this happened once before
created: Big things popping, little things stopping

–Black Panther DVD

–Gantz was pretty crappy

–Camilla D’Errico draws good

–Here are some good looking Marvel books

–Evangelion 2.0 was pretty okay, but 1.0 is bland (longer post on 2.0 later, maybe?)

---

when i came to your door
consumed: No Effort Week! Gearing up for Black History Month next week, so this is gonna be short.

-Ooooh, man, looks like Rae & Ghost were right, ’cause there’s all types of sharks in the water! Online retailer TFAW is doing a little thing they’re calling Digital Comics Month, where they go around and interview major players in the digital comics landscape, and also Zenescope. Now, I’m not saying that they borrowed my blueprint, but check out their questions, see if they seem at all familiar. I think Jay-Z saw the same thing happen to Kane. They probably should’ve tried a little harder, though, because questions like this:

“TFAW.com: What do you think of the piracy issue that comes along with digital distribution?”

Don’t even make any sense. No one is pirating digital comics. They’re pirating print comics. Gotta do better than that.

-Pedro Tejeda is writing again, after a bunch of bullying from me and Jamaal. I liked his review of the new Ghostface record, but his review of 88-keys’ The Death of Adam is on point. I thought it was an ill concept album, and that’s about where it stopped. Pedro’s point about why we should even believe Adam, and why the narrator is on his side, is pretty good, and sorta made me re-examine what it was about. The result is an album that is both a little shallower than I’d expected and more interesting to think about. Visit that dude so he writes more.

–This video of a housewife doing acid is amazing and probably sold me a copy of The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.

–The Mindless Ones go drinking with superheroes and the results are fantastic. Someone get Garth Ennis to write the comic adaptation. He’s the best at comics about dudes in bars.

-You guys see that Matt Fraction x Bryan Lee O’Malley conversation in Casanova: Gula 01? Fraction couldn’t be more wrong about Kanye. I’ve gotta stop reading backmatter.

–Cheryl Lynn has a habit of throwing ideas at me on Twitter. She was blue-skying some Kanye + Comics ideas and I basically went and called that bluff.

Top to bottom: “Gold Digger” (art by Jim Calafiore), “New Workout Plan” (art by Jim Lee), “New Workout Plan” (art by Ed Benes)

-I bought Superfly: Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition and Curtis! (Deluxe Edition) because Curtis Mayfield is that dude.

---

no reply
David: New Mutants 21, Thunderbolts 152
Esther: Action Comics 897
Gavin: Justice League Generation Lost 18, Incorruptible 14, Avengers 9, Captain America 614, Chaos War 5, Deadpool 32, Incredible Hulks 621, Namor The First Mutant 6, New Avengers 8, Punisher In The Blood 3, Secret Avengers 9, Thunderbolts 152, Ultimate Comics Avengers 3 6, Uncanny X-Force 4

Still thinking about February and Black History Month. Formulating a plan of attack, striking things from lists, and catching up on things I missed.

Anyway, my homegirl Cheryl made a brief return to comics blogging with a trio of posts over the last week or so. There’s ten things she wants out of DC in 2011, some stuff she wants from Marvel and DC in other media, and how DC is kind of a lost cause when it comes to getting books that aren’t lily white.

She writes a lot, and I agree with most of it. Together, you have sort of a general list of things that Marvel and DC aren’t doing that they should, and could, be doing to push comics and their characters harder. The point about diversity being a lost cause at DC stings, but it’s true. Marvel’s a little better, mainly due to having created a decent group of black characters in the ’70s and then again in the ’90s, but who do they have that can support a book on their own? Not Cage, not Storm, not Night Thrasher… Black Panther has a solo book, but how absolutely awful has that series been for the past couple years? Right now, he’s batting clean-up in someone else’s book. Six months from now? Who knows? Maybe DC will get Aqualad off the ground, but I’m not sure the market wants it.

-Over at ComicsAlliance, I’ve got a pretty good idea on what major Marvel comic Charlie Huston’s gonna be writing later this year.

While “Deathlok” is currently being serialized, Huston doesn’t have any announced work coming out of Marvel’s stables. Until now, that is, as he spilled the beans on a few projects on his site on Thursday. Longtime readers will know that he’s written a year’s worth of stories on a major Marvel series which should debut this fall, but he also revealed that he’s doing a two issue story “about a guy who never misses [his] mark.”

-And at Tucker’s spot, I talk a little bit about How to Make It In America and Archer.

How to Make It In America is, at least theoretically, about Ben Epstein and Cam Calderon getting off their butts and making something of themselves. Now that they’re pushing 30, they’re gonna strike it rich, or at least solvent, by creating a new line of jeans. Along the way, they’ll have to negotiate with Cam’s menacing cousin Rene, played by an aging but still talented Luis Guzman, coordinate with one of Ben’s rich friends, and fight against everyone who is telling them that they can’t do their thing. And then, in the end, they’ll win. They’ll stick to their guns, believe in each other, and their jeans will be the talk of New York City.

