ADAPT #1 MAY 2013
JONNY NEGRON + FLOATING WORLD COMICS
Stumptown Comics Fest is soon. Visit the Press Gang table, I bet Farel and Brandon will be there.
Tour de François: Titan #1 Available for Pre-Order Now! →
Family Style is delighted to present the first full-length comic from François Vigneault in over five years, Titan #1! Wowza!
Titan is the story of MNGR João da Silva, a music-loving productivity expert sent from Earth to the moon of Titan, where he finds himself embroiled in…
I hope people come to these things. I try to do thoughtful drawings in books and I have a couple new zines that’ll only be available directly from me… I know it’s easier to sit at home / order online, but if a cartoonist draws in a book and hands it to you, that energy stays with the book forever! It changes the book!!!
Webcomic Wednesday - Haunter by Sam Alden
Look, I’m not saying spectacle is never empty. I saw Independence Day on opening weekend, man, I remember. Bigness and loudness are often ways to compensate for a lack of ideas and imagination. But in the right hands, spectacle — the ability of art to overwhelm — can communicate just as clearly as a quieter approach.
Case in point: Haunter, the lushly colored science-fantasy adventure by cartoonist Sam Alden currently being serialized at Zack Soto’s fine webcomics portal Study Group. (Full disclosure: Zack’s published two of my horror comics there, though I was on record as a fan well before that happened if I do say so myself.) Alden’s simple hunter-becomes-the-hunted story of a young woman who stumbles across an ancient guardian in Earth’s apparently remote post-apocalyptic future is a wordless action romp through a vividly imagined fantastical environment after my own heart. His line is as crystal-clear as his characters’ “acting,” and the design for the titular creature — imagine the Statue of Liberty shrunken and gone feral, like Shardik the Guardian in the Dark Tower series — is just the right blend of goofy and menacing.
But where Haunter truly impresses is that dazzling color you can see above. There’s no need, strictly speaking, for the palette to be so fervid and febrile. Those trees could be brown, the water could be blue, the brushstrokes could be obscured, the tones on the young hunter could remain consistent throughout. But Alden’s choice to ramp everything up into a psychedelic freak-out makes his kill-or-be-killed scenario that much more intense and nightmarish, without making a single change to how he draws or writes the thing.
Comics, even alternative comics, has carved out a pretty healthy place for spectacle these days (to a fault, perhaps?), but I like to point this stuff out anyway because it’s far from universally supported. Analyses of television shows like Boardwalk Empire, for example, tend to focus on trainspotting all the real-life gangsters, or complaining that it doesn’t share the restraint of Mad Men, or cataloguing the mere facts of the violence like a ratings board would do. If you ignore the white-hot emotional intensity expressed through spectacle — through the pacing of the seasons toward truly mad climaxes, through knowingly theatrical performance styles, through almost dreamlike editing choices in key scenes and episodes, through the way the violence is used to embody and express the characters’ emotional states like the singing does in a musical — you’ve missed half the show. So by all means, Haunter, break out the watercolors. Let’s get crazy.
This Friday-Saturday-Sunday (there should be a succinct word for that: Long weekend I think indicates Sat-Sun-Mon. Big weekend?) Press Gang will be at the fantastic Emerald City Comicon in our neighbor to the North, Seattle! Come see in Artists’ Alley at table A-08, Zack, Jason, and François will all be in attendance!
Press Gang will be representing in our home town of Portland today, but we will be on new territory as we join up with the first ever Wizard World Portland! This massive comic convention has tons of celebs, lots of other creators from the mainstream and beyond (including our friends Joe Keatine and Sloane Leong), and now it’s got us! The full Press Gang trio of Zack Soto, Jason Leivian, and François Vigneault will be there, along with special guests Julia Gfrörer, Farel Dalrymple, and Jason Fischer (click on the links to see how cute we look on the guests page)!
Come see us at tables 2521,2523, 2525! We’ll be there Friday, Saturday, and Sunday!
Press Gang will be at the second annual LA Zine Fest today!
Sunday, February 17, 11am–5pm
Ukrainian Cultural Center, 4315 Melrose Ave
