Archive for the Western Comic/Comix Category


Western Comic: Anne Bonnie

December 7th, 2015

AB-1-titlePrewCopy_small-198x300Here’s a little piece of wisdom about fandom – geekery is not a contest. We can love ninjas and pirates! ^_^

And so I do. I can love evil psycho lesbians and magical adventures on the high seas, starring a plucky young woman without a lick of common sense, but some extraordinary luck, who manages to activate the magic-powered ship of the famous pirate Anne Bonnie. In Tim Yates’ Anne Bonnie, we meet Ariana who has been kept at home and protected from pirates and piracy her whole life and she’s ready for some adventure.

With the help of her unkillable parrot sidekick, Finn, an escaped slave with a secret and Anne Bonnie’s magical ship itself, Ariana takes on Elves, other pirates, evil mermen, the corrupt navy and the legend of Anne Bonnie herself. And where it leads her is both remarkable and a rollicking good yarn.

I know you’re going to ask, so let’s cut to the chase – yes Mary Read makes an appearance and she’s everything I ever hoped her to be. Big, brawny, muscular with no fucks to give. ^_^

I picked this up at New York Comic Con in October and was reading it very slowly so as to have more time to enjoy the story. Luckily for you, there is a preview online of this enjoyable Volume 1 and it’s available on Blue Juice Comics in print and Comixology digitally… and I gotta say, I’m definitely looking forward to Volume 2!

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 9
Characters – 9
Service – Not really, unless you count Mary’s biceps. ^_^

Overall – 9

Pirates and mermaids and magic and kicking ass on the high seas. Yes.





English Manga: Before You Go 2 Halfway There

December 2nd, 2015

BYGHT-Cover_smallNext time you sigh and think, “Gosh, I wish someone was creating Yuri in English” please stop and remind yourself of these two extremely important words: Sparkler Monthly.

I’ve sung the praises of Sparkler Monthly before. It is a homegrown josei manga magazine, which is to say that it is primarily by and for adult women, with light novels, audio dramas and manga/comics. The editors are folks with tons of experience in the manga industry and are talented creators in their own right. And, because they are trying to create a unique product focused on a female audience, without keeping male readers out, Sparkler Monthly runs action and adventure and romance and has straight, Yuri and BL storylines.

Previously I’ve mentioned Denise Schroeder’s Before You GoKaiJU’s Mahou Josei Chimaka and Alexis Cooke’s For Peace. When Denise first created BYG, she had no specific idea of continuing it, but due to your support of her work, she got so many requests for a sequel that she drew one! I received that sequel as a ebook for subscribing to the magazine and today I want to talk about it.

Before You Go was a cute, somewhat typical “Story A”; two women meet on a train and eventually get together. Unsurprisingly, I wanted to see what happened afterwards. Before You Go 2: Halfway There picks up a few months after Sadie and Robin have been dating. Everything seems okay, but Robin can tell that something is up with Sadie, so she tries to find out what it is. The drama is small and the resolution sweet.

For us here at Okazu nothing in this comic is groundbreaking content-wise, but it is absolutely wonderful that Sparkler Monthly has shown a continuing interest in and commitment to great female characters as well as BL that reaches beyond basic tropes and of course, Yuri. In return I encourage you to support Sparkler back. Subscriptions to Sparkler start as low as $5/monthly, chapters are available online for free to get a taste of any given story  – and the store is having a huge holiday sale right now. If you like fantasy (and Utena) I recommend Windrose (in paperback or ebook) as well as BYG, For Peace and Chimaka. A subscription to Sparkler Monthly and/or some of their original Yuri  would make a swell gift to a friend, a young woman you know who loves manga or yourself.

And you can be absolutely sure that the folks at Sparkler know when it’s Yuri that folks are looking for. Your support makes a much bigger impact here than it does for folks like Seven Seas who publish what they like first before they think about what you like.

Ratings:

Art – 7 and improving
Story – 7
Characters – 7 Sound like, (gasp!) people!
Yuri – 6
Service – 0

Overall a solid 7, smiles all around.

