Ryan Estrada's new Kickstarter looks kind of awesome.

Ryan Estrada, that guy who I'm still not convinced is real, has started another Kickstarter campaign and it looks kind of awesome.



The idea? Broken Telephone, a set of eighteen comics, illustrated by eighteen different artists released at a rate of one every two weeks and all that it'll cost you to get them? One measly little dollar.

The eighteen stories are all connected with each character playing the role of protagonist in one comic and villain in another. Eighteen dollars will get you a nineteenth comic in the series and pay an extra six dollars on top and you get another five fortnightly comics drawn by Mr Estrada himself on top of that! Isn't that a bargain?

It really is.

There are even five $200 rewards where you can get the original art for one of those last five comics, two of which are already taken. That is amazingly cool.

So go throw a load of money at him, he'll give you a bunch of cool comics and everybody wins! It'll be brilliant. Trust me.

Comics I Read Last Week - Week 9

Welcome to the slightly belated ninth week of Comics I Read Last Week, the imaginatively titled blog feature where I talk about, well, comics I read last week.

Definition of a Dead Body
Jang Young (translated by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada)

Definition of a Dead Body is one of the big digital pile of books I got as part of the last Whole Story bundle. It's strange, sad and sweet and one of those books I finish reading and just really don't know what to take away from it.

The book contains a few different stories which, unsurprisingly, are all about death in one way or another and also love and friendship and it's actually a really confusing book for me to write about.

All the stories in the book are related and connect together in way that might not seem obvious to start with.

The stories vary in style visually, using whatever works best for each situation, so you get pages like the one the image above is from, and yes that one is about a fish, and also pages that look like the one below.

So yeah, it's a weird comic. Good, but weird and I'm really not sure what to make of it. I plan on giving it another read sometime and see what I make of it then.

Plague!: The Musical
Ryan Estrada

The other Whole Story comic I read this week.

Plague!: The Musical is the shortest comic out of this week's lot, running at a tiny six pages. That's 17 panels and a title image. It's less a full musical and more a single song really, but I'll forgive him, because it is a really good little (emphasis on the little).

It's short, but it's good.

Tokyo Mew Mew volume 3
Mia Ikumi, Reiko Yoshida

Last week I talked about volumes one and two of Tokyo Mew Mew, so this week it's volume three. As I said last week, the plot is absurd. Aliens are trying to take over the world by turning animals into monsters and two strange men who own a cafe decided that a great way of combating this would be to zap the animals with the combined DNA of five different endangered species. It didn't really work out though, because an earthquake disrupted their experiment and they accidentally zapped five girls who just happened to be stood near each other somewhere close to the cafe and now they all have superpowers accessed by shouting seemingly random word combinations and transforming costumes and for the most part they do what the two strange men with the cafe tell them because, hey why not?

Oh and they all work at the cafe, even the rich one because, hey why not?

In this one we get to meet some more of the alines trying to conquer the planet, find out what's so special about this little spinning lump of rock and stuff and the Mew Mew's learn that they really shouldn't trust their strange bosses when a day off on a rediculously huge private boat turns out to be a mission in disguise.

Oh yes, and Ichigo turns into a cat.

One of the big problems this title has, the biggest problem in my opinion is that the people over at TokyoPop seem to have no idea what they're doing. Take these two images from the recap at the start of the book for example.

One of these characters is a hyperactive acrobat called Pudding and the other is a famous model. Somehow someone at TokyoPop got a bit confused about which one is which.

And then we have this panel only 18 pages in.

I think someone got a bit confused between what Ichigo there is saying and what's just going through her head. Either that or she's even weirder than she seems.

Anyway, if you can get over the occasional mistakes on the English language team's part and don't mind your comics being more than a bit daft then give it a go.

And that's all for this week. Yes, I promised some Daredevil too, but I've been kind of busy and didn't manage to finish reading it, so...

Come back next week for some Daredevil (finally), X-Files, The Beano, Book 1 of Pita-Ten and something else probably too.

Comics I Read Last Week - Week 5

Welcome to Comics I Read Last Week, where I talk about comics that I read last week. It's pretty simple really.

