Posts Tagged comics

12 results.
Apr15

The Original Elfquest

by Rindis on April 15, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

It is impossible to overstate how important this series was to me during the ’80s. If you want to understand teenage me, Star Trek, Robotech, Elfquest, and role playing games are essential knowledge.

I recently picked up the Dark Horse collection of the series and read through it for the first time in entirely too long. Mostly, this is long-familiar ground. The Wolfriders are elves, persecuted by humans for generations, and then burned out of their home. After an introductory story, the titular quest begins as Cutter, youthful chief of the Wolfriders sets to to understand more of the world, and what, if any, place they may have in it. As our knowledge of this nameless world with two moons (which has since been named the World of Two Moons…) expands, so does the scope of the story, ramping up from thoughtful beginnings to an action-packed epic fantasy climax, and finally, unexpected answers.

This was the kick-start of the independent comics boom of the ’80s (along with Cerebus), and parts of it are rooted in its time. Narration text boxes are heavy and sometimes weigh down the storytelling (though on occasion they do heavy lifting to keep the page and art from getting tied up in talking heads). And parts are ahead of their time, with Wendy Pini’s art being an early source of Japanese manga influence in the US. On top of that, there is a great story, with great art that also shows her animation training, as characters have life on every page.

Reading it was also new to me as the Dark Horse version is in the original black-and-white. Wendy Pini’s inks are gorgeous, and it’s great to see them here. But the World of Two Moons is a colorful place, and one where color can be very important. The original series has been colorized three or four times, and the best of those colors is how I first discovered the series, and the version that is both the hardest to find now, and what I would have hoped for others to see in the Dark Horse version.

The worst color version is the 1985 Epic Comics reprint. This was produced in the usual (for the time) comics standards which means it would have suffered from lackluster registration and a very coarse color screen no mater what, but it also suffered from a non-technical problem. Glynis Oliver did the colors for the series, and while she is generally good and celebrated colorist, for some reason the trolls, who should have a kind of an olive drab skin tone kept coming out with regular human(/elf) pink skin tones. And it was a recurrent problem that would go away and come back. I don’t know what happened there, but it’s solidly the worst.

Next up is the Father Tree Press graphic novels from 1988. The printing job is fine, and the colors are actually very good, but a bit flat. I think this was produced by the traditional color-guide and separation method of comics. For that, it’s very good. At least in the original series. The graphic novels after that, where there were no previous color jobs to act as a guide, get worse with some odd color/highlighting choices, and some garish results. I know very little of the 2003 DC release, but it has computer color obviously based on the Father Tree Press versions. What little I’ve seen does have some very nice effects.

The first, best, now lost, colors were in the 1981-84 Donning/Starblaze graphic novels. These were hand-painted over prints of the original pages and then photographed. Wendy Pini did a very good job with the first volume and 2-4 were even better with Jane Fancher doing the colors (the first Dark Horse volume is all four of the Donning books together). Given that the relationship between the Pinis (and many other creators) and Donning ended in court, I have to assume that Donning owned the rights to the color work, which is why it’s never been re-used.

And it is a shame. Compare the B&W, Father Tree, and Donning versions here:

Or just the two color versions:

And a glimpse of Fancher’s colors:

Dark Horse’s collection seems to be meant to preserve the original. It sticks with the original black-and-white, and foregoes the extra pages from the Epic series that were inserted into the Father Tree Press version. It’s still missing a bit, as originally there were twenty color front and back covers to give a much better guide to how everyone looked, but preserving the original presentation is worthwhile in its own right.

And color or not. Or any of the various color jobs, it is still a very good story well worth a read or a dozen.

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Jan05

Gold Brick IV

by Rindis on January 5, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Comics

The fourth Gold Brick starts right in the middle of the action, with part two of Brianna and an attempt on the leprechauns’ gold. From there, we quickly go back to the big story line, as Gina gets invited to see the secrets of the shadow elves on Jade, and meets… herself.

