A few titbits I’ve come across in the past week or so, and some more substantial morsels too:
The American woodcut artist Lynd Ward was an early pioneer of “novels in pictures”, or “graphic novels” as we call them now, though Ward’s work is unlike anything you’ll find in a comics shop today. Nick Mullins has unearthed some scans of illustrations Ward did for a 1934 edition of Frankenstein. They’re remarkably powerful pieces, bringing to mind William Blake as an antecedent and Shaun Tan as a descendent. Ward eschews literal, naturalistic illustration in favour of evoking the intense emotional states of the characters and the Gothic atmosphere of the novel; it’s strong stuff, and it’s a bit shocking that they’re all out of print, but thanks to the internet we can see them in very nearly their full glory.
(Lynd Ward’s striking illustration of the monster in Shelley’s Frankenstein, borrowed from Nick Mullins)
Speaking of hard-to-find gems: it’s a bit surprising to me, in retrospect, that I never got into Elfquest. Given the way my tastes usually run, you’d think it’d be right up my street, but for some reason the stars were never right and I was never in the mood for something like Elfquest at the same time as being in a shop that sold it. In recent years I’ve found that the books are both harder to figure out (on account of how they keep publishing more of them, and the timelines keep getting more complicated, so it’s not immediately obvious where to start) and harder to find (though maybe I’m just looking in the wrong places). Fortunately on both counts, the Elfquest site has both a simple timeline laying out which series take place when, and an online archive of many old Elfquest comics, going all the way back to the very first appearance of the title in 1980. New issues are being added all the time, so if you’ve always been wondering what the fuss was about, or you used to be a fan but lost track somewhere along the way, you’ll soon be able to get completely up to speed.
Of course, Wendy and Richard Pini are not the only publishers to put older works online. (They’re not even the only husband-and-wife self-publishing team creating fantasy comics to put older works online; Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius has been on my “do an archive binge some day when I’ve got a spare afternoon” list for a while.) It’s a wonderful way of satisfying your existing audience with regular and frequent updates if pamphlet serialization isn’t an option; but, of course, that’s not the main reason why publishers tend to do it. In general, the main reason to put old comics online is as a shop window: people are more likely to buy them if they get a chance to sample them first. This is probably the main purpose of DMP’s new eManga site. Although technically one can “rent” the manga on the site, I doubt many manga readers will be willing to shell out $4 for 72 hours of access to an online version of the manga that costs about $12 in print; the manga cannot be downloaded and the e-reader DMP are using is rather clunky and doesn’t show off the art to its best advantage. At actual size it looks fine, but at actual size it’s too big for a standard monitor to display a full page; meanwhile, at the smaller sizes the text is so small that it’s uncomfortable to read, and the art looks blurry and generally awful, as if it were a photocopy of a photocopy. There’s a compromise between the two in the form of “panel view”, which automatically shifts focus from one panel to the next, but that doesn’t let you see the whole page, and the constant shift of focus made me either seasick or impatient until I figured out how to get it to run at the right speed.
To be fair, the site is in beta at the moment, and DMP are open to feedback, but I just can’t see myself spending any money on what’s on offer. I’d rather stick with the dead-tree edition.
But, on the other hand, until I looked at the eManga site, I hadn’t realised that DMP/June had published Kiss Blue by Keiko Kinoshita, one of my favourite BL creators. I don’t plan on renting the eManga version — in fact, right now I can’t, because only a short sample of that title is available at the moment. But now I have one more title to add to my wishlist, one more pink-striped book to look out for when I’m at the comics shop. And maybe that’s the real point of eManga: not to be an online store for DMP’s online manga, but to be a sample counter for their printed manga. If that’s the case, it would be wise for them to start putting up samples of their adults-only line, 801 Media. In shops, these books are usually shrinkwrapped, which makes it impossible to browse, and a sample online could give readers a chance to see if they like the art style and the writing — they wouldn’t even need to put anything on the site that was strictly 18-rated.
(scene from Order of Tales, art and (c) Evan Dahm)
Finally, to comics that were put on the web and then printed: I’ve raved here before about Evan Dahm’s Rice Boy, and I’m very pleased to tell you all that Dahm is currently working on another story set in the same world. It’s called Order of Tales and there are 56 pages up so far. What’s more, Rice Boy itself is now available as an honest-to-God book, that you can take to the bath or curl up with in bed. It looks gorgeous, and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.
Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture from around the world, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.
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