MonkeyBrain Comics: Worth Your Money!

On this blog I’ve spent a bit of time talking about the potential for web-based comics, but also my personal romanticism for print media. I’ve even stated that I can’t yet bring myself to pay money for a digital product. That has all changed, however, with the recent introduction of Chris Roberson and Allison Baker’s MonkeyBrain Comics. MonkeyBrain is a creator owned digital comics line that currently has 6 comics for sale through ComiXology. Initially, I thought that all of this emphasis on digital delivery for sale was misdirected and that the industry should be focused on unique digital presentation and production; that was because the trends had been to offer digital comics same date and price as their print counterparts.  The real genius of MonkeyBrain comics is that they are delivering original creator owned comics in a digital-only format, but one still based around traditional comic design paradigms, for only $.99 -$1.99. What this does is enable creators to more or less have total freedom over content and deadlines, receive 90% of the profits, and yet still find publication through a venue with substantial marketing and administrative clout. It’s so simple a model that it’s astounding that it hasn’t been created before.

Most of the six titles that have been released so far fall under the literary fantasy category, with a little bit of superhero and sci-fi thrown in. In general the titles are fun and intellectually stimulating, but accessible to young adult audiences and up. MonkeyBrain came to my attention after I read a whole slew of rave reviews for Roberson’s own comic Edison Rex. I didn’t get the “digital-only” memo so I pored over the shelves at my local comic shop, confounded by its absence until I got home and did a Google search and found out what was up. I wound up on the MonkeyBrain website, read the descriptions for each of the other comics and, to my own surprise, decided to try out all six. I’m glad I did and I am certain that I will continue reading each series.

Edison Rex is a clever and emotional take on the supervillain / superhero relationship that asks the questions: What would happen if the villain won? How would they find purpose? And how would they deal with their newfound responsibility? It is an intriguing treatment of a relationship nearly as old as comics and it is excellently drawn by Dennis Culver. Four of the books fall squarely in the literary fantasy genre: Aesop’s Ark, in which animals on the ark exchange fables during the flood;  Amelia Cole and the Unknown World, in which a teenage girl splits her time between the magical world and the non-magical world, only to be catapulted into a new and unfamiliar world from which she can’t return; Wander: Olive Hopkins and the Ninth Kingdom, in which a failed grad student goes on a bender and wakes up in a world built out of fantasy clichés; and October Girl, in which a girl meets her imaginary friend, for real. If some of these premises may seem unoriginal or overused, don’t be fooled, each issue is well crafted and was clearly a labor of love. I continue to be amazed by how easily a creator’s genuine enthusiasm transfers on to the page. My personal favorite is Bandette a sleek and sexy espionage / action story about a modern-day robin hood and her network of accomplices. This title was written by the husband and wife team of Paul Tobin and Coleen Coover. The story is action packed and filled with delightful lighthearted fun while the artwork radiates an electrical excitement.

I think the approach that Roberson and Baker are taking here is quite commendable. Roberson has said that they aren’t really listening to pitches or requesting particular projects, rather talking to creators they admire and asking them what they want to do. I think it’s also worth noting that 4 out of the 6 titles so far feature female lead characters and about a quarter of the credited creators are women. Though I haven’t actually researched this, I feel pretty certain that those statistics put MonkeyBrain far ahead of most other publishers in terms of gender diversity. Apparently they have an impressive 30 projects already in different stages of production and with that kind of volume you can bet that MonkeyBrain will be a force to be reckoned with.

 

Check out MonkeyBrain’s official website at: http://www.monkeybraincomics.com/

And read the transcript of MonkeyBrain’s San Diego Comic Con Panel here: http://www.newsarama.com/comics/sdcc-2012-monkeybrain-comics.html

 

Read Creator-Owned Heroes!

I am in many ways a romantic when it comes to print media, though I try to fight this tendency knowing that our society is making an unstoppable forward march into a digital world. Even I, through my clouded perception, can honestly see so much of the positive potential this shift has in store. I was, however, still surprised and excited when I first caught wind of, Creator-Owned Heroes the new collaborative project from Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Steve Niles, along with others, being published through Image Comics. I first heard about this project, not through Comic Shop News, or from my local retailer, or even in an advertisement in another monthly book, I heard about it on some comics website or another (though I can’t remember specifically which one), which really brings me to my point: despite the fact that it is backed by an established publisher and has a decidedly pro-look, this magazine is essentially a throwback to the indie fanzines of yore, which the wide reach of the blogosphere has more or less eradicated with a few remarkable exceptions.