Physically, this is the same as the previous volume. A collection of 25 color issues, weighing in somewhere around 450 pages. My personal copy also had the binding come lose from the cover, though it is otherwise physically intact. Thankfully, the lettering doesn’t get overly small as much as it did in Volume III.

With 25 issues, there’s time and room for a fair amount of different stories, such as yet another matchup between Ace and Night Flight, which again is very well done, especially from a story perspective. Generally speaking though, more things are tying to the Nomad Artificers, and projects they started when this universe was young…. There’s the usual bevy of new characters, as well as returning villains, and one of the more important stories deals with a return to Dreadwing’s lair, from the original short story.

On the other hand, Brittanny is found to be pregnant midway through, which has its own influence on the stories. Like with any other long-term series like this, life goes on, and the characters evolve. It feels a bit more integrated in Gold Digger, though, and certainly Tiffany Targét Gia is an important story point coming up.

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Nov30

Gold Brick III

by Rindis on November 30, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Comics

The Gold Digger color series starts out big. Three multi-issue stories flow directly into each other before there’s any sort of break. In the middle of this, Brianna, Julia, and company finally return from Jade after being missing for several issues… and no one’s talking about what happened.

The third part of the lead stories features one of my favorite names from Perry, Uhm Di Turrok, The Halls of the Extremely Dead. This is a bigger, badder, trap-filled complex (and poor Stripe gets pretty beat up!)… that Gina eventually gets through, and the guardian of the place tells her to come back in one year, when she’ll be ready to learn the secrets of what all this is protecting. (Now, how can he know ahead of time just when everything will be right…?)

My understanding is that Perry started working out a really big story about the time he did Beta. And this volume has a lot of groundwork for that story. And even then, it draws on earlier bits. Gina is getting hints of the mystery of the nomad artificers, who date from the beginnings of the universe, and first came up in the limited series.

After that winds down, we finally find out what happened on Jade: Julia’s nemesis, G’nolga held Brittany hostage to force her to throw a match and lose honor. Much of the rest of this volume deals with the Arms-Master tournament, as she tries to reclaim her title. It’s the biggest story yet, all on Jade, as there are plans afoot to effectively take over Jade by use of little-noticed privileges that come with the title “Arms-Master of Jade”. The final few issues break up into a couple of smaller stories, and the first half of a two-parter.

Physically, this volume is a bit smaller than the previous ones. The page count of the color series (understandably) went down to 24 pages, so this volume is a mere ~450 instead of 600, and is shrunk a little from standard comics size (~9.5″ instead of  ~10.5″ tall), which does occasionally make some of the lettering a bit small. Though the paper quality is much improved the binding is iffier; my copy of this tends to creak and pop alarmingly, and a couple of pages are partially lose.

Overall, this is very solid volume (well, solid story) of Gold Digger, with over half dedicated to one really well-done story. There’s been a couple of printings, I don’t know how they differ, if there’s any real differences between them. So while it’s out of print, it doesn’t seem that hard to get.

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Nov06

Gold Brick II

by Rindis on November 6, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Comics

This is a straight reprint of the second half of the Gold Digger B/W series, so its another ~600-page volume reprinting issues 26-50. Unfortunately, it does suffer from there being two cross-overs and one spin-off during this period that aren’t in here. Those should be fixed with volumes 2 and 3 of the color remaster, which is the primary thing making me think about getting them (along with the slowly ageing newsprint).

Again, there’s a lot of single-issue stories in here, but there’s some bigger ones too. Most notably, the Dynasty storyline takes a fair chunk of the volume, as things kick off in issue 30, and it runs through 38. However, the first half or so of that is the main characters getting distracted by other problems that crop up at the same time as El Dorado suddenly disappearing. And, it turns out that events in Asrial vs Cheetah (a two-issue Ninja High School crossover) kicked off this storyline before issue 30 (it’s not actually directly plot related, but it will be in the remaster).

