Primate Typings

Circle: Your reward for doing good work is more work.

Square: Ah, the burden of competence.

This week, the boys at Unskippable give us not one, not two, but three cut scenes worth of mocking. They’ve got three trailers from E3, including one for Final Fantasy.

The Work: Lackadaisy vol. 1

Author/Artist: Tracy J. Butler

What’s it about?

20’s gangsters in St. Louis. Except they’re cat people.

Is it online?

Yep. Lackdaisy the webcomic is right here.

Short review

Good content. Packaging has flaws.

Long review with spoiler-ish stuff

So the Lackadaisy is a speakeasy during the days of prohibition. It used to be the premier illegal establishment in the city but has fallen on hard times since the death of its founder, Atlas May. His widow, the lovely Mitzi May, still runs the joint, trying to keep it going in an era of much increased and more aggressive competition. 

 Mitzi May, the late Atlas May, and their crew at the height of their success.

 Our story mostly follows our noodly hero Rocky as he tries to secure a delivery of booze so the bar can put a good show for some hoity-toity business types on the occasion of some blown up rocks. Things go badly right away as some low class rivals nail Rocky’s tie to the train tracks to make sure he keeps a bloody appointment with a train. Through clever use of a dead pig, our hero escapes, leading to two days of Molotov cocktails (from Rocky), an adorable clandestine date (not Rocky’s), and the inevitable call for a doctor (amazingly, also not for Rocky. He really is noodly).

Viktor “counseling” Rocky on a problem.

The comic features a solid supporting cast. Rocky’s cousin just washed-out-from-police-academy Calvin (a.k.a. Freckle) is sweet, adorable, and a maniac when a gun is in his hand. Stoic Viktor isn’t sweet or adorable but rounds out the group’s heavies quite nicely. (The two extra strips from back in the old days of Viktor and now-working-for-the-rivals Mordecai are both hysterical.) Ivy the flapper is also sweet, but that doesn’t stop her from scheming. Luckily, her plans tend to work better than Rocky’s.

Soda pop and guns! 

The whole thing works well, taking action and humor to keep things moving along even in the more criminal moments. The art is simply lovely. It looks like it was done with pencil and sepia-toned with Photoshop to go with the era. Almost nobody does pencils-only for comics, even though the technology to reprint it well has been around for a couple of decades. The only other one running right now that I can think of is Megatokyo. It’s a shame that more people don’t use it, because it can look really good in black and white or sepia toned.

It would look even better if the book was a little bigger. Butler’s pencils are detailed enough that a bit more room on the page would suit the artwork more. Of course, bigger would have meant more a more expensive book. It’s in color, which means production will already be more expensive that the average Garfield book. Still, maybe they should have increased the price of the book, since my volume has a couple more serious flaws. Look at this spine:

One of these things is not like the other.

 Help! I’m upside down!

 The title and author are printed the wrong direction. Seriously. Those other titles are from major book and comic publishers. That’s the standard, which means someone screwed up on the Lackadaisy cover. But that’s not the worst of it. Look at these:

 My book has strings.

Yeah, I’m not supposed to be able to see those strings. And the glue keeping the cover on as started to come off the sides. So far, Lackadaisy has held together, but I have no confidence that it will stand up to heavy handling.  Hopefully, these issues will get corrected in future printings. Right now, the book costs 14 bucks plus shipping. I’d have been willing to spend two or three more bucks to getting something with better binding if not a larger page size.

Good story, great artwork, but the packaging isn’t up to my buying extra copies to give as gifts. So go read Lackdaisy online so it gets a bigger audience so it gets better hardcopies so I can give better gifts.

Go give Tracy J. Butler eyeballs and money!

This arrived with the mail today:

 

I think I’ll read it and write a review!

I’m fiddling with the sidebar today. I added a bunch of links, among other things. Holy cow, do I follow a lot of webcomics. And that’s just my list of recommendations. There are six or seven more that haven’t made my permenant list yet.

 And I forgot xkcd. Let’s get that one in there.

Time flies, but it is a pterosaur, a bat, a bird, or a bug?

Originally posted in the comments to this article over at Tor.

Well, first off, I can guarantee that you won’t enjoy all of Neil Gaiman’s work equally. He isn’t an author who tells the same story in the same way again and again. I can say as someone who spent years on his site’s forum that there are plenty of disagreement of which of his works are the best. Really, you can even name distinct factions among his fandom. Sandman, Death, Good Omens, and American Gods seem to be the major poles, although others may have emerged in the years since I was a regular there.

For me anymore, that variety is a deal breaker. I burnt out on fantasy in the middle of college. I’d read more than enough of the field to know every cliché and every trick, and I started hating everything I was picking up because I’d already seen it. It made me sad, because the itch that drove me to read fantasy in the first place didn’t go away. So, for a few years I mostly reread old favorites and bad science fiction (plus, totally broke in college, so that saved me money).

When I got a real job and some money, I didn’t return to fantasy. No, I went with comic books, which were just starting to regularly put out trade paperbacks and graphic novels. The Dark Knight Returns had been on my bookshelf since college and the first half of Maus I bought for a college course. The Crow, Watchmen, and the JLA all followed. Then I picked up the first volume of Sandman.

I love series. I always have. Part of the problem I was having with fantasy novels were single novels that I enjoyed were often part of a series in which the same story is told again and again, although most authors at least have the decency to change the main characters every few books. There’s nothing wrong with it, since that was what many readers want. Heck, some of those old favorites I mentioned are just those sorts of books, which I happened to run into before I got burnt out.

The Sandman is a series, but it’s not the same story again and again. Instead it changes characters and story types, moving from boy stories to girl stories, from minor characters to guest stars, from pop culture to Shakespeare, from mythology to harsh reality. And yet it builds a world and single story out of 76 issues (10 volumes) (4 Absolutes) that ends up being more than the sum of its parts. It is a staggering piece of literature.

The variety did not stop when Neil moved on to other works. The comedy of Good Omens, the fairy tale of Stardust, the mythological weight of American Gods, and the many deaths of Batman – these are all different kinds of stories with different needs and different audiences. Neil does a good job of entertaining each of those audiences, but it should not be a surprise that some fans of his puppet show are not enthralled by his children production about two small fish and a parental figure.

Neil Gaiman is big deal author not because of he has a big following, but because he has many different big followings. He even has fantasy snobs like me, who appreciate good authors who don’t sell me the same thing I loved before again and again.

I did hurt my foot last Sunday, but contrary to rumors it was not in a Karaoke brawl.