The Eagle Awards were announced last night at the MCM Expo Awards. Results are below, and congrats to everyone who won this year. You all have the chance to say you won the last Eagle Award.

After a long history dating back to ’79, the Eagle Awards are being retired, and in their place next year we’ll have the MCM Awards, organised (no surprises here) by MCM Expo. The Eagle Awards site may have the winners up this month… but Heidi was far quicker, so I’ve grabbed these from The Comics Beat… and added a few thoughts along the way….

Best Newcomer (writer): Jeff Lemire (Essex County 2009, Nobody 2009, Sweet Tooth 2009, Doug Wright Award fro Emerging Talent 2008)
Best Newcomer (artist): Francesco Francavilla (Zorro 2008 and many more)
Best Writer: Scott Snyder
Best Artist (pencils): J.H. Williams III
Best Artist (inks): Scott Williams
Best Writer/Artist: Frank Miller (Since I reckon it’s ythe only thing he published in the period, this would be an award for Holy Terror? Really? Oh Christ)
Best Fully-Painted Artwork: Alex Ross
Best Colourist: Dave Stewart
Best Letterer: Richard Starkings
Best Editor: Karen Berger
Best Publisher: DC/Vertigo
Best Full-Colour US Comic: Batman
Best Black/White US Comic: The Walking Dead
Best Full-Colour British Comic: Dr Who Magazine (comic?)
Best Black/White British Comic: Viz
Best New Comic: Batman
Best Manga: 20th Century Boys
Best European Comic Book: Dylan Dog
Best Web-Based Comic: Freakangels
Best Single Story: Dr Who #12
Best Story Arc: ‘No Way Out’, The Walking Dead
Best Cover: Batwoman #1 by JH Williams III
Best Original Graphic Novel: Batman: Noel
Best Reprint Compilation: Thor by Walt Simonson
Best Comics-Related Book: Supergods by Grant Morrison
Best Comics Movie/TV Show: The Big Bang Theory
Best Comic Book Website: Bleeding Cool
Best Comics-Related Magazine: DC Comics Superhero Collection (Easy to forget there’s a magazine attached to the statue – maybe the Comics Journal should give it a try?)
Roll of Honour: Frank Quitely
Huntsman Challenge Award: The Time of Reflection

The Eagles have long been the only British Comic awards. Now they’re gone. Will the MCM Awards be any different? I hope so, I really do.

The Eagles may have been organised by many well meaning people, but generally, the last few years at least have not been kind, and instead of a UK Comic Awards we can be rightly proud of, celebrating the very best of UK Comics, we have something that’s more often than not mentioned with a laugh and a snarky tone. Good luck MCM Expo.

Strong Female Characters – The Return:

Now with the rise of digital, I get a lot of comics being offered for review on pdf format, for which of course, I’m very grateful. But there’s a worrying trend amongst these digital works – too many of them seem to be looking at the decompressed form and adapting it for other genres.

Too often I find myself emailing back to a new writer/artist and telling them that there’s just not enough here to review. I try not to do really hyper-critical reviews of self-published stuff, preferring to be critical yet encouraging, but with these comics coming through it’s hard not to take some of them to task for the sheer emptiness of what they’re offering.

And as a simple comparison, here’s an ad for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #16 by Mark Martin from 1988 (courtesy of Mr Phil):

A one page ad for a comic that takes as long to read as some of the 20 page comics I see at the moment. Something’s gone very, very wrong I think.

The world really is a strange, strange place isn’t it?

Not only does Shia LaBeouf make mini comics, but they don’t look at all bad, and Sean T. Collins at The Comics Journal rather likes them:

“All right, let’s take the elephant in the room and fly that fucker around like Dumbo: These are self-published, arty alternative comics written and drawn by an actor whose movies have grossed just shy of five billion dollars worldwide. In that respect Shia LaBeouf has already lapped most celebrities who’ve gotten their names on a comic, since in most cases “name on a comic” is as far as it goes. At best, these vanity projects might provide an interesting mainstream creator with a better work-for-hire opportunity than most. Far more frequently they exist just to give some nerd-made-good the thrill of seeing their name on the stands at the Android’s Dungeon of their youth, or to provide proof of concept for some shitty genre movie-or-TV-show-to-(never)-be. In a context where singer Gerard Way’s apparently short-lived but well-received stint as an honest-to-god scriptwriter for his smart superhero series The Umbrella Academy qualifies an extreme outlier, it’s difficult to believe in the existence of freaking minicomics from the co-star of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull even when you’re holding them in your hands.