While Stripe goes to save his people’s homeworld, Gina and the rest end up having to save themselves from the return of Dr Peachbody from the first volume. Time Warp is the place where the Brick really falls down, as it was an interleaved story of four issues of GD and four of NHS, so there’s gaps here (this is the second-biggest reason I’m looking at the remaster), so there’s holes in the story here. Thankfully, the original issues actually have decent recaps of the previous NHS issue’s action, so it can still be followed, except that part 8 was in NHS…. After that wraps up it still takes a couple issues to focus on the Dynasty, and then that fight actually wraps up in a couple issues.

The other big story is Beta, which starts in Gold Digger Beta #1, which was going to be a color spin-off series running concurrently with the main one. However, after one issue the new story was folded into the main series while plans were made to transition to color full-time (and getting Beta #1 in there is the biggest reason I’m looking at the remaster). At the same time, Brianna and a couple others set out to Jade, and that actually turns into a bigger story that’s just as important.

In fact, a lot of this volume relies on Perry handling multiple on-going stories, and he generally succeeds. I feel that the Dynasty got too stretched out by all the things allowed to interrupt it as it gets going, but it does work as a story. During the later part, Perry experiments a bit more with layouts (which have always had a very dynamic manga-influced style), with a page with a single small panel in the center, and one two-page spread that goes sideways (he needed all the height he could get for it, and it works very well).

Things largely devolve back to single-issue adventures at the end of the volume/series, but Perry continues juggling old villains (Dark Bird), and introducing new ones, such as the wererats and Gothwrain, who becomes one of the main problems in the future.

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Oct29

Gold Brick I

by Rindis on October 29, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Comics

The Gold Bricks started as a project to get the original 50-issue black-and-white Gold Digger series into a convenient, but impressive format, with 25 issues per volume. They’ve continued since then with 25-issue collections of the color series. On one hand, the production’s a little cheap, with ~600 pages on thin newsprint paper that that has yellowed over the years, but the binding is amazingly solid.

The regular series sees a refining of Perry’s art and character design, though it remains very loose in feel. As a regular series, and 25 issues, there’s a number of story arcs in the first volume. One of the more impressive things, reading it all now, is just how little ‘throw away’ pieces there are: a lot of things in here continue being central parts of the series for a long time to come, or secondary characters show up for a story… and then show up again a dozen issues later at a logical point. The fact that Fred Perry is writing all of this doubtless does wonders to keep things consistent, but it can be amazing just how much he juggles. Some characters do fade away though. Tark and Mesha from the original story slowly get sidelined, and then basically take a job that rotates them out of the recurring cast.

Perry loves making references to popular culture as part of his light-hearted tone (the computer-book from Inspector Gadget showed up in the limited series), and he spends a couple moments explaining one, establishing the A-Wing as one of that world’s next generation fighters. Which is a fun way of underscoring that superscience is a part of that world. A lot of the stories in here are short, and as the series went on, story titles got dropped; here’s the bigger stories:

Issues 1-4 — The Curse: The first story of the continuing series, and the second big story for GD (I kind of wonder if Perry had originally planned it out as a second limited series). We start with another ancient-ruin-exploration-gone-wrong (Gina was beaten to the loot by Croesus no less), a demon, and the creation of Brianna. That last is introduced really well, with the issue starting with the aftermath, and going back to figure out what happened.

Issues 4-6 — Tooth and Claw: The end of The Curse melds straight into the next story, which I always felt didn’t have quite enough groundwork laid, but was still quite logical. Britanny’s relationship with Stripe has disturbed the relationships within El Dorado, and now that comes back to bite Britanny. Not only do we get a rematch with Jetta and Thabian, but we finally get to see more of Gina and Britanny’s dad, Dr. Theodore Diggers, and get an idea just what he can do (that he was a powerful mage had been established in the mini-series, now we get to see what that means).

Issue 6-7 — Night Flight: Dark Bird returns for a rematch with Ace. This story really shows off that Fred Perry loves flying and aircraft, and he does a good job narrating a multi-plane dogfight.

