Archive for the 'Great Creators' Category

20
Apr

God

If you liked Books of Magic, The Sandman, Wisdom or any other comic title presenting the Fairy and its odd inhabitants you might have heard of the upcoming release of Vertigo’s new hard-cover title, God Save the Queen. Well I don’t know what you’ve heard but this one’s a bit different than what we’ve encountered before:

The story is set in modern London where a bored, rebellious teenager, Linda, starts hanging out with a group of wild fairies. They introduce her to the ultimate fairy drug, Red Horse, a mixture of heroin and human blood and quite the dangerous high, and she soon finds herself drawn in a civil war from the alleys of London to the fields of Fairy, a fight between Queen Titania and her mad predecessor Queen Mab. A grasping story with cameo appearances of other Vertigo characters, what more would you ask?

The story seems extremely interesting of course but the element that captured mostly my attention was the creator team. Written by Mike Carey (Hellblazer, Crossing Midnight, Lucifer) and illustrated by John Bolton (the person who first designed Tim Hunter’s face in the Books of Magic, he has a strong resemblance to his older brother) this could be nothing less than a masterpiece, both of them carry along a big piece of recent comics history. Especially Carey, a living legend in comic narrating, is a creator whose work I try to follow closely, check out for instance the recent issue 229 of Hellblazer, a beautiful story about why you should never do a friend a favor. Now, if this one’s going to be as good as their previous books, I don’t know but the clues point that way, you can bet I’ll buy it the moment it’s released though (that would be April the 25th). Punk/fairy is here to stay (cool name for a new gender)!

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19
Apr

The

As a tribute to the greatest comic ever made today’s column will be a presentation of the Endless, the 7 members of the greatest family ever written about (ok, I’ll try to chill out). Less talk and more pictures, these are the Endless:

Destiny: The elder brother of this family Destiny is appeared as an old man dressed in brown robes with a book chained on his hand (or him chained to it). He is walking in his garden, a vast maze in which when you walk forward there are countless different ways but when you look back only one path exists, reading the book where everything that happened, happens or ever will happen is written.

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Despair: A short, fat, grey woman who rarely speaks, she wears a hooked ring (her emblem) which she uses to carve herself. She lives in a realm full of rats and windows, each window looking through a mirror where someone watches himself without hope, doomed to end under her influence.

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Delirium: One of my personal favorites, she is the youngest one of the Endless. Once she was Delight, now a half crazed, eccentric girl that constantly changes appearances, her hair always in a different style and her eyes another color in every picture. Even her text expresses the instability of her character, wavy colorful letters spilling out and dancing in every page. She seems to know things the other Endless don’t, and that knowledge pushes her to insanity.

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Desire: Beautiful, merciless and without a specific gender he/she is Despair’s twin sister/brother. She/he seems to have a grudge against Dream and he/she misses no chance to give him a hard time. Her/his emblem is the heart shape and his/her realm a large human body with a gallery in the heart.

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Destruction: An extremely large man with red hair and beard this is one of the most mysterious of the Endless, his first appearance in the series comes after many issues. Having a sword as his symbol Destruction creates and destroys things because it is the only way the world can go on, but his artistic talent are not quite developed as he’d like. Centuries ago he abandoned his responsibilities as an Endless and fled causing much conflict in the family.

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Death: My favorite, the most charming gothic character ever created in art. She is a beautiful young girl dressed in black with an ankh as her sigil, always present twice in every being’s life, in its birth and death. She is a kind and loving person, optimistic although the grim of her business, she is the one that will settle the table and close the door behind her when the last creature will end.

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Dream: The main character of this series, Morpheus, the lord Kai’Ckul, creator of stories and shape shifter. He is a tall, extremely thin man with black hair and eyes with his helm as an emblem (created from the bones of a dead god). He once was cruel and insensitive but during the series he changes and faces the results of his previous harsh decisions.

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What, you need more to get excited about this? This is a story you start for fun and end up reading it again and again because you need it, it’s addictive, it’s Sandman!


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17
Apr

The

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The power of comics as a medium is unique, it the power of something combining some of the greatest advantages and disadvantages of other great art forms like literature and drawing. Every now and then comes a work of genius, an artistic creation so beautiful and poetic it’s hard to realize it’s just a comic, because it’s not. It’s a little bit of everything put together in a mix of something even superior. As far as I’m concerned the best example of this is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, something so extraordinary and breathtaking people still read it manically.

avatar1.JPGThis is the story of Dream, not the god of dreaming or the spirit of the stories but Morpheus, the manifestation of dreaming itself. He is one of the seven Endless, created long before humanity and destined to end when the last living creature will die, all of them personifications of something different and necessary. They are Destiny, Death, Delirium (who once was Delight), Despair, Desire, Destruction (long ago self-banished) and Dream, the mysterious tall, thin figure that creates the worlds we visit when our subconscious gains the upper hand. Reading every issue of this magnificent tale you will follow him in the present and past as “The king of dreams learns one must change or die and then makes his decision”.

I’ve spent half my life over pages and this might be my favourite work in literature, comics and drawing altogether, and before you hurry to object that it is literature you should know that it is the only comic book to ever have won the World Fantasy Award for its issue #19 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the next day the rules were changed so that it would never happened again. This is really not just a comic book, it’s the creating of a new world that affected story tellers, music artists, WWF wrestlers (it’s true, there’s a guy that fights wearing Sandman T-Shirts), people of all ages, you read it and it changes you in every page. To conclude I am not able to describe the phenomenon called The Sandman, get your asses of your chairs and go buy the issues (hard), the trade paperback albums (easy) or the Ultimate Sandman edition (expensive), don’t just sit here, go!

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21
Mar

Johnen

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If one of your primary criteria when judging an artist is originality, you gotta love Johnen Vasquez. He began with cult comics for Slave Labor Graphics but his work is now extremely popular and well known, his unique style of black humor and macabre irony has established him as one of the most important young creators in the field.

johnny155gu.jpgJohny the Homicidal Maniac, his first and maybe most famous comic, started as a series of short strips for a Goth magazine, Carpe Noctem, until it was collected in seven issues and published by SLG, followed by the Director’s Cut trade paperback. The story was mostly about Nny, a serial killer with unusual thinking processes killing anyone he believes unworthy of living and hating the rest, haunted by Nailbunny (his consciousness, sort of) and two Styrofoam Pillsbury doughboys representing his mania and depression. The book also contained other short stories and characters like Anne Gwish (a parody for the Goth culture), Happy Noodle Boy and of course Squee, the kid living next door to Nny frightened of virtually anything (and with good reasons that is) who got his own spin off series after JTHM. His bibliography also includes The Bad Art Collection, Filer Bunny, Everything Can Be Beaten, I Feel Sick and others.

invader_zim.jpgHis début in television after Squee’s success was instant, Nickelodeon offered him the opportunity to create an animated series, and Invader Zim was born. Invader Zim was a short, cute looking alien fighting to prove to his race that he can be a fearsome invader. Totally evil, extremely stupid and with no self-knowledge at all Zim and his retarded robot consistently tried to take over, or at least destroy, Earth. The series was canceled after a year but it was released again in several DVD volumes and still has a pretty big fan group.

So at this point, waiting for Johnen Vasquez’s next creation there’s not much to be done other than reading again and again the rest of his work, enjoying his sick humor and agreeing with most of his thoughts. Enjoy!

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