#sff comics

[thephooka]

White Noise update - Left Unsaid 3/4

Read it here! | WN on Patreon | @hiveworks

Despite all my rage, etc

[featureenvyproductions]

here’s a bird’s eye view of my comic Eyan Eternal

For people who don't know what it is. Bc I think some of you might find it's right up your alley. Well this is an updated one anyway. I do actually have a volume of this out in print right now, but the low def, basic version is online and complete, and tbh, I just want people to read it. I took almost two years to complete this and quite literally poured every waking moment (after work and when I wasn’t fixing stuff in my house) into this to try and finish it.

Ahem

Here is one of these at a glance things! 

If that’s enough to intrigue you, take a look at my chapter masterpost which has convenient links to every chapter post so you don’t have to go figuring out where they are and what order they go in!: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/717516139934154752/eyan-eternal-tumblr-chapter-masterpost?source=share

If you like it and want to support me you can also buy a copy of the first print volume, which collects chapters 1-5 and has a smidge of bonus content (only available in the US right now, but that’s not going to be forever, and I’m working on an e-book as well): https://www.etsy.com/FeatureEnvy/listing/1447399615/eyan-eternal?utm_source=Copy&utm_medium=ListingManager&utm_campaign=Share&utm_term=so.lmsm&share_time=1683565699335

And now here is a more detailed break down if you need more info than that...

*Jonathan Frakes asks you things meme voice* have you ever wondered what you’d find if you REALLY lived forever?

Well, meet Eyan, an immortal vampire.

He’s slowly finding out the answer to that question...

...And it appears to be unbearable isolation.

Eons into the distant future, when most stars have faded in the night sky and the cosmic event horizon has confined any remaining beings to an isolated pocket of the universe, Eyan roams interstellar space in a repurposed generation ship in search of anything that could be considered alive/sentient in the way he is.

So far, he’s out of luck.

That is until he runs into an unexpected former rival on a remote planet - Zero, a sentient android he never expected to be the only other person left alive.

Well. That is, if either of them can really be considered “alive”. What does that mean anyway, when the humans who defined what it means to be alive are all gone?

This is something they’ll have to explore and define for themselves as they attempt to set aside their myriad of differences and try to work together on one of the few ways left to escape the dark fate of ultimate isolation - The Grand Encoder, a machine that can upload minds to a special medium - if it even works for them anyway. In the process, they slowly come to accept that maybe they’d had each other all wrong and weren’t seeing the bigger picture.

You may not find any action-packed Star Wars like escapades here in this sci fi drama. You also won’t find ponderings about the origins of vampires or what gave rise to robot sentience - It’s integral to the plot that these things just ARE. But you will find a thoughtful exploration of identity and how it can cause us to define ourselves and relate to (or abandon) each other depending on the framework within which we are doing that exploration and within which we are compelled to exist. It asks the question, what if the frameworks within which we defined our existence and purpose no LONGER existed...Where would we go from there?

And as two immortal guys who are the only folks left in the universe (as far as they know), Eyan and Zero are just the right people to mull over that.

There is both textual and allegorical queerness in this story - both main characters should be considered gay men, even if it’s The Future TM and terms/exact scopes of identities may not be EXACTLY 1-1 with today’s...But I want to be perfectly clear that it was my intent to make them gay because I wanted to see more gay guys in sci fi and I don’t want anyone erasing that. As for the allegorical stuff - I myself am a trans gay man in my late 30s, so this act of re-exploring and re-framing myself and evaluating how and why queer folks interact with each other the way we do is something I’m very familiar with, and I feel like other folks might relate. (I also peppered in some neurodivergent-person-in-a-neurotypical-world moods tbh.)

Of course it’s not all serious. I do have a bit of fun with some old school vampire tropes, tossing Eyan around and putting him in Situations.

Anyway if this all sounds interesting to you, take a look at my tag and site (above)! I’d appreciate it! I also like to hear from people and see if there’s anything about it you related to! :)

I also do everything. Every last monotonous step (well, aside from literally loading up a printing press to churn out volumes lol - BUT REST ASSURED IF I HAD $10K TO PISS INTO THE WIND I WOULD DO THAT TOO). So if there’s ANYTHING you want to know about my process, I’m happy to tell you so please ask, especially if you’re like trying to get started on your own comic or trying to go to print :) 

Edit before I go ahead and blaze this: I want to say, to be honest, the creation of comic was initially motivated almost entirely by the isolation/loneliness I’ve felt in my life. It’s not as bad as some folks’ and I know that, but it is a really prevalent thread throughout my life and sometimes is almost unbearable, and my comic began as an exploration of that loneliness, as well as a narrative exercise to try and express the depth of it at its worst point. I’m putting this out here because ultimately I don’t know...maybe someone will catch my drift and understand the feeling I’m trying to illustrate, and maybe they’ll want to see the plot that came of those feelings. I am not above the need to feel seen lol, especially if other people out there feel like they can resonate with this experience as well.