Believe it, though. And believe this, too: They’re good.”

“LaBeouf could have, I dunno, plotted a Transformers miniseries and some would have feted him for it. Instead he hand-crafted a bunch of weirdo comics that leave him wide open for mockery when he hits notes too hard or takes ideas too far or makes drawings too sloppy (and he does on all counts, from time to time, inevitably), because he had something to say and had to say it with this particular art form. That’s something I respond to no matter whose name is on the cover, and the response is gratitude, for lack of a better word: “Hey, thanks for making this cool thing and showing it to me, because I had a great time with it.” The craft may not be there yet, but the heart and smarts are. Shia LaBeouf is a for-real cartoonist, and a talent to watch.”

The world is indeed a stranger place for knowing this. But also, in just a small way, a better one as well. Next up, Jason Statham’s poetry collections?

These two are pending approval…

But a third design has already had a little feedback from Threadless. I’ll pass you over to Rian’s comments grabbed from his Facebook feed:

First T-Shirt design (image shown below) “not up to par” and “could do with more work” according to Threadless. Looks like I’ll have to give up the day job. Does anyone have an opening for an over-the-hill design/illustration intern? Willing to make tea. I need to start at the bottom again, I think:

“The Threadless staff has provided the following reason to decline your submission: Your submission was declined because we feel your idea could use a little more work to be up to the standard that will give it the best shot. We have a feature called Critiques on Threadless.com that allows you to have your design critiqued before you submit it for approval. By using the Critiques feature as a pre-submission tool, you can let the community help get your submission up to par. This will not guarantee your design will be accepted, but we hope this will help you improve your design!”

This could get very silly…. there’s a critique section on the design, where Threadless members are encouraged to give their own feedback… and Rian’s playing along:

Rian: “Student designer seeks tips.”

MrGoobler: “What year are you in, young fella? I’m guessing you must be a freshman? your design doesn’t seem to have legs, although that might be deliberate. Have you thought of adding a funny caption like: ‘Don’t worry if you get me legless, I’m pretty armless.’ or something.”

Rian: “Well, I’m just starting out. Working on an old Mac 2Ci, hoping to get a Quadra when I can afford it, and hopefully learn Corel Draw and PhotoExpress.“

Happening over the weekend, or this afternon if you were at the special Friday preview.

MCM Expo is a full media show, with a lot of guests from the worlds of TV, film, and pop entertainment of all kinds. Big names this time round include Danny Devito, Anthony Daniels, and Kevin Eastman along with a host of actors who’ve played bit parts in various sci-fi series in the US over the last few decades.

What makes MCM Expo relevant for comics is the sepcialist comic village. Whilst small in comparison to the MCM Expo as a whole, the appeal for exhibitors at the Expo is the sheer footfall that passes by the tables. Sure, most of them are doing just that; passing, but artists in the past have talked of Expo being a great place to meet new readers.

Full list, and details at The MCM Expo site.

Jack Davies, Catherine Reda, Luke Bayliss & Harry Griffin-Hayes, Sammy Borras, Lily-rose Beardshaw, Sarah Fogg

Inspired Comics

Hmm. The urge to pepper this one with hideous puns and food references is almost too much. You’ll forgive me “pepper”. I promise that will be the last of them.

Right then. Six comic strips all on the subject of food. All wrapped in a gorgeous, fun, sweet cover by Sarah Fogg. By the same comic collective, and featuring many of the same artists as Science Fiction Octuple Feature from last year.

Sadly, the cover here proves to be the high point, only really matched by Sarah’s own contribution; The Mysterious Land Of Under-Noodle. That was nearly as cutesy and sweet as the cover, a six-pager of territorial trouble between the forces of food species, all fighting over the gigantic mushroom that plunges into the broth sea…

(Sarah Fogg)

The other five strips all try really hard to do their thing, but for one reason or another they’re all a little under-par. There’s a good mix of styles and themes though, but no-one really delivers a fully formed, interesting story.

Jack Davies was one of the highlights of the last Inspired Comics anthology Sci-Fi Octuple Feature, but his Many Years Ago story here is pretty but confused, his storytelling a little all over the place, each panel looking attractive, but the relationship between panels not as good as his previous work. Again, promise, but not quite there.

