Archive for the Western Comic/Comix Category


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 Go, KaiJU’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.





LGBTQ Comic: The Infinite Loop, Issues 1-4 (of 6)

August 21st, 2015

TIFL1When I first heard that Pierrick Colinet and Elsa Charretier’s series The Infinite Loop had been licensed by IDW, I was immediately intrigued. For one thing, this series is a Bande Dessinée (BD), a French-language comic. We in the USA are just starting to get a real grip on the breadth and depth of the BD industry. International comics shows that specialize in cross-cultural exchange, such as Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Tokyo International Comics Festival and Angoulême International Comics Festival are making it easier than ever before for fans and creators to reach past borders and get to know the broader range of comics globally.

In addition, The Infinite Loop is a science fiction series. I know I’ve mentioned this from time to time, but when I was in my early years of reading all the lesbian literature I could find, a great deal of it was science fiction. The speculative nature of that genre and fantasy were comforting to LGBTQ writers who were not yet afforded a place on bookstore shelves.  In recent years, LGBTQ sci-fi and fantasy have been vital and thriving…but not so much in comics. Scifi particularly, and comics have mixed less than one might suppose, given the crossover fandom.

So, yay, a BD about a lesbian that is a sci-fi story! Win, win, win.

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Teddy is a time traveler, whose job it is to clean up time anomalies, left by tourists and terrorists and anyone fucking with the time stream. Agents have a relatively short shelf-life, as infinite possibilities and selves play havoc with their sanity and Teddy is the agent who has been active the longest. Teddy’s good at getting rid of anomalies, until she encounters one that looks like a beautiful woman who is in danger. Teddy immediately protects her and takes ‘Ano’ to safety.

Teddy’s partner is Ulysses, a meaty guy with an overt crush on his partner. But he’s put in a very tight spot when Teddy violates the rules.

The art is adorable in a retro futuristic way, almost Jetson-y. The color palette is vibrant. I love the panel design, the crazy paving works especially well when Teddy is having schizophrenic conversations with herself, or multiple things are happening simultaneously in various timelines.

I generally like the story, and will certainly read it to the end, but there are some problematic areas. Of these, the first real problem is something I can only express as a “man writing a lesbian as if she were a female-shaped man.” Now, I am aware that there are crass, vulgar women on the planet, but of the lesbians I myself know, none of us are in the habit of referring to other women as having “nice boobs” except, perhaps, in bed. There is a male-gazeness about Teddy that grates on me ever so slightly. This continues throughout, with dialogue that is supposed to be cutesy, sexy jokes, but just come off as icky-making, eye-rolling double entendre’s. I’ll hope that the humor was merely lost in translation. The writer himself outs himself in the afterword, so it is not an issue of “straight guy writing lesbian wrong,” just a guy writing lesbian oddly. ^_^

This is a small, but persistent irritation, but not my biggest complaint. And even this is not “big” it just really stands out. On Twitter I commented “Writers, please do not introduce characters for the sole purpose of treating them badly to prove the bad guys are bad. It’s weaksauce.” And, in a nutshell, that’s the problem. Spender and Prospekt are the bad guys (so far). They are two more meaty guys who arrive on the scene with a load of misogynist, homophobic and transphobic insults, this way we know they are bad people. Then they kill a perfectly innocent person so we know they are really bad. Really, really bad. Yeah, we got it. They could have been multi-faceted, complex characters, instead they are just two-dimensional violent sociopaths who have somehow made it to the top of the organization, while Teddy, who is at least as skilled, is persecuted for her relationship. I think I’ve read this one before.

Once again I find myself wishing this was in manga page count, rather than western comics “squeeze the story in quickly, then spend 4 pages on a sex scene! Hurry Hurry!” mode.

The Infinite Loop is not yet available as a single volume, but the collected volume is being released in December 2015, it is listed on the Yuricon Store. I’m reading individual issues on Kindle. (Issues 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5| 6 TBD). The kindle app breaks the complicated  panels up for slightly easier reading, but also allows a full page mode to see the full effect. Overall, a very decent reading experience.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Character – 8
Story – 7, could be higher, depending on the resolution
Service – 7 there is a sex scene
Yuri – 8

Despite minor distractions, there are some genuinely interesting turns of the story. As I say, I’m still reading and looking forward to the resolution.