First up...

88 Blues
Nam Dong Yoon (Translated by Kim Hyun Sook)

88 Blues is another one I got through The Whole Story and I think the opening page sums the comic up pretty well:

"In Korea the current generation of college students face fierce competition for jobs. Even when they finish their schooling, many will be lucky to find jobs that pay $1000 a month. After taxes and deductions, that leaves them living off of $880 per month. This is the 88 Generation. This is their story."

Where Son of a Father felt a little hit and miss to me, I found 88 Blues much more entertaining.

It's a pretty short one, 27 pages including covers and title page, but it's really good and think the shortness works for it.

The Real Ghostbusters #108, 119, 124, 135, 136, 137, 140 
John Marshall, Dave Harwood, Glenn Dakin, Brian Williamson, Gordon Robson, Stephen Baskerville, Lesley Dalton, Stuart Bartlett, Deborah Tate, Dan Abnett, Jinny McKenzie, Anthony Larcombe, Steve White, Stu B, Stuart Place, Dave Hine, John Freeman, Zed, John Burns, Anthony Williams, Glib, Stuart Place, Phil Gascoine, Spolly, Emma Marshall, John Carnell, Tony O'Donnell, Ian Rimmer, John Carnell, Hel, Lynn White,

That is a big damn list of people, but I suppose that's what you get with seven issues with only three of them being consecutive. At least they're all from 1990 and 1991. That's something at least.

Like the Slimer! comics I mentioned last week these were published by Marvel in the UK and Now Comics in the US. They even have a half page version of the very Beano like strips from the Slimer! comic and issue 140 contains a five page Slimer! (complete with the ! in the header image on the first page), with appearances by two of Slimer's supporting cast from that title.

Other than that each issue has one or two longer comics, a prose story, a usually clearly made up feature called Dead True, a one page article about a real haunting or two, a summary  from the Ghostbusters case files and a section called Spengler's Spirit Guide, which varies between a massive outpouring of terrible puns and ridiculous wordplay...

"Doctor Sigmund Frayed, the

noted psychologist (it says

here in my notes), analysed

Glossop's case and told him

that basically what he had

was a leather-effect

Sampsonite valise with built

-in castors and towing strap."

...and a heavily Douglas Adams inspired piece on the nature of wishes. There' also a feature in some of them called Winston's Diary. I'll  assume I don't have to explain what that one is.

Issue 136 is an odd one. The main story, titled The Return of the Frightful Four, features the return of three of the Frightful Four and their clever scheme to release their fourth member from the containment facility. Where things get weird is when one of the team try tearing a hole in reality leading into the containment facility and instead comes out on another page of the comic.

To get out of the scene they're in the characters climb right out of the panel and into another, which is already odd and fourth wall breaking, but it gets odder, because they don't just jump around in the story. They end up elsewhere in the issue as well, appearing in Winston's Diary and the Spirit Guide. It's pretty funky.

Other stories include a dead tennis player turning up several years late for Wimbledon, a wishing well that actually works, a mysterious door that appears in someone's house, a party in the underworld, an inter-dimensional portal that just happens to be in the Ghostbusters' fire station, a sleepwalking spectre, a possessed bicycle, a very quickly scuppered revenge scheme by the son of Gozo, son of Goza (y'know, the one who unleashed a giant marshmallow on New York) and the appearance of a couple of ageing in superheroes, one of which looks more than a little like the Question.

They're fun comics and I wish I still had more of them.

Frank: The Comic Strip
Ryan Estrada

Frank the Goat is the official mascot of Live Journal. Once upon a time Ryan Estrada wrote and drew his official comic. The comic's in four chapters. Chapter one, Ballard tells the tale of how Frank got his job in t he form of a song performed by Frank himself.

I like the fact that this chapter's drawn in two different styles. Current day Frank is drawn in the same style as the other chapters, while scenes from the past are done in a very different one.