Catherine Reda’a Bunnies Incorporated Into Various Food Items is simply a cute gag done too long – a single page would have been funny, but 5 pages, with 28 iterations of the same gag is really pushing it. In the Sci-Fi Octuple comic she took three pages to do a cute bunny gag that worked so much better.

The Italian Dish by Bayliss and Griffin-Hayes I simply didn’t like. Clumsy story, stilted dialogue, and no, not in a classic film-noir sense, grubby art too focused on the close-up to really give any sense of transition. Nope, didn’t like it, and that makes two for two from this team.

(Sammy Boras)

Sammy Boras’ Food Wars is a good looking strip, and tells a story of a TV cooking contest in readable fashion, but there was simply nothing that really hooked me in, it’s just lacking slightly, right on the cusp of impressing me.

Lily-rose Beardshaw is a weird one. Last time I saw her work I moaned about the reproduction and the muddy feel. But here it is again with The Butcher and the Tattoist. I’m beginning to think it’s simply her style, and I’ve got to say it does nothing to sell her work to me. There’s a talent here, most certainly, but it’s too hidden. And a story that says very little, wants to say a lot, and simply comes across as poor, badly worked out, and confusing doesn’t help.

(Lily-rose Beardshaw)

So ouch. That was a little harsh. I never like being quite so critical. But the most frustrating and annoying thing about Eat Me! is the potential that’s here. Davies, Boras, Beardshaw are all promising so much, yet just underwhelming here.

Next time? I do hope so.

You can of course see for yourself at Inspired Comics, where Eat Me is available to buy.

Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières

Cinebook

When a rogue planet threatens a new Human colony, Valerian and Laureline are sent to investigate and discover a barren, rocky surface… and a whole world beneath it! The people who live inside Zahir have never seen the stars. Divided along gender lines, torn by a senseless and bloody war, they are unaware that their planet is hurtling towards disaster. To stop it, the two agents of Galaxity will have to infiltrate both sides and force a reconciliation.

Oh dear, here we go again, Volume 3 of Valerian and Laureline, one of the greatest sci-fi epics in printed form…. except I still don’t really see it. Granted, I’m warming to it, I really am. With Volume 1, I just couldn’t see it, it all seemed a little too dated and staid:

“It reads and looks to my uncultured eyes like a badly produced late 70s cartoon series, the kind with badly drawn characters against static backgrounds who always found themselves with every plot device meticulously explained to the point of near irony and every situation the hero finds himself in has some immediately available solution.”

There was more to enjoy in Volume 2:

“… still not the classic I keep being told Valerian is, but the improvement here on the first volume is profound. I can only hope that, as so many of you have promised, this series keeps on this upward curve. Because at this rate, somewhere around volume 5 or 6 I imagine I may well be agreeing with you about it being a bit of a classic.“

This one starts with a problem and quickly ascends at least partway to the wonders I keep being promised. Problem first.

Valerian and Laureline is often hailed as something of a masterpiece in humanism, but all the way through The Land Without Stars the humanism has a distinct smack of chauvinism about it.

Take the first few pages and the repeating gag of Valerian delivering the farewell speech to the colonists of the four planets of the Ukbar system. He finds himself doing the space equivalent of nipping through to the billiard room for brandy whilst the little women chat about knitting or such-like:

And that feeling carries through the volume, as Christin splits up the pair to investigate the planet careering into the Ukbar system, plunging into a society split across gender lines. Valerian finds himself a slave warrior to the female amazons of the city of Malka, and Laureline a bride in the male dominated city of Valsennar. But there’s little subtlety, little avoidance of the worst stereotypes. And unfortunately it seems so ancient, so out of date. Am I being hopelessly reactionary? Overly sensitive? Should I simply look at it as a product of its time?

But what saves this one is that, once you look past the sexism, there’s something important here; Laureline comes into her own, isolated from Valerian, the conflict is solved through negotiation, thinking, diplomacy, the worlds are saved by adapting the political and social ideologies of the people, not through force. It relies not on force, but on the inventiveness of the protagonists, and of course, the inventiveness of the man writing these protagonists.

And even better, what really makes me think that, even though it’s not there yet, but at some point I’m going to be fully on-board with all the fans is sheer out and out epic stuff going on in the sci-fi, specifically the quite wonderful planetary geography of the planet Zahir:

Yes, okay, hollow planets are nothing new, but there’s a real sense of the “wow” in the manner in which Christin, and especially Mézières just throws us into the situation. That sort of legendary imagining is the sort of stuff that I wanted much more of.

