Author: Dave Thomer

Huge airborne ships carrying weapons of mass destruction. Sorceresses wielding phenomenal magical power. Soldiers fighting an impossible battle against a desperate enemy and a supernatural force. And a heavy dose of historical allegory to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the current state of the Russian people.

Not what you might expect as the main ingredients of a successful comic, but it’s a formula that’s working for The Red Star, already mentioned on our forums as good comics reading for almost any audience. In the three issues out to date (with the fourth hitting stores soon), readers have marveled at the integration of three-dimensional computer models with two-dimensional hand-drawn art, gotten their first glimpse at the world of the United Republics of the Red Star, and been introduced to two members of the Antares family, among other characters. Maya is a sorceress who serves aboard one of the URRS’ skyfurnaces, massive and terrible ships that look a little bit like giant floating sandcrawlers and can reduce a desert to molten slag in minutes. Her husband Marcus is a soldier in the URRS’ army, fighting fiercely for his country even as he curses his leaders’ incompetence, doomed to fall in battle. Everything in The Red Star is big – the story, the action, the ships, the artwork – but its ambitious story and visual style are blended with small, character-building moments. But you don’t need me to repeat how good the book is — check out the forums for that.

Although the first issues can be hard to find, a trade paperback collecting those issues will be released in the near future, and the creators make an extra effort to make sure new readers can pick up on what’s going on – a lexicon section at the end of each issues brings you to speed on the dramatis personae and on the specialized vocabulary of this fictional world. (Spells, for example, are called ‘protocols’, and that one definition does wonders to establish the cold, technical nature of the URRS.) There’s also a good deal of information at the official site, where creator/writer/pencil artist Christian Gossett, writer Brad Kayl, and other members of Team Red Star can frequently be found on the message boards. I had a chance to interview Kayl and Gossett via e-mail in early November — the transcript of that conversation follows, edited slightly to make the questions and answers flow better: Continue reading “Rise of The Red Star”

We read a lot of comics in my family; my brother and I have been collecting pretty much continuously for the last eleven years or so, and my wife is quite the Batman fan. So it makes sense that This Is Not News should have an area where we can talk about comics as an art form, and look at the best the form has to offer. That’s right, I called comics an art form. I’d go into a lengthy defense of that position, in case someone who was drawn here by one of the other sections is inclined to dismiss comics as disposable entertainment, except that Scott McCloud has already done a much better job of that than I could hope to over the next several hundred words.

McCloud is a comics artist whose career spans the last two decades; his Zot! has won several awards and, after a several-year hiatus, has returned as an online comic. But it is for his two books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, that he has garnered a great deal of attention over the last few years. Both books are comics themselves; a black and white McCloud guides the reader through comics history and his vision of comics’ future, using excerpts from other comics and many of the illustrative techniques he describes to develop his points. Some critics have complained that this poses a problem: McCloud wants to teach his readers what comics are and what they can be, but he assumes that those readers are familiar enough with the vocabulary and methods of comics to be able to follow him. However, McCloud does not use any of the bizarre or chaotic panel layouts made popular by many of today’s comic book artists; if you could read the Sunday Calvin and Hobbes, you should have no problem with either book. Continue reading “Can a Hobby Make It as an Art Form?”