Chapter two is all about Frank's fancy date with a sheep called Meme (pronounced Mimi). She has a very odd way of talking. Chapter three is a good old fashioned murder mystery. Seven characters who (mostly) don't know each other are invited to dinner only to find that their host is dead, but who did it? Finally in chapter four Frank (and a bunch of characters from the other chapters) have to deal with a cursed tag.

It's a really neat comic and you can read it here.

Now, I did mention last week that I'd be covering volume one of Battle Angel Alita as well. Well, that was the plan last Wednesday when I knew where it was. See, I'd only read twenty or so pages at the time and, well, um... I lost it. I'm sure I'll find it again though.

Anyway, come back next week for more reviews hopefully including that temporarily misplaced copy of Battle Angel Alita.

Comics I Read Last Week - Week 4

Welcome to week four of my weekly blog feature "Comics I Read Last Week" in which I talk about the comics I read last week. Pretty simple really.

Bone Volume 2
Jeff Smith

I talked about the first volume of Bone back during the first one of these. I resisted the urge to read the second volume straight after, seeing as it likely won't be until the end of the year before I get to read the rest and I wanted to make it last at least a bit.

Bone is a lot of fun. The protagonists are fun. The monsters are fun, both genuinely threatening and fantastic comic relief at the same time. The cow race is brilliant. The whole thing is just a great read and a whole lot of fun.


Plagued
Ryan Estrada

Cartoon Coup
Ryan Estrada

There's a bit of dialogue in an episode of Jonathan Creek where a publisher finds out that the author she's talking to didn't make Jonathan up, but has really been working alongside him to solve murders. The moment she finds out that Jonathan is a real person he's suddenly a much less believable character.

I'm not entirely sure that Ryan Estrada is a real person. I mean, I've interacted with him on Twitter, he's commented on one of my comics,  but I'm still not entirely convinced that he isn't a character out of a series of ever more over the top comedy movies. The kind that start off semi-believable but by the third instalment the main character's found himself sleeping in the open during a typhoon and accidentally entering a foreign country as an illegal alien.

Did you know that Ryan Estrada has slept out in the open through two typhoons and once entered Burma illegally? Like I said, I'm not sure if I really, truly believe that Ryan Estrada is real.

Plagued by Ryan Estrada is the true story of how he survived a disaster that mostly existed within his own mind and also the true story of a man who survived a real one not long before that. It features a plague of insects, frogs falling from the sky and incident with a naked man running around in the middle of the night. And it's a true story.

Cartoon Coup is a collection of different stories including those two typhoon incidents, the time he set himself on fire, the time he found himself in the middle of a corporate coup orchestrated by crazy people he'd never met before, the time a homeless man offered to kill for him and the first time he ever got paid for producing comics.

Ryan Estrada is a character out of a series of increasingly ridiculous comedy movies, only the movies are comics and non-fiction.

They're also very good.

You can check out his comics over at ryanestrada.com.

Duckula #5-7
Various (uncredited)

Yep, more stories about the vegetarian vampire duck. I think I said pretty much all there is to say about the comic as a whole last week. These three issues are very much more of the same. There's one story in issue six that's a bit disappointing, like someone had a great idea for a story, didn't really know where to go with it, but went ahead and wrote it anyway.

The Marlin the Magician story that started in issue one wraps up in issue seven, which is lucky really because my copy of issue eight has been missing for years, though I do have issues nine to twelve still., so that's good.

Dennis the Menace annual 1976
Various (uncredited)

This book is old and smells funny.

Finally here's one that's seven years older than I am. I can't remember if I got this one for a pound in a charity shop or for 50p in a different charity shop. Either way it was a bargain.

Dennis seems to have stayed largely the same since he was created back in 1951 and many of the strips in this book could easily be redrawn for publishing today with very few changes. The art however...

Yeah, some of the art is interesting to say the least.

It's basically what you'd expect from Dennis and Gnasher with the exception that almost every strip ends with a panel of Dennis getting hit with a slipper. Dennis's dad become a much better character when the editors decided he couldn't just hit Dennis whenever he thought he'd done something wrong. He had to start actually thinking when it came to punishments and that always makes for a much more interesting strip.

