Emergent Phenomena
Wow, it’s been over a year since I posted anything. Well, I just got a bunch of new comics at Wizard World Chicago and should have lots of stuff to write about over the next few weeks. And without further ado…
I met the Comics Creators Cabal guys this year. Before I even start on the comic they had for sale I have to say a little something about the group in general. Talking to Adron he told me that the Cabal had formed up just six months prior to the con and started work on the actual comics only four months ago. Now, they don’t have quite finished product out there yet, but their preview book was available and looked pretty good. It’s a glossy covered, perfect bound thing that looks like someone actually knew what they were doing, which is more than I can say for some of the other self-published books out there. And, to be honest, with print on demand becoming so prominent and affordable these days there is really no excuse for those photo copied things, unless it is some strange aesthetic choice. But I digress.
Emergent Phenomena is a preview book of the characters and books about to be released from the C3, so don’t expect a lot of closure from the stories. Their choice of story order worked well for me. I personally think that they started with the strongest work and the rest sort of descended after that. Loop & Hoodie really looks like it will be an interesting title. The art is very slick and controlled. The characters look a little like those little kid toys with the Giant feet that my nephew really used to like, which makes the whole thing feel fairly light hearted. I was slightly confused what exactly what was up with these two characters (a werewolf and some kind of psychic), but at the end there appeared to be a plot device that will help sort out just what’s up with these two in the future.
Percy the Nazi Killer is something else entirely. Human heads in jars attached to the heads of monkeys run around killing Nazis. One thing that bothered me right out of the gate is that in the first two pages there is either a typo or a continuity error. Either that or something I’m just not getting, which is a much worse thing.
Art and story wise Percy feels very inspired by Mike Mignola, but maybe that’s just a side effect of monsters and Nazis.
I’m also not completely sure I understand what’s up with the monkeys and their brains, but the important thing is I want to know. I’ll end up buying more of these things just to figure out the damn monkeys. That plus Emperor Hirohito as a half man half octpus is pretty funny.
Realistically Percy is an extension of whatever genre Hellboy is and it works well. Aaron Pittman (artist and writer) isn’t taking himself too seriously and he’s drawing weird stuff. The story is easy to follow and the pacing is sufficiently gripping. Now, if I could sort out that typo…
Morningstar was cute, but I’m not sure what to make of it. Dan Cassity’s art style is the same in this as the other two stories he illustrated in the anthology, which is well polished, but it makes it difficult to decide how serious to take some of this stuff. Is the main character crazy? Is the idea an Alan Moore-ish take on superheroes mixing with real people?
The story is well put together, but I’m just not sure if the “Masked Avenger” is just a joke or a sympathetic character.
I didn’t really like Bruder at all. The artist had trouble with human proportions and it looked like someone had explained cross hatching to them, but they had never seen it. The use of variable fonts for the different characters is an interesting tool first successfully used by Walt Kelly, but it just makes some of the dialogue hard to read here without really gaining any insight into the characters.
At the end of the story I had no idea what was up with Pierre Lamont, and, quite frankly, I didn’t care to.
The last two stories in the book were really nothing to write home about. Path of the Black Hand is the only story that is supposed to be complete in itself, but I’m not sure I quite got it. Of course that comes out of a long history of Lovecraft style writing. But a little more atmospherics or exposition might have helped.
All told I see a lot of promise coming out of this group. While I didn’t like a fair amount of their stuff, going from nothing to two books I would almost certainly pick up again in around six months is more than a little impressive, and I wish them continued success.