The concept is straightforward, but enticing. Each issue features two 11-page ongoing creator-owned comics, along with a slew of other material ranging from interviews to op-eds all with the intention of promoting and supporting not just the creators themselves, but the whole concept of creator-owned comics. Last week marked the second issue of Creator-Owned Heroes and already, I am pleased to say, I see substantial growth in the content and execution of this magazine. First I am going to take some time to review the non-story content of the magazine.

First up is the interview. An interview with a noteworthy member of the comics community has been a staple of the first two issues and the creators seem to view it as a cornerstone of the publication since it is has been the only content, other than the comics featured prominently on both covers. Issue number one included an interview with Neil Gaiman. I certainly see the benefit of putting the name of such a rockstar of the industry on the cover to help boost some first issue sales, and it was a fun interview, but I did find myself asking, “OK, so it’s Neil Gaiman, but what’s the point of putting an interview with him in this magazine? What comics fan is not already acquainted with his work and why should I pay $3.99 for it rather than read one of dozens of interviews I could easily find with a simple Google search? This is really the important question that this magazine’s success hinges on: what can it provide, in this day and age, that can’t be found for free and immediate consumption all over the World Wide Web? This issue, I think stepped it up a notch by featuring an interview with Paul Pope, an indie comics maverick responsible for Heavy Liquid, 100%, and one of the less conventional, more memorable Batman interpretations Batman: Year 100. Pope is an underexposed writer/artist who’s every word is not instantly reported through sites like Bleeding Cool and Newsarama.  He is a creator who I had never read an interview with and who fits the spirit of the book exceptionally well. The interview itself was a nice mix of nuts and bolts comics industry fair about his working habits and inspiration with some more “out of left field” type questions not found as frequently in your typical interview. This makes for a fun read, but it’s also fair to say that some of the non-sequitur style questions posed gave nice insights into Pope’s personal values and attitudes.

Much of the content of both issues has been made up of opinion pieces written by Palmiotti, Niles, et. al. that I don’t want do injustice to by calling rants, but have lacked a certain focus and have seemed a little bit pre-occupied with hammering home the idea of creator-owned work. I think it’s typical of new publications to spend some time emphasizing their mission statement and it can be difficult to bring outside voices into a publication that hasn’t fully taken root yet. I also appreciate the fact that much of the comics reading public may have a genuine need for some creator-owned comics 101 to help them fully understand the concept and the value of this approach. That being said, I hope the content continues to branch out to other writers and that the focus in individual articles begins to narrow within the context of creator-owned publishing.

My favorite piece in each issue has been what I am going to call the “outside of the box” article. Issue number one featured an interview and photo-shoot with a cosplayer who had put together a costume based on Trigger Girl 6, the titular character from the Palmiotti / Gray / Noto comic. This article was fun for the geek in me who loves to see comics characters come to life in all their black-leathered glory, but I think it was also successful in exploring a comics-culture phenomenon that is not often looked at from the creative end, and hopefully encouraged readers to exercise their own creative muscles when it comes to cosplaying. Issue number two went in an even less conventional direction by featuring an interview conducted by Jimmy Palmiotti with his friend Victoria Pal, an LA area personal trainer. I will admit when I first saw this piece I thought “boy, they’ve already run out of material so they’re calling in personal favors to fill space.” I really shouldn’t be so cynical, but I learned my lesson and it won’t happen again, at least not in relation to Creator-Owned Heroes. The interview fit because it was predicated around the idea of recognizing those who have taken risks to make alternative career choices that have paid off. In addition to learning about a very interesting person, the interview left me motivated and inspired. That’s what I like most about the tone of this magazine, despite at times drifting dangerously close to desperation and crankiness, it manages to, on the whole, create an atmosphere of excitement and encouragement. It is all about empowering readers to be active members of the comics community as consumers, of course, but also as creators, cosplayers, spokespersons, and essentially as fans. This is the real answer to what this magazine can deliver that the internet cannot, or at least has not so far. Fan-interaction sites exist, and people are certainly talking about these topics, but there is also something to be said for the solitary experience of reading a print magazine and being given the space to let these ideas percolate without the constant presence of message boards and user-comments that can quickly turn a good thought into a divisive battle before anybody has really internalized what’s being presented.