Bizarrely in one story Dennis questions why his dad bought a dog lead, because they don't have a dog. They don't have a dog? Did he forget poor old Gnasher?

Dennis is Gnasher's favourite person in the world and he forgot he has a dog.

Either this strip is from before Gnasher was introduced in 1968 or that's just mean.

Slimer! #9, 12 and 13
Hilarie Staton, Howard Bender, Michael Hawkins, John Stangeland, Joseph Allen, Tammy Daniel, Michele Mach, Katherine Llewellyn, Tony Caputo, Gordon Morison, Dan Nakrosis, Mark Braun,

Slimer! was published by Marvel UK in the UK and Now Comics in the US. These issues are all from 1990 and each one contains one eight to nine page story, two short stories and an unrelated single page comic called The Daily Howl about a newspaper by the same name staffed by various horror movie monsters with help from Douglas the tea boy, the one and only human staff member.

Being a go-fer is a dangerous job.

The Daily Howl and all but one of the six shorter Slimer comics come across a bit DC Thompson-like to me. There's something very Beano and Dandy about them. Obviously that's not a complaint, because I love those comics. It's these pages, and a spot the difference where Slimer has great big piles of bangers and mash that look like they came straight out of a Bash Street Kids strip, that make me think that it was actually Marvel UK as opposed to Now who were responsible for this comic.

None of these comics are at all weird.

Actually, I do have one complaint about one of those stories and it's, well is it just me that thinks that maybe someone should have thought twice about putting in a strip with this as its punchline?

If I'd asked you to guess where I'd be most likely to find dodgy and kind of offensive stereotypes, a 1990s spin-off comic about a wacky sidekick ghost or a 1970s collection of strips about a juvenile delinquent would you have guessed the wacky sidekick ghost? I know I wouldn't.

The three main stories involve Slimer going up a pack of wolf ghosts, a dodgy looking pair trying to collect Slimer's slime to sell as engine coolant (they discovered it's cooling properties when one of them accidentally drove through him during a ball game) and a slightly Garfield-esque story about Slimer eating too much.

The other story is a bit of an oddity. It's the first part of a tie in with the first movie, in which Walter Peck (Yes, the man who according to the film version of Peter Venkman has no dick) is trying to ruin everything for the Ghostbusters again. Now that it's been thoroughly proven that ghosts are real and he's an imbecile he is trying to get them shut down for keeping a pet ghost around. That guy is really an arse.

What's weird about it is that it's as much a bit of prose as it is a comic. As much of the story is told in the paragraphs of text at the top of the pages as is in the actual panels. It's a really weird half hearted way of doing a comic. 

And on an unrelated note is it me or does one of the kidnappers in this panel look a bit like Andy Capp?

Join me again next Wednesday for some more Ghostbusters related stuff, volume 1 of Battle Angel Alita, 88 Blues by Nam Dong Yoon and whatever else I feel like reading between now and Sunday.

Ryan Estrada is looking for suggestions for the next Whole Story

So yeah, what the title says.

The Whole Story is a really neat idea, a really, really neat idea. Bundles of DRM free digital comics starting at a single, solitary dollar for the basic bundle (though I'm pretty sure nobody would mind if you felt like paying a whole lot more). For readers it's a good way to discover new creators and for creators it's a good way to get a whole bunch of new readers, and also some money. Everybody wins!


To quote from the last Whole Story Kickstarter:

"The Whole Story is all about digital done right. We put our time and money into offering the best first-run comics, new translations, and high quality, complete versions of old favorites. We don’t force you to read them on certain devices or in certain apps, we let you download and keep your comics forever. We don’t force you to pay more than cover price, we let you name your own price.

Our books are bundled together in pay-what-you-want collections, and every book we bring you is a complete, stand-alone story. No cliffhangers that force you to pay more to find out what happens next! You can choose between Retina-resolution PDFs (for the highest quality), Web-resolution PDFs (for easy storage), or CBZs (in both resolutions, for use in comic-reading apps), all of which are DRM-free so you can download and keep them forever."

Check out the official twitter account here for more information or if you want to submit or suggest something email Ryan Estrada at ryan@ryanestrada.com