Oneshot Webcomics

I obviously enjoy several serial webcomics. However, one of the big drawbacks in following a work in progress is that the payoff of a satisfying ending doesn’t happen for a long, long while. That’s why I appreciate folks who try their hand at one-shots. A particularly brilliant one is Emily Carroll’s Face All Red. A creepy, lurking animal of a tale, it was originally published around Halloween last year but I read the first few panels and decided to put off finishing the whole thing until the Christmas season. Believe me when I say that that is high praise.

Blue Delliquanti’s 24-hour project called Metamorphosis is the adaptation of a segment from Radiolab (my current obsession!). His drawing style lends itself very well to the poignancy of the original audio piece. I also love how he did everything within 24 hours.

If you have any suggestions for great one-shot webcomics, don’t hesitate to tell me! I’m always on the lookout for more.

Day 02 – Ray Bradbury fanclub, party of one

Day 02 – A book or series you wish more people were reading and talking about

Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes

This is such a pretty cover, I wish my copy has this. Anyway, the short lifespan of his blog has already demonstrated my affection towards Ray Bradbury and his works, and I’m going to do more of the same today. Something Wicked is part scary story, part coming-of-age tale about two boys on the cusp of adulthood who find themselves confronting the burden of growing up and shedding the innocence that they’ve always enjoyed. It also features the scariest way to utilize a carousel ride ever. EVER. I stake my reputation on that.

I feel like Ray Bradbury’s works, with the exception of Fahrenheit 451, have been largely overlooked, mostly because he opts to write using old fashioned, nostalgic language. His subject matter is also significantly less “edgy” than SFF authors like Robert A. Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. Still, if you want a good horror book, or a poignant tale of childhood and what we leave behind, I totally recommend this.

World War Z: A huge wave of zombies is appro–wait

Max Brooks’ World War Z is fiction for the Discovery Channel / NatGeo junkie, that special breed of people who regard Shark Week as a red-letter holiday. Masquerading as a collection of interviews from survivors of a global zombie apocalypse, the book succeeds in taking a ludicrous premise and making the reader take it seriously.

Brooks does a good job at setting up the beginning of the zombie infection. The disease first emerges in China before slowly spreading around the world, both through regular air travel and human trafficking. The public was initially lulled into a false sense of security by a combination of government propaganda and predatory businessmen. By the time the existence of the zombies becomes impossible to deny the human race is already in the middle of a losing battle that ends up killing hundreds of millions and turning them into flesh-eating machines.

Planetary Pariahs: Bradbury and the Influence of Edgar Allan Poe

Note: I’m going to repost some of my old essays/blog posts for posterity’s sake. It has been years since I’ve done this one but I’m still relatively proud of it, and my affection for both Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe remains the same.

Planetary Pariahs: Bradbury and the Influence of Edgar Allan Poe

I. “Bradbury is the Louis Armstrong of science fiction”

More than sixty years after publishing his first story and creating a career full of contradictions, Ray Bradbury has firmly cemented a reputation as an oddity of the American Letters. As part of the so-called Golden Age of science fiction in the 1940′s and 50′s, he achieved a fanatical following through his mass production of off-beat stories, spitting them up by the dozen for pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and Imagination! He later gained mainstream celebrity for his brilliant novels, The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. One novel is a pioneer-type tale about humans colonizing the planet Mars, the other a futuristic allegory warning against the dangers of censorship. Both of them are generally accepted as part of the SF canon. Aside from that stories had also appeared, in such highbrow publications as Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Collier’s and he has been awarded both the National Medal of Arts and the O. Henry Memorial Award. He also earned lavish praise from more “literary” (as opposed to “pulpy”) writers such as Chistopher Isherwood and British writer Kingsley Amis. Is he then a hack, or a genius, a veritable master of the bizarre or simply a writer of childhood elegies? Not many have ridden this fence like he has, balancing between what Amis calls his “dime-a-dozen sensitivity” and literary respectability.

His reputation among SF circles is shifty as well. Despite being constantly mentioned in the same breath as other SF greats such as Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, many science fiction purists refuse to recognize Bradbury as a legitimate SF writer, and have criticized his stories’ “science,” with good reason. In Bradbury’s fiction, Venus skies are full of rain and not toxic ammonia, and improbable rocket ships scoop out burning pieces of the sun while the crew recites poetry.

Webcomic Recommendations – The Horror Edition

I just got back from watching Social Network, so this’ll be a quick update. In this blog, I hope to make a series out of recommending awesome webcomics that don’t seem to be talked up as much as the hugely popular ones like Kate Beaton for strips or Phoenix Requiem for serials. I’ll be catching up on the Halloween theme by naming two titles that’s heavy with the costumes and the creepiness.

Lovecraft is Missing by Larry Latham is one of my favorite webcomics ever, with a distinctive drawing style and a plot that mixes fact, fiction, and horror meta commentary. It is a story about pulp writer Win Battler, an Oklahoma native who travels to Providence to meet his pen pa,l Howard Philips Lovecraft. Yes, that Lovecraft. He arrives to find out that Lovecraft has apparently disappeared without a trace and people around the sleepy New England town may be involved.

Romantically Apocalyptic by Vitaly S. Alexius is one of those quirky yet unsettling comics that follow the comic strip style of storytelling. The gist of the setup is this: a pilot, a sniper and an engineer walking around a post-nuclear city, trying to entertain themselves. Every update is a short scene with an often macabre punchline, but it’s the gorgeous superrealist art that keeps me coming back. (Special thanks to Bhex for pointing out this title to me.)

I hope you enjoy these, and watch out for more recs!