpasta. Read review.

5.

The Everyday Life of Letta Novak— Artist-writer Novak’s perfectly-composed art and eye-catching color is a big draw for this series of short comics, but the subtle writing raises it to another level.

4.

Fried Rice Comics–Erica Eng’s Eisner Award-winning autobiographical saga features gentle realistic depictions of family life in a Malaysian village.

3.

Blind Alley— Adam de Souza’s low key humor is reminiscent of Charles Schulz with a touch of Charles Adams in this Ignatz Award-nominated series.

2.

Everything is Fine— Mike Birchall’s subdued characters are imprisoned in animal masks and must pretend happiness in a dystopian society. Read review.

1.

Lore Olympus— Rachel Smythe’s vibrant colors and contemporary wit bring depth and immediacy to this Harvey and Eisner Award-winning rendition of the legend of Persephone and Hades. Read review.

Horror comes in two varieties.  The typical horror mode has the characters in a normal, reassuring world, and gradually a foreign, menacing element is introduced that doesn’t belong in the normal world. Works as diverse as Frankenstein and Halloween operate in this mode.

Another variety of horror is less typical. In this vein, the normal, reassuring world itself becomes subverted; everything we value has disappeared, and qualities like love and friendship are no longer possible.  Think 1984, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Mike Birchall’s Everything is Fine is horror of the world-subverting variety. The characters Maggie and Sammy live in an orderly but bland suburban house. She is a housewife, he has a white-collar job meaninglessly moving products from point to point. Their relationship with each other and their neighbors are utterly drab and monotonous, with a few troubling details. The family dog is dead; and they sprinkle poison in their garbage to deter a homeless man from eating it.

What’s most disquieting about the characters is their appearance.  Birchall at first keeps their heads out of frame to conceal them, but eventually gives the reader the first little shock by revealing that they have large oval heads that resemble the Hello Kitty character.  As the story goes on, we come to know that these heads are actually masks that end at the neck line; a door slides open in their mouths when they eat.  The heads are some kind of behavior control mechanism; a red light appears in one eye when a stressful situation occurs. For more serious offenses, the individual is “designated as red-status”— both eyes turn red, and horrible death occurs.

As the characters interact, the expressions on these masks never change from vapid, pleasant smiles. Birchall emphasizes this with frequent pauses in the conversations and closeups on the mask faces, forcing the reader to question the smiles and imagine the sad, troubled personalities that lie beneath.

The art and the aesthetic of this series reminds me of Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, which happens to be one of the most honored and respected works in the realm of print comics. Not prepared to say that Birchall is operating on that level, but it is a very good webcomic, one of the best I’ve seen.  Nice to see as well that it has had 80 million page views and collected 1.3 million subscribers; a lot of people are being exposed to a finely-wrought and thought provoking webcomic.

I met some folks from Spider Forest who had a table next to mine at the Bethesda Small Press Expo.  Nice people!  I took their card, and later on I checked out their website.  Of the numerous comics listed, Ten Earth Shattering Blows stood out, because of the nice artwork in the thumbnail, and also because of the crazy title.  Very glad I clicked on it!

This comic begins with an incredible 360-degree tour of a lusty, primitive outpost, part Mad Max, part Star Wars. It’s familiar territory for a fantasy comic, but the artist, Nuclearpasta, makes it fresh with meticulous detail, stunning two-page spreads, a sincere love for depicting giant lizards, and an ironic tone throughout the proceedings.

The two main characters both are wearing masks when they’re introduced, and the camera zooms in for closeups when each of them is unveiled— Landa, a bratty but bold young noblewoman, distinctively dressed in the latest interplanetary style.  And Joy, who is first introduced as “the monster”, being thrust into a cage match she easily wins. She escapes, and slays Landa’s protector with incredibly violent head butts. When her helmet is shattered, she is revealed as rough and unglamorous but nevertheless beautiful.

Joy abducts Landa and escapes the outpost in a furiously-paced sequence that leaves us gasping; and then the science fiction elements become even more mind-bending and weird.

Nuclearpasta’s art is a stunning combination of Moebius-style backgrounds with Kirbyesque action. The faces are expressive and perfectly carry the humorous tone.  The art pays a lot of attention to portraying motion, which goes a long way to bringing the action sequences to life.

The website itself is especially genial and engaging, with lots of extra artwork to enjoy, a links page to the artist’s favorite webcomics, and more.

As to that title, the what or how of these earth-shattering blows has yet to be explained– and why ten of them?  I can’t wait to find out!