Retail Gods

I recently got a new tablet and have been producing work again.  However, I have around a billion projects I want to work on.  Right now, Retail Gods is on the back burner.  I want to sit down and redesign it and really figure out where it is going to go.  When I started the comic, I wanted to try writing week to week with little planning.  This experiment told me several valuable things: I can keep a weekly schedule, I can write when I have no ideas, and I really suck at on the fly no idea writing.  So I am going to sit down one of these days and plot out a solid year of strips, focus on clearer character design, and then pick it back up.  I want my work to be quality, above all else.

In the meantime, I have a sketch and photo blog over on Tumblr.  I have already posted a couple of pencil only pages for a short pulp comic I am working on, as well as some one off comics.  Go check it out, I will announce new Retail Gods news on there.  The archive will remain here.

If anyone is still reading this/ just discovering it, I appreciate your patience.

I am successfully moved.  However, as you can see, there have not been an updates.  My scanner is not working and my tablet died… so I am trying to fix the scanner.   Until then, the comic is on hold.

The chaos stick has been hitting hard lately, which I suppose will happen in the lead up to a move.  Because of this, I need to put the comic on hiatus until after the end of the month when I make the road trip that is this move.

Look for me to return in the middle of July.

I’m finally caught up on a bunch of my obligations.  Now it’s time to catch up on reviewing the books I have read over the past couple months.

20th Century Boys, Vol. 1 & 2
These really deserve their own review, and I will review the whole series when they are all released and I scrape together the money for them. Until then, this little spot will have to do. 20th Century Boys is by Naoki Urasawa, the same guy that did Monster and Pluto. After reading two volumes of each, I like this one the best. It tells the story of a group of neighborhood friends and tells the story of what their present day lives are like and how their childhoods informed it. They all wanted to grow up to save the world, but ended up with average lives and average jobs. But a symbol starts popping up in relation to a growing doomsday cult. It is the long forgotten icon of their childhood club. Now this group of friends is slowly becoming involved in an end day conspiracy and may get their chance to save the world.

The Eternal Smile
The Eternal Smile is a collection of three short stories by Derek Kirk Kim and Gene Luen Yang. Yang brought me in for this after I read American Born Chinese, but both authors are phenomenal storytellers. The three stories focus on the worlds we create and how we live with them. The first is the story of a fantasy prince investigating the mysterious appearance of a soda bottle in his realm. The second is the story of a Scrooge McDuck style frog who starts a religion around an eternal smile that appears in the sky. The las is about a woman who falls for the African Prince that emails her asking for money. It is this final one that I found most beautiful, because it did not deal with a slowly crumbling illusion, but rather with a willfully built and forcefully lived one.

Library Wars: Love & War, Vol. 1
Library Wars is an interesting concept, but the focus isn’t quite where I wanted it to be. It is about a woman training to be in Japan’s Library Defense Force after a totalitarian regime begins regulating books. The task of the LDF is to preserve books and give citizens access to knowledge. I love this concept. However, the book focuses on a romance story instead of focusing its exploration on the Library War. THe romance is decently written and I will continue reading the series, but I would have prefered a more equal split. We’ll see what happens in later volumes.

Legal Drug, Vol. 1
Legal Drug is the first Clamp book I have read. It is fun and does exactly what it needs to in setting up the world. I just can’t say that I am terribly interested in continuing the story. The more distance I get from it, the more forgettable it becomes. The focus of the book is on two runaway boys who work in a pharmacy and do mysterious jobs for its owner.
Planetes, however, is a story I want more of. This book focuses on an orbital garbage collector who dreams of traveling beyond Earth’s orbit. It has several beautiful stories about the garbage crew. These job manga are incredibly interesting to me and I keep stumbling accross them. I love the idea in this one of exploring an interesting world through the lens of a garbage collector. Check it out if only for that. But the story is interesting.

Mermaid Forest, Volume 1
Mermaid Forest is the first volume in Rumiko Takahashi’s Mermaid Trilogy. You may be familiar with Takahashi because of Ranma 1/2 or Inuyasha. The gimmick in this series is that eating the flesh of a mermaid can either grant you immortality or turn you into a monster. The story focuses on a man looking for the secret of having his immortality reversed and a mermaid who he rescued from becoming a sacrifice. The interaction between the characters reminds me of what I saw in Inuyasha. I am interested in reading the rest eventually, but am not rushing out to track them down.

Mercury
Mercury is a beautiful book from Hope Larson. Larson is one of those creators who I now have to tack down everything she has done. The book is masterfully laid out to track the parallel stories of Tara, a girl whose beloved house has recently burned down and is now living with family, and Josey, a girl in 1859 whose father recently found gold on his property. The two stories blend together creating a beautiful coming of age story. And the ending works amazingly well.

Naruto Vols. 1 – 6
I came by these in a huge box of manga that I bought to trade in at a used book store. I figured that if I had the first 12, I should give them a read if only because of their popularity. And the first volume had me hopeful. It was a succinct story in an interesting world. However, the rest of the volumes have been incredibly decompressed storytelling and messy action sequences. The story has barely progressed and the humor that was present in the first volume mostly fades away. That said, the series does have its moments of good solid story. It just doesn’t have enough of them for me to read the fifty-something volumes that are currently out.

Okay, that’s it for now. I’ll have more for you soon.

As earlier posts have said, I was at Intervention this past weekend. If you weren’t, well, shame on you. It was awesome.

This was my first convention on the creator’s side of the booth and it was a brilliant one for that. There was not a lot of traffic because we were competing with the Small Press Expo. But this did allow all of the creators a chance to wander around a talk with each other. Everyone was very supportive of the various projects that were floating around.

On top of that, there were a great array of panels and events. I didn’t take advantage of many of the ones during the day, as I was tethered to my booth, but there were panels on most every aspect of webcomics and a zombie LARP going on. At night things got especially awesome with programs like Cosplay Burlesque and Super Art Fight – Uncensored. Both were amazing events that you should check out if you ever get the chance. If Jamie Noguchi is at the Super Art Fight, fear for your brain, however. And ask him about Puppy Cow.

Of course the best part about the convention was meeting several amazing creators. My booth-mates were CyberGen 2027, Tony D., and Jennifer Smith. I have to thank Megami Jadeheart for buying one of my stuffed penguins and wandering around the con with it tucked into her cleavage on Saturday. I also need to thank Eric Menge for sending quite a few people my way and for buying a hat. And there are many others whose names I have to be pull off of the business cards and post cards that I gathered during the con. I will probably be talking about several of the comics I discovered in the coming weeks.

And if it is at all possible, I will be attending Intervention again next year. Thank you to Oni and Harknell and the rest of the organizers.