Enjoy the happy endings of Before You Go, then grab a few shiny things from Sparkler Monthly for the holidays. ^_^





Time Fiddler, Volume 1 (English)

November 20th, 2015

tumblr_nxbmj6UwXa1so0o5uo1_1280Samantha is a relatively normal girl who one day follows a stray cat into an abandoned building. What happens to Sam is not normal at all, as she is thrown through a rift in time to the late Cretaceous Age, where she meets Caroline, a girl who claims to be a time-traveler.

The tagline for this series is “Time Travel Girls Love Feels” so, as you can imagine it interested me greatly. And, as it’s currently in the middle of a Kickstarter, I thought it suitable to mention it on the Yuricon Facebook Group, right after I supported it myself. In return, creator Ellis Kim has kindly sent me an advance PDF to share with you. ^_^

There’s a fair amount of Dr. Who-esque hijinks in Time Fiddler, and the Whovian in me thinks that’s perfectly cool. Sam is a companion-type character (you know, nice kid, seemlingly normal life) who suddenly gets dragged into a time-traveling adventure that involves dinosaurs. Only – and this is a big sell for me – instead of being just another companion, Sam becomes a time traveler herself. Very little time is spent in explicating what “The Agency” does or why or how or…anything. The specifics of pretty much every plot point must be accepted as such with no discussion so far. Even the repeated line “read the manual” is given to Sam without an actual manual. (Which blew the chance for an old-school RTFM joke, but Kim seems too young for the reference anyway. Oh well, guess I’m just old. ^_^)

On the less-good side, the plot is uneven, with TV pacing, (you know, spurts of action followed by explication while we wait to run some more) and a few odd throwaways, like Caroline’s “boyfriend” Ulysses, who was introduced clearly wearing “I’m a future plot complication” expressions. When we suddenly have a confession from Caroline that she likes Sam, it becomes even more crystal clear Ulysses was introduced to be broken up with and get pissed off, which is wholly unfair to him. The art is manga-inspired. It has moments, but still Kim’s style is still evolving. One sees it more in his color art his black and white pages thus far.

On the positive side, the next adventure takes place in 1880s California and Sam and Caroline are cute, so final judgment will remain reserved until volume 2.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story -7
Characters – 7
Yuri – 4
Service – 0

Overall – 7

Time Fiddler is a fun webcomic that I hope will take itself to a more sophisticated level of writing and art, but which is worth throwing the price of a cup of coffee at in order to help it do so.

Thanks Ellis for the advance copy and best of luck to you!





Western Comics: Valor Anthology (English)

November 11th, 2015

ValorWhether they begin “Once upon a time…” or “Mukashi, mukashi…,” fairy tales all begin some time a long time ago, quite often in places without real names. The kingdoms are feudal, evil mostly comes in the form of magic and/or giant beasts that must be defeated and slayed. And, as so many people have commented so many times, they usually star a young man who achieves greatness…and gets the girl as a reward. If you’re an active, self-willed young lady, this can become irritating over time. You start looking around and you find the story of Vasalisa, who uses wits and luck to overcome the witch Baba Yaga, read Barbara Walker’s Feminist Fairy Tales or more contemporary stories like Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword by Barry Deutsch. In fact, it’s hard to not roll one’s eyes at the idea of reworking fairy tales as, by now, it seems to have been done to death. If you’re a gay girl, there’s even Melinda Lo’s Ash, to give Cinderella a much cooler lover than a prince with a shoe fetish.

In Valor, a Kickstarter funded anthology, 24 creators take a look at stories that we know, unravel them, rethink them, revamp them, reweave them and sometimes just create something wholly new and amazing. The collection spans multiple cultures, with both prose and graphic stories.

Some of the stories are merely riffs on well-known tales, such as the above-mentioned story of “Vasalisa,” retold by Kadi Fedoruk or the “Crane Wife,” rendered here by Alex Singer and Jayd Ait-Kaci, and some are wholly original tales, such as the prose “Finette” by Megan Lavey-Heaton and Ran Brown or the gorgeous no-text graphic “Nautilus” by Ash Barnes and Elena “Yamino” Babarich.

