Items: Comics, videos, photos
Assorted comics and comics-related items, plus a few cat and lizard photos, and some other stuff.
- Nifty comic strip in Spanish and English, by Chilean Juan Santapau: Ojalá tuviera un gemelo perverso.
- Diversion Surplus: New words to old Rex Morgan comic strips.
- Joey Comeau and Emily Horne's A Softer World continues to be my favorite webcomic. (After you read the strip, be sure to point your mouse at the final panel and then pause a moment to get a little pop-up coda, which is sometimes the best part of the comic.) A few recent examples:
- And btw, though this is only tangentially comics-related, Joey C. has a blog. For example: Joey gets a webcam. "How do you cater to your own tastes if your taste is the unexpected?" . . . The comments in his journal sometimes read (to me) a little like the mouseover coda in the comic.
- While I'm talking about Joey (and btw, we have more of his fiction coming up at SH in 2005), I might as well mention that his novella Lockpick Pornography is now available in full online, and you can order a paper copy if you want one. I haven't finished reading the story yet, but after reading the first three chapters a while back, I wrote: "It's really excellent so far--funny and sharp, filled with all sorts of genderfuck and smart (and funny) commentary about queer issues. I was going to start describing the plot, but Joey puts it better than I could: it's 'political and dirty and ranty and queer and it has crime and sex and good intentions.'" I ought to have mentioned this in my sex-items entry the other day. Oh, well.
- Comic-book project: 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, by Matt Madden.
- Spin is a really nifty 8-minute film in which "[a] mysterious DJ is sent to a busy street corner to fix a chain reaction of bad events." I don't quite follow all of it, but it's very nicely done.
- Tim P's gecko photo.
- Photo of unhappy cat.
- Photo of happier kitten.
- I think Making Fiends has a bunch of new episodes since I last pointed to it. I haven't watched all of them, but I think my favorite is episode 17 (2nd season), the April Fool's episode. In Bulgarian. With subtitles.
- You probably know that Phil and Kaja Foglio's brilliant Girl Genius is now a freely available online comic. But you may not know that Carla Speed McNeil's brilliant Finder (which I reviewed for SH some years back) has also made the transition to online-only. Both comics will continue to be collected in printed bound trade-paperback volumes; they're just not coming out as individual issues any more.
- At the comic store the other week, I picked up (among other things) issue 1 of Polly and the Pirates, by Ted Naifeh. It's fun so far: a girl from a proper boarding school is kidnapped by pirates. You can view a PDF version of the first several pages on the website.
- Also bought and read volume 2 (Sacrifice) of Age of Bronze, Eric Shanower's comic-book retelling of the Trojan War. Still good, though things get really dark in the second half of this volume (featuring Iphigenia, for those of you familiar with the story).
- Speaking of dark, I finally read volume 2 of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; still good, but it gets awfully unpleasant.
