Now then. With only one X-book out this week I feel like
reviewing more other stuff than normal. A paucity of new releases
forces me in rather unusual directions.
Web comics. HAUNTED MAN is a miniseries from Dark Horse which is
running simultaneously in web comic form on their web site
(www.darkhorse.com, if you're interested). It's written by Gerard
Jones, who did some stuff for DC a while back and co-wrote a
rather good book on the history of superhero comics marred only
by the disproportionate amount of space it devotes to the work of
Gerard Jones, and drawn by Mark Badger, who did (in a footnote to
a rather impressive cartooning career) the Promethium Exchange
three-parter in Excalibur. Yes, THAT one.
The creators are pretty upfront about the fact that the web version
is their top priority, and the published version is effectively
a remix. I took a look at the web version; apparently there's
meant to be music, but damned if I could get the bloody stuff to
play. Anyhow, it's one of those heavily shockwaved things with
characters moving across the screen and such forth.
There are broadly two schools of thought so far as web comics are
concerned (not counting the people who just scan in an ordinary
page). One says that we should take full advantage of these
wonderful Shockwave and sound tricks and create the sort of all-
singing all-dancing web pages that HTML designers dream about.
The other says that this is a load of bollocks because Shockwave
is an animation tool, not a comics tool, and what you end up with
is basically just a really shitty piece of animation not dissimilar
to those awful "cartoons" Marvel had in the sixties. Instead, they
say, you should take advantage of the other less flashy but more
comics-specific tricks that HTML can do.
My sympathies lie firmly with the second camp - not least because
for those of us who aren't linked to some kind of ultra-phoneline,
trying to read most shockwaved web comics is a tediously dull
process of reading the first page, waiting thirty seconds for the
next one to load, etc etc. I long since gave up trying to read
Marvel's web comics, although admittedly the fact that they were
rubbish anyway was also a powerful influence. For a better example
of what you can do with comics on the web, I entreat you all to
visit Scott McCloud's website, which
is full of interesting experiments that may, admittedly, not be the
best stories in the world, but certainly point the way for totally
new storytelling techniques. For that matter, former racmx
regular Alasdair Watson is doing some interesting stuff with Rust
on Popimage (understand the navigation system and
win a prize!).
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with the hefty use of
Shockwave (assuming you've got enough bandwidth to read the damn
thing at an acceptable speed). But the future of comics doesn't
lie simply in turning it into animation.
Anyhow, all of this talk about the medium isn't reviewing the
printed comic.
It's one of those slightly satirical, rather surreal series about a
superhero who's nuts. Nothing particularly groundbreaking, but a
reasonably amusing story in which our hero and his deliberately
stereotypical reporter sidekick stop a villain from stealing
entire periods of history and selling them to billionaires who
want to live in those times forever. ("1974! The last time being
a Democratic Senator actually meant something!")
Mark Badger is off into wildly distorted cartooning (and yes, if
you remember The Promethium Exchange, more so than that).
Sometimes that compromises the clarity of the storytelling,
although in fairness this artwork was originally designed for the
web version and there are inevitably going to be difficulties in
translating it to the printed page. Even so, there are some
excellent moments (a particularly good double-page spread in the
centre), and imaginative use of colour gives the book a unique
tone.
Given that you can get the thing on the web, to be honest, I
wouldn't recommend buying it. But it's alright in its way.