Several stories are reworkings of timeless and well-known stories. Of these, my two favorites were “The Steadfast Automaton” again by Alex Singer and Jayd Ait-Kaci, which was a steampunk/scifi version of the Constant Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Anderson with heavy shades of Offenbach’s opera, Tales of Hoffman…and “Goldie Locks,” by Joanne Webster and Isabelle Melançon, a clever and fun riff on the classic tale of breaking and entering.

So, while it may seem that this anthology has “been done,” I’d argue that there can never, ever be enough versions of timeless tales. Heck, I wrote a series of  Sailor Moon/Arthurian Legend mashups. How can there *ever* be too many reworkings of archetypes?! And in the case of Valor, we have certainly not seen this version of these fairytales done this way before.

There is a nice selection of sexualities in the collection, as well. Some of the heroines get a prince, others get a princess and all get themselves which, in many ways, is the best ending of all.

Ratings:

Overall – 9

You can buy Valor online, and frankly, I think you should. It’s an entertaining collection full of things you’ve never read before – even if you have read them before. ^_^





LGBTQ Comic: The Complete Wendel

August 30th, 2015

TCWen Back in May, I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural Queers & Comics conference in NYC. At the very end, as a panelist, I was given a copy of the definitive collected edition of Keynote Speaker Howard Cruse’s serial Wendel. Originally begun back when The Advocate was a tabloid, Wendel ran in the pages of the magazine through the 1980s (a decade that I spent mostly without a TV or car, working 2 or 3 jobs at a time and therefore somewhat limited in my participation in the world.)

I have just finished The Complete Wendel and both liked and disliked it in equal measure. It’s important to remember that while this was the Gay Community of the 1980s, I was not ever part of this community, so reading it is as alien to me as reading a book on being a mother of 5 children.

Wendle is a young guy, with a supportive family, working at a small tabloid magazine. He meets Ollie, an aspiring actor and, through the pages of the story, their relationship develops through years of political crisis, AIDS, and regular family and friend nuttiness.

The early stories were the hardest for me to enjoy. They are supposed to be funny, but there are not my sense of humor and so left me sort of “meh.” Wendel is earnest and openly feminist and progressive, but the actual female characters we meet are abrasive and irritating.  Particularly Tina, the butch lesbian girlfriend of Deb, one of Wendel’s coworkers who, as the comic pointed out, if you didn’t hope she was being ironic, was a horrible person. Ollie’s ex-wife, father of his child Farley, is pretty much a one-note  neurotic rant from the beginning to the very final page.

It’s not just the women who are irritating. Ollie’s best friend Sterno, an out-of-control hedonist is tedious. So, here we have Wendel and Ollie, whose main schtick is to be neurotic out loud and adorably in love and their terrible friends. ^_^ It took me a while to warm up to them. But…I did warm up to them.

They lived through the Reagan years, during which I came into being. Had I been 5 years older, I might well have been a lesbian Wendel. In a moment of complete irony, the book ends with some promotional posters featuring Wendel after the comic had ended, one of which was the March on Washington in 1993, which I attended (and wow, what a day that was). So Wendel ends as I began, in a sense. And that, in a nutshell describes my feelings about it.

Lesbian and gay comics have been with us since the beginning. Queer & Comics was about those comics and about the people who drew them. We’re incredibly lucky to have so many of them still alive and willing and able to tell their tales. It’s up to us to read them and remember them and pass them along.

The world of the bathhouses and the early Gay Liberation marches, are the history I read about, the shoulders that I stood upon. Wendel is my fictitious older brother’s age, never my own. But once I  got to know him and Ollie and his friends, they came to have meaning to me.

Ratings:

Art – 8 (It’s a style that is so wholly unlike manga, it’s fascinating to delve into. Every background, every cross-hatched shadow was done by hand.)
Story – 7 Slice of life with “silly” filter
Characters – 8
Service – Lots of male nudity and sexual situations, no explicit sex shown
LGBTQ – 10

Overall – 8

I’d never have Sterno stay the night and would probably have told Tina to shut the fuck up, but I could see myself sitting and listening to their stories and understand that without them, I might not have been here.