[secretfishfag]

comicgideoncharic: a xenogender related to gideon graves, specifically his comic version! Can also be related to his design, aesthetic, being a kin/irl of him, & anything else related to him!

moviegideoncharic: a xenogender related to gideon graves, specifically his movie version! Can also be related to his design, aesthetic, being a kin/irl of him, & anything else related to him!

gamegideoncharic: a xenogender related to gideon graves, specifically his (video)game version! Can also be related to his design, aesthetic, being a kin/irl of him, & anything else related to him!

animegideoncharic: a xenogender related to gideon graves, specifically his anime version! Can also be related to his design, aesthetic, being a kin/irl of him, & anything else related to him!

I know this is a hcs blog but I wanted to take the opportunity to post these. Feel free to use them and if you publish or repost them elsewhere, don't forget to give me credits or ask me for permission to do so!

[the flag template i use is made by @/theredpixil on pinterest]

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #3 – Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress is one of about three comics I’ve ever considered myself an unequivocal fan of. I, alas, lost track of things during a hiatus a while back, and got to the point where I barely remembered where I was or what was happening. So, as a palate cleanser between longer books, I’m making it a project for the first chunk of the year to reread this from the start until I’m caught up again.

This is a very high concept series – a matriarchal dieselpunk fantasy world vaguely inspired by 1920s/30s East Asia with a strong art deco aesthetic. The world is divided between the Arcanic Courts – kingdoms ruled by the animalistic ‘Ancients’ and populated by the Arcanic descendants of their half-human children – and the Federation – a human nation-state dominated by witch-nuns who derive their influence from being able to render down the corpses of said Arcanics into magically potent ‘lilium’. Also there are insubstantial projections/ghosts of titanic tentacle-ey monsters that wander across the landscape sometimes. And a genocidal war ended in a stalemate a decade ago after a city was destroyed by something that no one on either side understands. Oh an in addition to the anthromorphic animal Ancients there’s also just normal cats, except they’re sapient and capable of speech and also necromancy. The book really throws you into things and a decent chunk of the first volume is just introducing and establishing the rules of the world.

The actual plot follows Maika Halfwold, an Arcanic who can pass for human except for the giant occult tattoo on her chest. The story follows her abandoning her girlfriend and voluntarily getting herself enslaved and brought to the mansion/mad science laboratory of a powerful witch-nun so she can break out, fight her way through it, and interrogate her at gunpoint for information about the giant gaps in her memory of when as a child her mother worked with the witch on an archaeological dig. Things escalate from there due to a shard of an enchanted mask and an eldritch abomination that had been slumbering with Maika’s body who is awoken by it. The balance of the volume is spent with her, an incredibly untrustworthy cat, and a vulpine arcanic child who she more or less accidentally rescued from slavery as they try to escape the manhunt after them.

So there’s a lot here, and I really do love almost all of it. Most obviously, the art is just gorgeous – I mean, I’m an easy sell on dieselpunk/fantasy 20s stuff, but genre trappings aside the detail and use of colour is just incredible, and even the less detailed panels do an amazing job capturing expressions and emotion. Basically every aspect of character and environmental design is just very deliberate as well – aesthetics reflect character, and scenes are full of little background details that help sell and fill in the world. But fundamentally just very pretty, an aesthetic pleasure to behold.

Of course, one of the things a whole page of artistic flourishing is devoted to is a flashback of Maika – a starving enslaved orphan during the war – eating the stomach of another child who’d died before her to keep herself going. This is a book that just about exults in brutality and brokenness – ‘there is more hunger in the world than love’ is basically the tagline of the entire volume. This is a world on the verge of a genocidal total war, rife with slavery and human sacrifice, and it pulls absolutely no punches about depicting that (so, so many dead children). With, like, one-three exceptions everyone is flawed and compromised and betrays something they care about when their backs are against the wall. You really and truly can’t trust anyone.

