3229.
There are a few things I've been holding back because reasons, and one of them I really regret holding back on is anything Brett Carville does.
We met him again at Artist's Alley Comic Fest. We'd met him previously at Linework NW and started liking what he did then. He showed us more of what he did, and we must say we like it much.
Life of Craig: A Planet Called Wilma is the first chapter in what promises to be a SF epic, seen through a cracked glass with a layer of satire. The story opens as we approach a desolate place of apparent doom … a planet called Wilma. The population, aside animated skeletal beasts that walk about cracking wise, are the Cougars, a line of rather grotesque female aliens, and their male counterparts, who are, well … useless.
The Cougars are dying out, with no virile-enough male to provide the sufficient spark. They have a problem, and they know it, and begin to come up with a way to solve it … they've tried every male species they can find, and none are good enough. They come from a galaxy far, far away but, as foreshadowing might suggest, not sufficiently far enough away to keep them from coming our direction. Striking out on an expedition, they depose their autocratic queen, but not before she, in an indirectly literal way, puts a stick in the spokes of the plans of the remaining Cougars … and that's where the fun really starts …
We met him again at Artist's Alley Comic Fest. We'd met him previously at Linework NW and started liking what he did then. He showed us more of what he did, and we must say we like it much.
Life of Craig: A Planet Called Wilma is the first chapter in what promises to be a SF epic, seen through a cracked glass with a layer of satire. The story opens as we approach a desolate place of apparent doom … a planet called Wilma. The population, aside animated skeletal beasts that walk about cracking wise, are the Cougars, a line of rather grotesque female aliens, and their male counterparts, who are, well … useless.The Cougars are dying out, with no virile-enough male to provide the sufficient spark. They have a problem, and they know it, and begin to come up with a way to solve it … they've tried every male species they can find, and none are good enough. They come from a galaxy far, far away but, as foreshadowing might suggest, not sufficiently far enough away to keep them from coming our direction. Striking out on an expedition, they depose their autocratic queen, but not before she, in an indirectly literal way, puts a stick in the spokes of the plans of the remaining Cougars … and that's where the fun really starts …
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| Looks like someone's not goingto be seeing Good Morning God today… |
Meanwhile, in Sarasota, Florida, our soon-to-be hero, Craig, is living, and … he's afraid … dying there as well …
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| Living the dream, such as it is, in Sarasota |
… trying to find some direction, getting his first kiss from Elizabeth, and trying to make sense of the legends that cats are killing and eating people, and how those play into his dreams.
The most remarkable thing about Brett's comic is the style. The produced book is very slick and finished, and reading it gives me the feeling that I'm reading one of those strange stories that I used to read in Heavy Metal when I was a teenager … the style really took me back. The sensibility of the story, with its grotesque characters and its compelling strangeness, could certainly have leapt out from between the pages of that magazine. It's intense, but in all the right ways.
The depth of technique and the accomplishment of the work is all too evident in the landscapes and wide views, which sort of speak for themselves, as this page shows …
The work is something that's clearly ready for prime time, and a work I'd like to keep an eye out for. Brett and his co-writer Jason Thibodeaux are clearly talents to be reckoned with, and bold enough to stand out. I hope they do.
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| A Cougar of Planet Wilma.Also, a time to worry. |
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