The comics aren’t bad either. I was already familiar with most of the creators involved before reading their stories in the first issue. I’ve enjoyed their output and respect them as creators, but most of what I have read was in a mainstream context so it was exciting for me to read some of their more personal output. Both stories are a lot of fun so far, and I have really enjoyed them equally, though they are very different. This publication is first and foremost about the unadulterated fun of engaging with the comics medium as both creators and readers so it is fitting that both stories are visceral off-the wall thrill-rides. American Muscle, written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Kevin Mellon is a post-apocalyptic road adventure about a band of runaways who have fled the closed compound in which they live in hopes of finding something else for them in the wide-open world. So far they have found only devastation and radioactive mutants! The artwork is gritty and minimalist with just the right splash of gore and camp. Though it treads well-worn territory, the well-developed characters, break neck pace, and unbridled enthusiasm lends a freshness to the execution. The second story, Trigger Girl 6 by Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Phil Noto is an espionage thriller set in either a near future or alternate world. This story features a cool aesthetic that mixes spy motifs, science fiction, and a twist of social satire. This story hits the ground…err… glass…err… undercarriage of a jet… running with no exposition or background. The reader is immediately mesmerized by the high stakes of the action and by a dozen questions including: who is Trigger Girl? Why is everyone either terrified of her or infatuated with her? And why does she want to kill the president? Eagerly awaited answers seem to be coming next issue. With two short stories that feel like issue-length narratives and loads of extra content, Creator-Owned Heroes is really a steal at $3.99. This book is a spark that comics needs right now and I look forward to watching it grow in the coming months.

Weird Reading

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer have a new anthology out this week called The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories and Jeff is doing some heavy promoting from his blog, Ecstatic Days:

Ecstatic Days » Blog Archive » Release Week for The Weird Anthology: How You Can Help.

I’ve been following the production of this antho for some time now and it’s quite exciting to see it make its debut. I love the editing work that this power couple of weird fiction have done. Their books always strikes me as being a step above the average SF anthology in content, conception, and execution, often balancing their story selections with critical essays and author forums. They put as much thought into the design and layout of their books as they do the selection of stories, giving these artifacts a cultural weight not often found in genre anthologies.

The Weird is a uniquely ambitious project, collecting over 100 stories that span the history of strange fiction. It represents authors from the mainstream and the underground, the past and the present, English originals and foreign translations. In addition to Jeff’s blog, the editors have also been promoting this on their site, The Weird Fiction Review by posting a slew of original essays and stories.

Of course buying this book from your local bookseller is ideal, but if that isn’t an option there is a really nice price on Amazon.com right now. For me, this will be a book to read through slowly and thoughtfully in bite size increments, letting each new story and author marinate in my brain; a long term investment if you will. This is the kind of book that probably won’t get a massive marketing campaign or excessive shelf space at the Barnes and Noble, so it’s up to us as readers to pick up copies and make sure that this book sees the success that such an audacious project deserves.

Explore the Past and Celebrate the Future With Steampunk Magazine #8

Steampunk Magazine #8

Edited by Margaret Killjoy

Combustion Books

I am the type of person that likes to read every single page of a magazine, but I don’t necessarily read them cover to cover. With Steampunk Magazine I like to read the nonfiction cover to cover and then go back to the beginning and read the fiction entries. For whatever reason, maybe negligence, maybe impatience, I left the “From the Editor” section for the very end. In this introduction the returning editor, Margaret Killjoy, identified a possible theme for this issue as “mischief and criminality,” citing articles on 19^th century street slang, girl gangs of New York, the sky pirate archetype, trespassing strategies, and DIY laudanum production. Steampunk Magazine has often employed loose themes in the past and while reading this issue I found myself searching for a theme – and couldn’t come up with anything. On first glance the contents appeared to be an enthusiastic but eclectic mix of anachronistic exploration and exposition. Maybe I missed the obvious, but perhaps my lack of perception actually signifies something uniquely compelling about the steampunk subculture and this publication. Steampunk at its best is about re-appropriating the seedy, the repressed, and the maligned aspects of 19^th and 20^th century culture for the purpose of revising and reimagining our understanding of what the world has been and what the world could be. Steampunk is not solely concerned with the illegal or the deviant, but when you look at the sum total of the above topics we see issues that touch on class divisions, narrative traditions, linguistic constructions, and social conventions or mores. It’s the examination of these topics that give steampunk much of its substance. It’s a wonderful thing that there is a venue in which the discussion of such concepts feels commonplace and appropriate rather than exceptional or laborious.