You can see this clearly with Maika herself. She’s just, genuinely an incredibly unpleasant person to be around. Responds to feeling unsure or anxious by lashing out, all but incapable of showing affection in any legible way, too wrapped up in her own mountains of bullshit to even notice what anyone around her has going on until it’s shoved right in her face, paranoid and suspicious and more comfortable with violence than uncertainty, has 100% gotten people killed multiple times due to lack of ability to get over her own (mountains, abyssal, soul-crushing) trauma – really the list just goes on. In her defence basically everyone is actually out to get her (sadly the paranoia and suspicion do not in any way actually make her more difficult to deceive or betray). Anyway, I obviously love her, and the supporting cast is very nearly as good.

Just, generally this is not a series where suffering is ennobling – fear and shame and trauma and a desperate need to cling onto what power or privilege you can drive people as much or more as sympathy for or solidarity with others going through the same things they have. The fact that the Federation is run by a bunch of genocidal religious fanatics doesn’t mean the Ancients ruling the Arcanic Courts are good, or even necessarily that they care about the lives of their subjects beyond their own power and pleasure. It could easily tip over the edge into monochrome nihilism, but it actually manages to toe the line very well.

Though like, despite everything I just said, it does do the oddly common modern genre fic thing where there’s brutal unsparing depictions of colonial plunder and oppression but also everyone’s an intersectional feminist. Not as much as some, but the race-war is between humans and arcanics with no one seeming to care on whit about intraspecies ethnicity or race, and the setting is matriarchal in the modern implicit glass ceiling way a modern American corporation is patriarchal, not the way a midcentury warlord state or fascist empire is patriarchal (not that this means there aren’t graphic threats of rape or depictions of what’s clearly sex slavery just that being the one holding the lash isn’t really gendered).

So yeah, overall happy to report that the first volume of this still absolutely and entirely holds up – and considered as a work on its own the first volume really coheres far better than I’d realized when I was first reading this in one mad rush. Very much looking forward to continuing on to volume 2.

[valleyofthesilksky]

Hi, remember this comic? I don’t blame you if not, I haven’t been able to work on it for awhile. The last time I penciled a page was in January 2022, and chapter 13 of Valley of the Silk Sky has sat at 75% penciled ever since.

In the intervening time I spent 6 months in physical therapy (two rounds, somewhat different issues, the bulk of it focused on getting my drawing arm in working order again). And so VotSS has sat on my cork board, those penciled pages staring at me every day, waiting for the will to work on it to return.

Well, it didn’t return, so I did what you sometimes have to do as a creative professional, and decided to pencil the next page anyway. I can’t make any promises as to when I will actually publish chapter 13. But I do still very much intend to finish this book, and I’m hoping knocking the rust off will help me get it running again. Onward!

[effusive-eschatologist]

I'm so excited to present the COVER REVEAL for my debut graphic novel, SN_33P'sCoolZine.pdf! It's the story of a spunky little AI who is making a punk zine to cope with grief for its creator. It's Adventure Time meets I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream!

You can pre-order it here: https://fifthwheelpress.myshopify.com/products/sn_33pscoolzine-pdf-by-tenacity-plys

And if you want to support me and my small indie press, reblog me so the whole world can meet SN_33P!

[tenrose]

Back on my Steampunk bullshit

[morebedsidebooks]

Ten 2023 Anticipated Books

New year, new books. Here's a mix of ten Asian titles I'm looking forward to. (Of course, release dates/cover art can and do shift.)

JANUARY

Is Love the Answer? by Isaki Uta

Isaki is one of my favorite Japanese artists. Over the last few years more English language publishers have also been taking notice of her work. This is a standalone coming of age comic with an aromatic asexual protagonist. From Kodansha USA.

FEBRUARY

At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender: Life Lessons From a 50 year-old After Two Decades of Self-Discovery by Arai Shou

This is one autobiographical Japanese comic worth mention as there’s little out there in English to compare. Besides digital release first, it will also appear in print later in the year. Also to note the US arm of publisher Tokyopop came back into English language publishing a few years ago. Besides some other endeavors particularly carving itself a niche in LGBTQ+ comics. Which if great, unless you have the long memory like me that also makes it a bit frustrating because of the company's frankly bad history.

JUNE

River's Edge by Okazaki Kyoko

This may be a familiar title because of the live action adaptation. Or Okazaki’s name as a phenome of visceral comics in the 1980s and 90s before an unfortunate car accident sidelined her career. It’s been a bit of a drought too since previous English editions of her work like Helter Skelter or Pink nearly ten years ago. This comic from 1993 has a cast of high schoolers and their screwed up lives.

