Joshua Unruh is a writer with the Consortium. He’s also a fan of comics, graphic novels, and tabletop games, and he’s offered to share that experience with our readers in a regular column.
You can read more of Joshua’s work at his site, JoshuaUnruh.com.
Recently I had the good fortune to discover a hilarious and poignant webcomic in Max Overacts. Max is created by Caanan Graal and you can find it at his website, Occasional Comics.
Through various machinations I came into possession of a collected story he’d created for Zuda Comics. It’s about a vampire hunter who finds herself in the body of a young girl. She has a plethora of sidekicks in a Frankenstein made from other Frankensteins, a shapechanging ex-husband, an indestructible neighbor boy, and the tooth fairy. Together they fight crime…er, vampires!
This thing sounded right up my alley. Plus, I wanted to put a spotlight on a talented individual who I knew was struggling as an artist which is obviously close to the Consortium’s heart. I sat down to read Celadore and give it a glowing review.
The only problem was, it wasn’t very good.
Wait, that’s not exactly true or fair. I had a guess that the book was actually quite good but it had gotten a hack job done on it when it was translated from flash-based webcomic to printed collection. So I contacted Canaan himself to get his perspective.
It turns out I was right. But more on that in a minute.
First, a little background: Zuda was an imprint of DC Comics that specialized in online, flash-based webcomics. This was a revolutionary and exciting piece of news at the time and I was sad to see it fold.
I have all kinds of editorial on why that happened and the quality of the work doesn’t enter into it for even a second. But that editorial is for another time and place. The coolest part of Zuda, to me, was that new stories could compete against one another for contracts. I’m going to send you to the wikipedia article to explain it properly.
Zuda had competitions that were open for comic creators to submit their own eight-page comics. Each month ten were selected to compete by editorial. Users could vote for their favorite and the winner received a contract to continue their comic on Zuda with 52 more screens. When the contract was filled, if the comic was liked enough it could be renewed for an additional “season”. Occasionally an “instant winner” was chosen to receive a contract without having to compete. In July 2008 an “invitational” was held where some well liked comics that had not won were invited to back to compete with an additional eight pages apiece.
Celadore won the May 2008 competition. But by the end of 2010 the Zuda imprint was folded into the new digital publishing arm of DC Comics which has, since then, done sweet fanny adams beyond scanning existing comics. Again, that’s editorial that belongs elsewhere so I’ll move on.
As for the book, Caanan has a clean, cartoony style that is fluid for broad comedy and physical action but also manages to give the faces bigger-than-life reactions.
Despite the cartoonish nature of these facial expressions, there is a great deal of emotional depth in these characters. A mother whose child is missing is just as lovingly and believably rendered as the outrage of a centuries-old vampire hunter at being stuck in the body of an 8 year old girl.
The cast of characters show obvious imagination and cleverness as well as being an endless source of amusement in and of themselves. Caanan’s writing style is similar to his art in that these characters that are initially painted in broad, often comical strokes wind up showing the deep emotional wells of true characters. All that’s the good news.
The bad news is that this presentation of Celadore makes it difficult to enjoy the story. The panels are broken up in ways that don’t make reading the story easy even for somebody with thirty years of comic reading experience. The art is very, very dark which makes that fluid action I mentioned difficult to follow. Also, some of the emotional scenes are overshadowed, pardon the pun, by the coloring. I read this book twice and did not enjoy myself.
But I usually greatly enjoy Caanan’s work on his site! I read almost no webcomics and the ones at Occasional Comics grabbed me and wouldn’t let go! He knew how to do “page layout” and action and coloring! Something had to be terribly wrong.
So I emailed Caanan and, before I could really mention my issues, he explained why they were what they were and how they happened. His candid and conversational emails told me just what I expected to hear.
He and I had to talk about how the medium informs the story you tell. The medium might be a 21″ monitor compared to a 6.6×8″ book or it might be the demands and expectations of a publisher. In the case of Celadore, it happens to be both. Please follow me over to my own blog for the next few posts as I discuss this with Caanan in more detail. Hopefully we’ll all learn something. Especially me.
Consortium Books is proud to announce the digital release of Taming Fire, an epic fantasy novel by Aaron Pogue.
Daven Carrickson grew up as a beggar in the filthy alleys beneath the shadows of the palace. He’s the son of a known thief, disgraced and despised. His only real talent is his ability with a sword, and his only real chance at finding honor or a home is a desperate dream of joining the King’s Guard.
Then Daven receives a new future when Master Claighan invites him to study magic at the Academy. The wizard offers to make him into a new kind of soldier: a swordsman equally skilled with forged blades and mystic forces. It only helps that Daven has no home, no family, and nothing left to lose.
But when conspiring forces destroy the wizard’s plans, Daven finds himself wanted for treason and murder. Hunted by a great black beast of a dragon, caught between the King’s Guard and a rebel force led by a rogue wizard, Daven’s only hope of surviving is to become more than he’s ever dreamed possible.
Get your copy for $0.99 at Amazon.com! Other formats (including a $12.99 paperback) are coming soon.