So now that we’ve delved further into the nitty-gritty than I anticipated in the first paragraph, I realize that many readers may still be wondering, what is Steampunk Magazine all about? It’s a unique artifact to find today in many ways. A dedicated print magazine, also available for free download, Steampunk Magazine is unapologetically political with a heavy anarchistic tendency – but in the true spirit of anarchism, Steampunk Magazine encourages the free discussion of ideas and perspectives, the political element is often inviting and never alienating. An alchemical allegory comes to mind when I try to describe how the magazine functions: the editors take the genre and subculture and boil it; they boil off the all of the superficial aesthetic and the genre clichés until they are left with only the essential salts, if you will. But then the salts are rehydrated, given new life, and reshaped to take as many forms as possible, all in accordance with the principle of solve and coagula.

I am always floored by the quality of the content in this magazine and this, being the beefiest issue yet, was no different. The features range stylistically. “Toussaint Louverture (was being really nice to Napoleon When he compared himself to him)” by Miriam Rosenberg Rocek (A.K.A. Steampunk Emma Goldman) is casual and quirky but absolutely filled to the brim with information; “Damn My Blood: A Critical Look at Sky Pirates” by Mikael Ivan Eriksson is enlightening while bordering on the indignant; while the editorial “Why Steampunk (Still) Matters” by James Schafer and Kate Franklin is a pure genre think piece worthy of any literary publication.

It’s that last piece that really set the tone for me this issue. In a world where glue on gears can be purchased just about anywhere and Victorian teen romances fill the shelves in the YA section of Barnes and Noble, is it really relevant to advocate for the radical and revolutionary potential of the genre? In fact, by supporting a genre that has, in many ways, been engulfed by main stream disposable consumerism aren’t we just supporting the enemy? Well…yes…no… it’s complicated. I think. Shafer and Franklin ultimately decided that “yes, steampunk still matters because it allows us to imagine change, and that is the most important step in ultimately making such change a reality.”

Steampunk really is uniquely capable of allowing us to imagine this other world in a way that other speculative fiction subgenres are not. It operates in a world so close to ours that the differences are accentuated and the implications can be profound, however it is also a world that is distant enough, and removed enough that we have that space to imagine. In other SF genres the temptation is to speculate on the future, and if it is a political speculation, with the exception of the most optimistic authors, it tends to be pretty bleak. That’s all well and good, but as the article points out, “one can only go so far by listing all the worlds we don’t want to create.” On the other hand, Novels that the authors consider to be shining examples of the imaginative potential of steampunk include China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. These are excellent examples and good places for any burgeoning steampunk to start. Reading this essay, I found myself trying to think of other books that effectively imagine new worlds and offer alternate uses of technology and radical systems of social organization. The two that immediately come to mind are Ursula K. Leguin’s fantastic far future utopia Always Coming Home and Margaret Atwood’s recent The Year of the Flood, which features a group of social and religious dissidents in a corporate dystopian landscape. Neither of these are steampunk works per se, but they both portray societies with an anachronistic flare and explore alternate or repurposed technology in a way that places them far enough under the umbrella that fans of the genre would accept and enjoy them. It seems like utopias often get written off as naïve or sentimental, and they can be, compared to their often realistic and cynical dystopian cousins, but a quality utopia has limitless inspirational potential. It’s often a much more daring approach to take. I would love to hear from readers about other utopian, or radical alternate world novels and stories that you have come across, because I know they are out there and we should be celebrating them!

This issue includes 7 pieces of fiction. None of it is your cookie cutter steampunk and diversity abounds, here are some of my personal favorites: “Scouts of the Pyre” is an alternate history civil war story that features zombies, the black arts, and a giant mechanical bird; “The Paraclete of Pierre-Simon Laplace,” is a semi-psychedelic meditation on time, space, and theoretical physics; “The Mechanic” presents a compelling love story against the backdrop of industrial-political sabotage and a sentient, but insane, subterranean machine. The magazine also features an English language translation of “Lichens,” originally published in the Italian anarchist fiction zine Ruggine. You’re sure to find something that satisfies your sense of adventure, curiosity, or intellect – depending on what you’re looking for.

Below are links related this review:

Steampunk Magazine’s website, where you can purchase issue #8, the collected volume of issues #1-7 or download each of them for free, can be found here –

http://www.steampunkmagazine.com/

Here is the site for Combustion Books, the current publisher for the magazine, where you can also purchase the issues as well as few other steampunk artifacts –

http://www.combustionbooks.org/

And finally, here is a link to Steampunk Emma Goldman’s blog –

http://anachro-anarcho.blogspot.com/

 

The Latest From Jeff Vandermeer and Why I Am Thrilled

Author Jeff Vandermeer posted this on his blog a few days ago. It is an announcement and preview of his latest, just completed novel: Annihilation.