Until I Love Myself: The Journey of a Nonbinary Manga Artist by Pesuyama Poppy

Another special two volume autobiography in comic form from a Japanese nonbinary artist. From Viz Media.

The Surviving Sky by Krikita H. Rao

An epic lush eco SFF novel featuring solarpunk, yogic philosophy, and a stormy marriage for it’s two 30s-40s aged bi/pan protagonists where civilization is also on the line.

AUGUST

Guardian: Zhen Hun by Priest

Danmei novels appearing in English continue strong. This mysterious Chinese fantasy series around the head of special investigation unit tasked with unusual cases and an enigmatic university professor was the basis for a popular (and persevering under censorship challenges) live-action series in 2018. From Seven Seas.

They Were 11! by Hagio Moto

A classic sci-fi comic from the 1970s with some themes around gender and attraction influenced by the novel The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. I’ve reviewed the previous English edition from back in the 90s. Publisher Denpa is small operation so it’s taken some extra time but a new deluxe edition with the sequel is coming.

TBA

Kitchen of Witch Hat by Hiromi Sato and Shirahama Kamome

The Witch Hat Atelier series is beloved in many languages and garnered awards. This ongoing spin-off comic series is another treat, literally as Qifrey and Olruggio get up to cooking. From Kodansha USA.

Savage Alice by Hwang Jungeun

There’s been big trends for South Korean literature over the last few years. This 2013 novel with drag queen in a Hedwig vein between the big city of Seoul and a smaller hometown will be translated to English by Janet Hong.

Star Clock Liddell by Uchida Yoshimi

Did someone say older philosophical Japanese girls’ comics? Indie publisher Glacier Bay Books has licensed this 1980s haunting three volume comic series.

[pensandpictograms]

I would like to follow more writers and artists and history nerds! Anyone out there?

[thephooka]

New page of White Noise!

Read it here! | WN on Patreon | @hiveworks

Oh no, they're back.

[featureenvyproductions]

eyan eternal tumblr chapter masterpost

because when you click the tag link I have in my other main post, it doesn’t show anything in any semblance of order half the time and I don’t understand why. it also seems to depend on your browser and connection....? but we don’t have time to open up devtools and unpack all of that right now so here we go CONVENIENT LIST (there are 22 chapters total)

1 and 2 (these are combined into one introductory post): https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/700504863517327360/hey-folks-do-you-like-gay-vampires?source=share

3: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/701777887904333824/hi-welcome-to-eyan-eternal-chapter-3?source=share

4: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/701877163710971904/eyan-eternal-chapter-4?source=share

5: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/702585315089678336/alright-lets-go-eyan-eternal-chapter-5?source=share

6: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/703084990615977984/sorry-one-more-reblog-i-realize-it-got-buried?source=share

7: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/704134390545072128/dont-think-eyan-eternal-chapter-7-took-me-long?source=share

8: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/704675397842976768/small-chapter-chapter-8-of-eyan-eternal?source=share

9: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/704927101933977600/eyan-eternal-chapter-9?source=share

10: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/705176959537299456/eyan-eternal-chapter-10?source=share

11 (I split this into 2 posts): https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/705469722448347136/eyan-eternal-chapter-11?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/705828311826350080/eyan-eternal-chapter115?source=share

12: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/705853597523525632/eyan-eternal-chapter-12?source=share

13: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/706086542107672576/eyan-eternal-chapter-13?source=share

14: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/707842393465044992/eyan-eternal-chapter-14?source=share

15: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/708485083389165568/eyan-eternal-chapter-15?source=share

16: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/708608473793970176/eyan-eternal-chapter-16?source=share

17: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/709088896388153344/eyan-eternal-chapter-17?source=share

18: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/709581533269409792/eyan-eternal-chapter-18?source=share

19: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/710603271177420800/eyan-eternal-chapter-19?source=share

20: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/712151724122603520/eyan-eternal-chapter-20?source=share

21: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/714271899008548864/eyan-eternal-chapter-21?source=share

22/epilogue: https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/714635250945392640/eyan-eternal-chapter-22?source=share

I FORGOT A LINK IM SO SORRY THIS IS THE EPILOGUE POST I MADE IT INTO A 23RD POST I CANT COUNT https://www.tumblr.com/featureenvyproductions/715897794446098432/eyan-eternal-epilogue?source=share

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #18 – Montress Volume 3: Haven by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

I have been reading one volume of this comic a month, in part as a way to force myself to take it a bit slowly and appreciate the issues and volumes as distinct arcs and works in their own right instead of archive binging, and in part because a volume of comic books being more than ~20% of my reading goal for the year feels like cheating. This has accomplished both of those goals splendidly, but it is making it increasingly hard to come up with different ways of talking about the basic premise of the story. So I’m just not going to.