Issue 7-8 — Crime Syndicate X: Early on, we get a mention that Cheetah had spent time ‘super heroing’ in high school with a friend, and that gets picked up with Cheetah running into her old pal the Pink Avenger in New York, and things go into a typically wacky take on superhero adventures, though with something of a nasty twist as the main villain is smart enough to find out heroes’ identities and threaten friends and family.

Issues 13-19 — The Lich King: This story technically starts with #15, but the the issue and a third before lead straight into it. Meeting the werewolves brings in more details on the end of the war between them and the werecheetahs, and leads directly to the next big story dealing with Dr Digger’s father,  and a very epic story with the fate of Gina and the realm of the undead at stake. It’s the biggest story so far, and is very well paced, and introduces Jade, the alternate world of magic, and Gina’s mother (who is every bit as competent as the rest of the family).

Aside from those, there’s eleven issues in here that are single-issue stories, mostly with lots of high-action plots, with more character-focused bits being banter and side-pieces to the rest, though issue #24 takes a break from high-speed action but still has lots of character-based conflict. Issues 11 & 12 establish that GD and Ninja High School are in the same universe, with the Rat Exterminators and Dog Supreme showing up from NHS. The number of characters grows explosively in these stories, and most of them are seen again later. There’s also several bits of circling back to the limited series to continue things introduced there.

One nice continuing thing in the series is that there’s multiple references to time passing. A previous issue’s events are often a week earlier, so between that and multiple-issue stories, it probably isn’t keeping up with publishing time, but it’s a lot better than many series of this type. Overall, this volume is a little over two years of growth in the characters, and the extreme sexiness gets toned down just a bit, which helps. (Not that there isn’t still a lot, but it does tone down a bit. Gina especially tones down a bit, though she is getting into a love triangle by the end of the volume.)

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Oct21

Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Lost Cities

by Rindis on October 21, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Comics

The main problem with the early parts of the Gold Digger series, is that it can be a little scattered. The original story appeared in Mangazine, and then there is a four-issue mini-series, and then the long-running B&W series, and then the color series that is still going.

The first couple bits are in the first ‘pocket manga’ collection, but that’s also a smaller format, and I prefer the original comic-book size, especially with Perry’s earlier art and hand-written lettering. The Gold Bricks pick up with the start of the regular B/Wseries… leaving the earlier parts less accessible. (Though there is a colorized re-master in the works that will sort everything into place. Liking well-done B/W art as much as color, I’m of mixed feelings, as including eleven extra issues in the remaster will solve a lot of problems.)

So, this is the collection of the early mini-series at full size. As a Brenner print job, the glue isn’t that great, and my copy is slowly disintegrating.

As for the actual contents: it is great. This was Fred Perry’s second story, and about four-times as long as the previous one. The art is good, and features some nice washes from Perry; it does get a bit messy, and the lettering is uneven in a few places, but there’s a lot of energy.

And energy is the best way to describe Perry’s writing, as he’s borrowing from high-action movies for what he’s doing; most prominently the Indiana Jones films. Here, we start with a running aerial battle on the way to discover El Dorado, and there’s barely time to catch your breath for the rest of the story after Gina and Cheetah land safely a short distance outside the city. The story is structured all as one whole, and around being four issues at the same time, as each one technically deals with a different ‘lost city’, though the plot really focuses on two.

The cast expands a lot from the mere five characters of the original story, including several people who remain very prominent secondary characters all the way through through the latest I’ve seen (and are unlikely to ever drop off). Likewise, the plot and action expand to fill the pages, and the story rushes around with no space to slow down, coming to a satisfactory conclusion right at the end.

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May20

Yeah, I’ve been here…

by Rindis on May 20, 2011 at 11:04 am
Posted In: Life

Smudge will really be able to empathize, I’m sure.

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Apr22

The End of Tokyopop

by Rindis on April 22, 2011 at 10:26 am
Posted In: Comics

For those of us who read comics–of whatever type–Tokyopop has been a major force in the industry for about 15 years. They took a slowly maturing market, and showed how it could be turned into a major runaway success.

