Amnia Cycle
now
That's right!
Tara has followed the Nerial to a mysterious planet in the Shadow Zone! Will she be able to find Amnia and her ship, The Plinius? Will her engines explode and send her crashing?
Tune in next time when NONE of those questions will be answered!
Oh and really soon I'll be starting my other webcomic Sagittarius A*-- I'll keep you posted.
blogged and blogged
I promised myself to read the entire story up to the last page the moment I had spare time. It's surprisingly good. Really good. I usually don't trust artists working on the story, not a logical reason, maybe because I used to read comics always written and drawn by different people (but I appreciate a lot of manga, I'm really a strange person...), but the story is solid AND compressed (I hate decompression in modern comics). The art is obviously awesome, but I was really shocked by some of your ideas in the division of the drawing board, especially how the balloons are read in page 18 and the pursuit scene in the first page of this post. Maybe these are elements with little to none importance to you, but I was impressed!
ReplyDeleteKeep the good work!!!
Thanks a lot!
DeleteOn the first page of this post Tara says, "Captain Zoltan would never allow this ugly maneuvering." She says this as she spins her ship wildly, and just before I do an unconventional panel arrangement. In a way, her relationship to Zoltan is a mirror to the way I often relate to editors. I show them a crazy layout, that I'm excited about, and they tell me to change it to something more conventional. Now that Tara is on her own adventure, she can do things her way, and so can I.
There is a lot about Amnia Cycle that reflects my personal feelings about my career, believe it or not.
About not trusting artists with the writing of comics (except for in Manga)-- I totally get it. I think most artists get into comics because they can draw well, and this is a fun job if you like drawing. But many comic artists are more passionate about drawing than they are about writing, and story, and comics. Many mainstream artists don't even read comics. They are illustrators doing what they do best. So when one of these illustrators gets the opportunity to write, they just don't have an story crafting ability.
In Japan it seems that the culture of manga is so different. Writing and story seem to just be considered part of the craft of manga along with drawing. If you are aspiring to be a manga artist, you are aspiring to be an artist and a writer… That's just not the system here in the U.S.
So, I do understand that lack of trust.
About the compression of story-- My philosophy with story is-- If you can make your point more efficiently, do it. If you need to decompress and take your time to capture what you want to capture then do that, but if you can capture it more efficiently then don't waist the readers time. Akira is a great example of good decompression. It's a decompressed story telling style, but I'm telling you, not a panel in that thing is waisted.
I agree that comics these days have decompressed in time waisting ways…
I'll stop ranting there. Thanks again:)
I watched Akira recently, in a theater! It was impressive (and given the time it was released, revolutionary), but I'm planning to get all the volumes to read the original Otomo story.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy you agree with the decompression problem of the modern comics, but there are still good writers who can fill those 20 pages with awesome stories, like Kirkman in his Invincible IMHO,
Thanks to you for your good work (this free awesome web-comic, too) and good luck with your new "marvelous" projects :D
Seeing Akira when I was like 13 had a huge impact on me, but reading the manga made me love comics like I didn't know I could. I bought up all the Epic Akira books back when I was 16 and 17. The big black and white volumes are great, but I still really love the Epic version colored by Steve Oliff. The colors are really great and I think they add something the experience of the story. Really good stuff!
DeleteGreat work on the sound effects, I like that Ka-pop a lot!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of that ka-pop, that's my favorite moment in these two pages because its such a nice surprise. Just when she's being all super cool, she's knocked down a peg. I enjoy that, helps to make her seem more human and add a sense of realism to the story. Bad things, or the unexpected, can in fact happen to Tara and its exciting to see how she responds to them.
In regards to the comments above, I would like to see more artists taking over the responsibility of writing, or at least contributing to the writing/plotting of american comic books. It would be awesome to break the general mindset that artists can't tell a good story. I say down with illustrators and up with comic creators!
I'm sure this is the kind of argument that comic book writers just love to hear. But, hey, if artists can learn to write, then writers can learn to draw… If you have a good enough story, the art doesn't need to be super awesome. Just look at the guy who does Attack on Titan. A good story with some good assistants can go a long way. You can make a mega hit and not draw all that well. Comics are about a lot of things, not just making pictures.
DeleteI thought you would like that moment.
Man, I love how the sound effects imply that the ships are bouncing off the panel borders!
ReplyDelete