Ecstatic Days » Blog Archive » Annihilation: New Novel Finished.

This post got me excited for a number of reasons. First, Jeff Vandermeer is a terrific writer of exceptional inventiveness and creativity. Most of his work in novels has revolved around his Ambergris cycle, a series of loosely connected novels and novellas set in the fictional city of Ambergris, a colonial port city infested with a subterranean race of dispossessed mushroom people. The new novel, Annihilation, marks his first since the completion of the Ambergris cycle with Finch in 2009 and I am thrilled to see where his mind has taken him since his departure from that fantastic world. On his blog, Vandermeer wrote the following description:

“Annihilation is about an expedition into a strange quarantined wilderness, narrated by the expedition’s biologist. I don’t really know how to describe it, except that it in part transforms my love of the wilderness of north Florida, especially the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, into something much stranger and more sinister.”

This blurb doesn’t give too much away, nor does the three paragraph sample that is included with his post. Nonetheless, the concept is intriguing and my creative mind is already beginning to wander through the weird wonders that may be in store

I expect it will be some time before excited readers see the published novel considering that as of this post it was still at the first readers stage and hasn’t even been shopped around to publishers yet. This brings me to my next point: Vandermeer is one of the few SF novelists whose new works I really get excited for even before the initial reviews and solicitations. This is partly due to the qualities of his work that I have already touched on briefly, but it’s also due to the cult of personality that he has managed to cultivate over the past half decade or so. He strikes me  as a throwback to the types of writers who came to prominence in the pre-digital SF revolution of the 60s and 70s while also representing a rare example of a writer who manages to succeed and flourish as such because of the digital age rather than despite it. Writers like Michael Moorcock and Samuel R. Delany not only wrote challenging conceptual SF, but were also passionate and vocal members of the SF community, constantly pushing the boundaries of their work and encouraging other writers to do the same. In addition to their novels they were editors, critics, spokesmen, and did each in the mainstream as well as in the world of fanzines and conventions. Jeff Vandermeer seems to have one foot in every SF circle that exists, editing many unique anthologies (The New Weird, Steampunk, The Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases), teaching at Shared Worlds, and writing reviews for a number of sources. At least from where I stand, he seems to bring the same passion and enthusiasm to all of these endeavors as he does to his fiction. But he also pushes forward. He has figured out how to make a career as a writer in the cutthroat world of digital media, something he has also shared with the community in his nonfiction guidebook Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips fo the 21st Century Writer. The latter accomplishment goes beyond the simple fact of his professional success; I believe his real accomplishment is in reestablishing the values of those earlier generations of writers in a way that is pertinent and accessible to the modern age.

The following example should support this idea and hopefully return this train of thought back to the original topic, Jeff Vandermeer’s recent announcement. There was a time when SF fans were intimately involved in the culture; when the line between fans and creators was far less delineated, when fans wrote and published fanzines that were literary achievements in their own right. Occasionally these publications would become catalysts to the development of writers’ circles, story ideas would be shared. It was a time when the process of creation was more transparent. Novels would often be published in serialized formats before being fully compiled, or even completely written. Fans were encouraged to analyze the differences, additions, omissions, and creative choices that were made. I remember reading an essay by Samuel R. Delany (though I can’t recall which one off the top of my head) in which he recounts the process of comparing the serialized version of a novel with the final published version. He systematically and meticulously critiqued and analyzed all of the revisions that appeared between the drafts. Today this process is highly veiled by the contemporary publishing system. However, there are platforms for this; all of the social media that is usually reserved for promotion has so much untapped potential to create genuine creative reader/author interaction. It’s exactly that potential that Jeff Vandermeer seems to revel in while many (though certainly not all) of his  contemporaries ignore it. Vandermeer has, in the past, frequently used his blog and Facebook page to post excerpts of drafts, alternate versions of his writing, as well as perspectives on his process. These items create a sense of reader involvement and co-ownership of a work that, for my money, overwhelmingly trumps a positive blurb or review from even the biggest names in the industry. I am already excited to compare the first page of Annihilation with the draft version that Vandermeer posted last week and to find out how it diverges from the narrative that I have already begun anticipating with bated breath and I am looking forward to following this novels journey from draft to published book almost as much as I look forward to the book itself.