Rasputin Barxotka

After The Dream

I will be doing a review on this one sometime in the future.  It will be worth the wait.  Trust me.  For now, just check out the site.  It’s super cool.

Kirby Miller, Serial Killer

This is nothing more and nothing less than a badly drawn and totally tasteless webcomic starring a serial killer, his mom’s disembodied voice and a teddy bear. Kirby Miller, Serial Killer is idiotic entertainment and a mindless pleasure I cannot deny myself.  I should be ashamed of myself for loving this webcomic. Then again, I am guilty of inflicting the original pre-reboot Rasputin Catamite upon humanity, so casting stones is definitely out of the question.

A Review of The Prophet’s Garden by Angie Hood and Geneva Rosett-Hafter

This lovely post-apocalyptic graphic novel is very much a work in progress. The text needs proofreading and the navigation is a bit difficult to get used to for those of us who are accustomed to Comicpress-type sites. Having said that, both are problems I’ve struggled with on my older webcomics so, I am sympathetic. Many of the pages of the main comic are in the form of rough sketches, which might be jarring to some readers. Looking at the loving renderings of Geneva’s finished art and based upon what I have read from the creators’ notes, this is as a result of an effort to keep a schedule rather than any willful desire to produce a substandard product.  Personally, I don’t mind this very much since the authors do plan to eventually finish the pages and I personally enjoy observing the creative process. My only real issue with the pages are the word balloons. The text would be a lot easier to read if these were considerably more opaque.

If you can get past the presentation issues, you will be treated to something very special in The Prophet’s Garden. From a storytelling perspective, Angie and Geneva’s piece seems heavily influenced by manga as opposed to the typical American end-of-the-world superhero action rag. This helps create a framework for much deeper character development, detailed relationship studies and a more subdued plot progression. Although some of the typical conventions of manga with a mad-messiah are present, there are enough deviations in the formula to make the characters worth caring about.  The subtexts about the frustrations of living with physical disabilities and the results of a complete economic collapse after a major disease outbreak, gripped me even more than the main plot. Being disabled and highly concerned about our government spending our societal safety net out of existence, ultimately caused me to get sucked me into Hood and Rosett-Hafter’s dystopian world.

The manga influence thankfully does not extend to the artwork beyond attention to detail and some genre-specific visual conventions. Instead of clean lines, pristine adherence to anatomical mechanics, enlarged eyes and exaggerated bodies, Geneva’s soft color illustrations evoke an air of purposeful primitivism with humanity that is rarely seen, let alone successfully executed in the comic genre. When Loki and I were first looking at the illustrations, we got into a small debate as to whether her work was pastel and pencil with digital adjustments, or digital pastels on pencil.  Although I lean towards the latter, I concede that the use of digital media is convincingly natural. Although the stiffness of the art can sometimes be an off-putting drawback of any composition inspired by primitivism, there are enough beautiful dancerly poses to balance out the natural limitations of this style. Being heavily influenced by Russian neo-primitivism in my own work, I can’t but help appreciate Rosett-Hafter’s approach.

Although The Prophet’s Garden is not going to satisfy people expecting a fully-developed webcomic that’s ready for the mass market, it is most certainly worth examining as a diamond in the rough waiting for a bit of polish. I highly recommend this graphic novel for anyone who enjoys storytelling rich with nuance and who can appreciate watching the creative process unfold.