They’ve been in trouble for the past few years, and laid off all but about 5 people around the beginning of the year. And this week the business closed its doors.

This is just the latest in a series of closures in the American Manga/Anime business. As a fan, I’ve been unhappy to see the various companies go, even though I could see the downcycle after the boom coming from years away.

I cannot be unhappy that Tokyopop is gone.

This blog post best articulates why, though he goes into things I had only vaguely suspected:
http://matt-thorn.com/wordpress/?p=495

This is a somewhat better overview of just went wrong at Tokyopop:
http://www.rocketbomber.com/2011/04/18/i-hate-stu-levy

And a rant about the ‘OEL Manga’ line:
http://khyungbird.livejournal.com/82308.html

The real problem was the man at the top. Did Stu Levy start Tokyopop because of a passion for comics/manga? No. He started it because he could, and to be on top of something ‘cool’. Tokyopop marketed manga pretty much purely as the new ‘in and cool thing’. Now, this is a great way to get word out to the audience that most manga is aimed at in the first place, but it’s not a long-term strategy.

The ‘coolness’ of anything has a time limit. For the mainstream in the mid-90s, anime and manga were still brand new, and the ‘never seen before’ factor is what allowed it to be cool. It has now been seen before. The mainstream has been aware of manga and anime for as long as many high-schoolers have been alive now. (Ow. That was painful to write.)

Once that was over, the Tokyopop’s ability to do things on the cheap and cash in was limited. Also, just in case you didn’t catch it from the above links, Tokyopop’s contracts with their stable of original artists were crap. Thankfully, companies that invite creator-originated content, and then treat the creators like crap have trouble lasting (I’m looking at you Sirius).

Okay, this has turned from a quick note to point up the first link to a full rant. *sigh*

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Aug27

How I Spent My Weekend….

by Rindis on August 27, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Posted In: Life, SFB

It’s been a busy weekend. There’s still things that need doing that didn’t get done.

Saturday was gaming. The usual crowd, Patch and Mark, showed up for SFB, and Paul showed up to watch after expressing interest in playing. We played Selected Attack from C1, where a small Hydran force tries to take out a Klingon Base Station before reinforcements show up. I took the Hydrans with Mark and Patch splitting the BS and the G2 police ship on station until the reinforcements showed up and Mark took over the G2 while Patch got the reinforcements.

It went badly for me. Mostly my own fault for not thinking things through enough. My initial plan was to advance towards the base, and then go to point blank range the turn after. Despite the fact that Fusion Beams require a turn to cool down, and that I knew I’d be using them at point blank range on Turn 2, I charged them up on Turn 1. The energy could have gone to bricking the front shields or the later plan I think I should have gone with.

The game saw our first actual use of Transporter Bombs, with the Klingons putting up an ‘instant minefield’ on the approach to the base. Considering how things played out, I’m thinking I should have gone fast so that I could get around behind the base (where they didn’t put any mines) if I needed. They could have countered with mines back there, but it would have spread them out, and the tight cluster they did was as much a problem as anything else.

The Base Station is the smallest regular base in the game. However, it still has six Phaser-4s, which can do ridiculous amounts of damage at close range. If it wasn’t for the fact that Fusion-Hydrans have to get to close range to do meaningful damage, and the Turn 3 reinforcing squadron is nearly as powerful as the full attacking force, I’d want to batter it from range a bit. But this scenario is designed so you have to go in.

The base focused on my Hunter frigate the first turn, crippling it with less than half power left. Then came the Ranger cruiser’s turn. As I was on final approach when the base fired on it, the Ph-4s didn’t leave much, including less than 1/3 of it’s original power. But they did leave 3 Fusion Beams intact.