But sadly, after that early bit of rather impressive wonder it does settle down to a somewhat pedestrian affair, although like I said, I did appreciate Christin adopting a far more thoughtful resolution than much sci-fi manages.

So, just like with Volume 2, I find myself coming to the end of another Valerian and Laureline review with a sense of “maybe I’m missing something?”, or maybe it’s simply, as I keep being told, a series that takes off in a couple of volumes time. This one was good enough, but it’s still not up there in grand epic stature yet.

Written by Daniel Bell, art by Katja Lindblom, Iain Buchanan, Daniel Bell

Yes, PT Barnum presents…. yes, the same PT Barnum who runs the circus. Except in here, it’s the Psircus he’s running, the Psircus being a way for writer (and sometime artist) Daniel Bell to shoehorn PT Barnum into his comic in a sort of weird Professor X (less wheelchair, more elephants perhaps?) fashion, the leader of a secret society of psychics, and secret saviour of the world.

Once you get over that bizarre, slightly off-putting inclusion, what we have here is 28 pages of comic, and three stories that deliver this Psi-sage really rather well. It’s by no means perfect sure, but for what it is, for what it’s trying to be, it does a fair job.

Kathy and Icarus are two girls with psi-powers, and in the three short tales we get a couple of origins of sorts, and a joint mission. What I thought was handled particularly well was Bell’s control of his storyline. He’s obviously got something bigger he’s trying to tell through this and hopefully future issues, but he understands that to tell what he want to he has to tell the smaller stories first, establish his characters, work them into the plot, and if he’s clever enough, he can combine all of that into these 28 pages.

Quick answer – yes, he’s clever enough.

(Kathy Isn’t Right by Daniel Bell and Katja Lindblom)

Kathy’s tale involves young Kathy breaking out of the mental hospital she’s been incarcerated in to deal with what they see as her paranoid schizophrenia, but actually is her massive psychic power.

She’s part of a power struggle between the afore-mentioned Barnum and some other, unseen force that calls to Kathy to escape. And this is very much her first meeting with Barnum, her introduction to the world she’s to inhabit in the future.

(Icarus by Daniel Bell and Iain Buchanan)

Icarus’ tale has something of the Leon about it; the young girl being apprenticed in the ways of the professional assassin. Or at least that’s what she thinks she’s doing.

In actual fact, she’s a powerful telekinetic, and her trainer is more concerned with the power of her brain than he is the power of the gun. I could tell you more, but that’s a sweet twist in the story that’s yours to discover.

(The Pull by Daniel Bell)

Finally, in story three – The Pull – we get to see a little of the girls in action now, what feels like a few years after their individual origin-ish stories. Now they’re working for Barnum’s Psi-operation and out on a job tracking down a particular piece of lowlife with low level psi-abilities that he puts to all too pathetic use.

Kathy and Icarus trawl the local flesh pit nightclubs, posing as more prey for this nasty little rapist, and deliver a suitable punishment after a well worked psychic conflict.

Three stories, each one well done, short, sweet, telling a tale within the story, yet also delivering something more, something of the greater saga.

If I had to criticise, it would be over bits of the art. None of the three artists are particularly bad here, but neither do any of them really stand out. Personally Bell’s story with his own art is the best of the three. Too much of Lindblom’s work seems too rough to me, with some panels really making me question just what she’s trying to show me. Buchanan’s art is suffering as it seems to be merely a black & white version of the colour work on Bell’s blog. It makes the tones artificial.

But even as I write those criticisms I feel a little too harsh. What worked best of all was the story, and each artist delivers the story as best they could, without real detriment to my enjoyment. For someone who’s always more story driven than cares about the art, that’s just fine.

There’s some interesting questions left unanswered here, although never to the detriment of the story in front of you. But who is Sunnyside? Who are the girls reporting to at the end of The Pull? It’s not Barnum. Who was Barnum up against in his fight over Kathy? How long has all this been going on? Who is Icarus’ trainer, Barnums’ partner, something else, just another team member?

Just having this many questions and still having enjoyed the comic tells me that it worked, that it’s enjoyable as a single issue, yet full of enough to make me want more. That, I think, is proof of job done for any #1 of a comic. Well done to all involved.

Now, where’s issue 2?