The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1009: Onigami #2, June 1998 (Antarctic Press Week)

I've decided to start making the pictures of covers larger. The format I've been using is no good for picking out cover detail.

Even though I had no idea what was really going on, this was a rather entertaining comic. The demonic characters in the story actually evince some compassionate behaviours, which I was fully not expecting from a pseudo-Manga like this. Usually the demons want to kill everything and then violate it. But these demons seem to care about their fellow ethereal beings, and have romantic feelings for one another. I've not idea what was going on with the police characters in the story, so instead I just read the comic as a demonic romance piece and left it at that.

The artwork is quite good, and includes some really neat panel layouts and perspectives. Michel Lacombe has a nice handle on visual storytelling, which is sometimes something of a rarity in comics published by small presses. The really gifted artists tend to graduate to the major publishers before very long.

An interesting little part of a story. More tomorrow.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1008: Betti Cozmo #1, April 1999 (Antarctic Press Week)

A rarity this week in today's comic, in that it's a first issue, so I'm actually coming into the story at the point that I ought to be. That said, I have no other issues of the series, so it's going to have to be one of those ones that simply ends in a cliffhanger forever. Probably.

As the art on the cover demonstrates, and the interior art supports, there's an interesting mix of the manga-esque and the Kirby-esque in this comic. The aliens have very distinctive Kirby features (that guy at the bottom of the cover is pretty indicative of this), but Betti herself cleaves more to the Americanized manga style that AP is known for. It's not perfect, by any means, but it's definitely offering a cool amalgam of two quite disparate styles. Though, perhaps, they're not too disparate on second thought. Both styles privilege movement, though manga movement emphasizes both small and large movements, whereas Kirby's style is more bombastic and hinges on the large movements of characters through space. There's something to both that attempts to tell the story even in the absence of words - this was necessary for the Marvel style of scripting that was the norm when Kirby was producing for them, and in the case of manga there's an equal emphasis on the story being pictorially driven as much as it is verbally. I think, anyway.

The story is okay, though nothing particularly innovative. Betti is a mercenary with a weird, frog-like sidekick, who picks up jobs from a woman who looks like a dominatrix. She's like Han Solo, but female-er. Her sidekick even speaks in an alien language that we only understand in Betti's responses to him. It was entertaining, occasionally amusing, and kind of action packed, which, really, is what one wants from a comic such as this.

To be continued.