The plot picks up fairly directly where the last plot dropped off – with Maika having escaped the last maratime city-state she’d found refuge in (now wanted fugitive) and settling into the next one. To secure safety for herself and her little crew of misfits (eldritch god-monster her mom bore and raised her to be a host for, adorable fox-child she treats like shit, terrible cat who betrays everyone, improbably hot noble magic assassin whose technically supposed to be murdering her), she’s conscripted by the royal engineer to assist in repairing the ancient magical shield which protected the city during the last war – which, due to her heritage and the aforementioned eldritch god, she might be the only one capable of safely accessing. That (literally) blows up in everyone’s face just about immediately, and the remainder of the arc is spent scrambling to deal.

Dramatically the volume works very well as a self-contained narrative, though a decade of marvel movies have left me kind of incapable of taking a big climax involving an apocalyptic glowing hole in the sky that seriously. Beyond that though, this is definitely a Lore volume, digging deep into the history of the Shaman Empress, her relationship with Zinn, and what the other Montrum are or want. It also, if my memory is right, marks the point where Zinn finishes transitioning from this terrible quasi-unknowable parasite ruining Maika’s life and turning her into a walking atrocity to just, like, Some Guy. They’re a little shit with an improbably amount of flattering amnesia and also murder a bunch of people but like, they’re a character now. They banter with Maika constantly, and also keep fucking up and being wrong about things. Deeply endearing tbh.

This also marks the point where The Doctor and Maika’s paternal family more broadly starts being a lot more plot-relavent which, going to be honest, I’m kind of dreading. Can’t remember any real details but my memories of the whole upcoming arc basically boil down to ‘at least Maika got that badass clockwork prosthetic out of it’.

Kippa and Ren are basically irrelevant to the actual plot this time, which is totally fine because I love them both dearly and would have happily read an entire issue of them going shopping and having a nice day in the market. Kippa, besides being adorable, does actually get some pretty meaty scenes providing the view from the gutter here though – Maika gets scooped up by a scheming vizier engineer as soon as she walks into town, and also hates people, but Kippa is absolutely the sort of person to go wandering through a sprawling refugee camp doing whatever she can to help. Which is both good worldbuilding and characterization and provides some desperately needed grounding to keep the whole story from vanishing entirely into mythic freudian psychodrama.

Speaking of preferring the social and political storytelling – I’m not sure they ever actually matter, but I do love the two bit characters who occasionally get scenes of their desperate heroic spycraft and diplomacy as they try everything they can to prevent another war breaking out. Their little bit in this volume also does a great job illuminating what a broken mess the politics of the Federation is – given the incredibly vague 1930s-East-Asia analogy underlying the story’s geopolitics, I like that the genocidal power about to plunge the world into war is riven with internal contradictions and five minutes away from a coup with the army and navy barely able to stand in the same room without gunfights breaking out).

Anyway yeah, it’s still Monstress. Still good! I probably sound like a broken record saying it at this point, but the character design remains just sublime, even for very thoroughly secondary characters. Speaking of, my favourite one has now shown up!

[comicgoblinwrites]

Writing Check in:

Tonight I'm working on TFBS. They've finally embarked on the body of their adventure (at 66k) and I'm excited to see where it goes.

Stats:

Started: 66,117 words

Goal: 66,617 (500) words

Stretch Goal: 67,117 (1000) words

Recent progress:

I took a break from TFBS for a while because I was stuck on a section and needed to let it sit for a while. But I just recently figured out how to unstick it--so I spent the last few writing sessions reworking those particular sections, and it feels a lot better now. I try not to edit too much while I'm working on the first draft, but I felt good about this.

Excerpt:

Maeve found Marcel standing at one of the portholes in the small vestibule before the galley, watching the space passing outside. They were back in the Jump stream, if they’d ever dropped out of it. 

“What do you think?” Maeve asked, going over to her. The princess glanced up. Iridescent light shimmer on her cheeks and her eyes were wide, reflecting shifting colors.

“What is it? It’s not space…”

“We’re in a Jump stream. You’re looking at the astral plane.”       

[jakesbrain]