The second turn for me saw the Ranger and Lancer (destroyer) go slow as all the power went into overloading the Fusions. So slow, that with dodging mines, I didn’t even get a point-blank shot (part of why I needed a better plan for turn one). On the plus side, the Ranger managed to avoid setting off a mine on three different occasions becasue of the slow speed. Several of the fighters did get through, and when I did fire, I did a good number of internals.

On Turn 3, the Klingon squadron arrived, and I tried to escape. One fighter managed a second pass at the base, and did more internals. I had hoped to cover the retreating elements with the Lancer, but a singe destroyer with its heavy weapons down just had no hope. I ended up only getting the Lancer off board (after being crippled). The only good news is that I had indeed managed to cripple the base, even with the two cargo pods attached to soak up damage.

This ended right on time, with Mark having to go home right afterward. Paul stayed for dinner, and we used the time until then to do a practice game of SFB, since he found it as fun to watch as to read about, and will now be our fourth for that. As his first time (at least, in quite a while) I gave him a Fed CC vs a Klingon D6.

I could have done better, but can partially blame the dice, as my disruptors did worse than average, while the photon torpedoes did better than average. I wasn’t paying enough attention to play as well as I strictly could, but that’s not the point. Paul picked up the essentials very well, surprisingly so, compared to most stories and my previous experience.

(Oh, yeah. I limped off board with two phasers still operational without ever quite cracking a shield right before dinner.)

So our next session is scheduled to be the four of us, in two teams. A straight-up battle with two ships each (one for Paul) as the clock advances to Y153.

And then on Sunday we (me, Smudge, Baron and Drew) went to the Asian Art Museum to see the Tezuka exhibit. The museum is very nice, and we’ll have to go back someday. The exhibit is very well done, and has a large number of his original pages. It’s interesting to note that the originals are tiny by our lights, and there’s quite a few cases of cut-outs pasted on for corrections in the early work. Some are extensive enough that you wonder why he didn’t just start over.

Also on exhibit there is the work of Taiso Yoshitoshi, a 19th-century Japanese woodblock artist whose career spanned the period before and after the Meiji Restoration. The exhibit thoughtfully puts everything in order and points out changes in style and the revisitation of subject matter against the backdrop of the events happening around him. Very nice, even if the room is kept really dim to protect the art.

On the second floor is the static exhibit of historical art from across Asia. The first six galleries are dedicated to India (and surrounds) and its different religions, with lots of statuary and friezes. A lot of truly remarkable stuff, and my inner archaeologist was having a field day. This meant that I was lagging behind everyone else (usually the other way around where art is concerned with Baron and Smudge) as I insisted on examining everything and reading the tags to try and get some sense of what I was looking at. Sadly, my knowledge of Indian history is sorely lacking, and it’s hard to just absorb much of it. I’ll have to do something about that someday. I don’t think any of us saw all of it, and I have no idea how much I actually got through. (Looking at the floor plan, we skipped the 2nd floor and went to the third. I got through about half of that; galleries 1-9 of 16.)

In between the two special exhibitions and the rest, we stopped by the gift store and had lunch. The cafe in the museum is quite nice, and fairly reasonable. At the store I got a collection of essays by Fred Patten and a volume of Astro Boy. Not exactly your usual museum fare.

On top of that, we had a couple of big WoW runs. All things considered, both went very smoothly, and both Thermidor and Dunain have gotten keyed for Karazan (I think that makes 7 in the guild now).

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May14

( No Title )

by Rindis on May 14, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Posted In: News

Thought I’d post this since I think I’m the only one on my friend’s list that watches Phil Foglio’s LJ.

http://philfoglio.livejournal.com/5139.html

Extremely short version: Kaja Foglio is in the hospital. Slightly longer version, she’s going through a bout with Chrohn’s disease, and is in no real danger, but is going to be in the hospital for an unknown period of time. Go read the post to get the full details. How he can still make me laugh when he’s in the mental shape he must be in is beyond me….

And, while I’m at it, let me plug the Foglio’s Girl Genius to anyone reading this who isn’t following that already. I think it’s one of the best comics out there (web or not), and deserves every kudo it can get.

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