-Archer’s last episode for a while aired last Thursday, and whooo. It was something else. Vile, obscene, disturbing, hilarious.

-David Welsh on the appeal of One Piece:

One observation that really caught my ear was about Oda’s world building and his willingness to plant tiny, seemingly irrelevant narrative seeds that come to full flower later, sometimes much later. Natsuki Takaya did this all the time in Fruits Basket (Tokyopop), turning seemingly oblique observations and sideways glances from volume two into searing heartbreak in, say, volume nine. It’s quite a skill, that kind of callback work, and it displays a great deal of confidence on the part of the creator that they’ll be able to tell their story according to plan.

-Esther writes about five ways you probably wouldn’t die in a vacuum at io9, and it is good:

Because a vacuum does not carry sound very well, you would not be able to hear the many, many alveoli in your lungs pop like bubble wrap under a child’s fingers, but don’t tell me that you wouldn’t imagine it.

-Judd Winick and Sami Basri are taking over Power Girl as of issue 13. Coincidentally, I have three extra dollars to spend a month now.

-Dave Johnson talks about his first cover for Abe Sapien: The Abyssal Plain.

-I haven’t talked about BPRD on here at all, I don’t think, but please believe that it has better than every single comic put out by mainline Marvel or DC for the past four or five years. Maybe All-Star Superman stacks up, maybe.

-Cheryl Lynn has a line on the hottest new t-shirt of the spring.

–Treme, the new show from David Simon and others, is gonna be a problem.

I’m taking a couple days break now that BHM is over, so it’ll be a few days before I get back to calling DC stupid and Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass racist. In light of that fact, now’s as good a time as any to remind you who we are and what we do!

4l! turns five years old this month. The anniversary is later in the month, and hopefully we’ll have some cool business going on. Five years, though, dang. If you have anniversary stuff you want us to do, drop a comment down below.

4thletter! is
Gavin: Funny stuff and wrestling
Esther: Batman and Batman
David: Black people and exasperation

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The Family
Blog@Newsarama: Psyche.
Cheryl Lynn: Cheryl likes to send me links that are to either funny animated gifs or are meant to get me writin’ mad. She’s also the maintainer of The Ormes Society.
The Factual Opinion: TFO is the home of Tucker and Nina Stone. Nina’s just looking for somecomic to love while Tucker’s handing out two-fisted reviews. Both are worth reading.
Funnybook Babylon: Chris, Pedro, Joe, Jamaal, and David U bring some tough talk for funnybooks.
Julian Lytle: Creator of Ants and dope artist. Check out his reviews and miscellany on Ignorant Bliss.
Ron Wimberly: Dope artist, creator of Gratuitous Ninja, jet-setting dude who does a whole lot.
Sean Witzke: Sean is the kind of guy who brings up something you’ve seen a million times and completely dismantles it, forcing you to look at it in a new light. You don’t get it, boy. Supervillain isn’t his blog. It’s an operating table. And he’s the surgeon.

If I forgot you… I forgot you. Peace!

There’s been this thing going around the bits of the blogosphere that talk about race and comics called “Chromatic Comics.” It started here, dipped over here, ended up on When Fangirls Attack (which is where I first saw it), and just this week showed up on Fantastic Fangirls. Essentially, established characters in various properties are recast to be a different race or gender. From the outside looking in, the choices appear to be fairly arbitrary. Kanye West as Archangel, for example, or Vanessa Williams as Emma Frost.

To put it bluntly, I didn’t get it, didn’t like it, couldn’t quite put my finger on why, and I’d decided not to say anything about it, barring some private conversations with friends. I felt like a player hater, coming from the position of “this is dumb and a waste of time and borderline offensive and I can’t quite figure out why.”

Earlier today, my buddy Cheryl Lynn proved that she’s smarter than I am when she started talking about it on Twitter. She gathered her thoughts and expanded on them in a post on her blog. It’s must-reading, frankly, and is almost exactly why I have a problem with “Chromatic Comics.” An excerpt:

This whole Chromatic Comics ish irritates me. Y’know, Marvel does have a whole boatload of POC characters. Stuff like that makes it seem like only the white ones are important and deserve focus. Y’know what would be nice? For POC characters to get the same promotion and devotion that white characters get so people don’t have to think of POC actors they’d like in the “important” (white) characters’ roles.

She has several more things to say on the subject, including a beautiful and nuanced breakdown of why Luke Cage has to be black and Frank Castle has to be white. I urge you to go read it. And pardon me if the following is just a rehash of her better piece.

Cheryl makes a good point on the subject of what race actually means in stories. She says, “And just like I’m not just a color, that white kid isn’t just a blank slate. He isn’t the default. And acting like he is the default hurts both him and me.” I’ve often seen it said, and probably said myself, that white is the default. That isn’t true- white is dominant, yes, but not the default. White doesn’t mean “average.” It, like black, is completely insufficient.

Elektra is white. Elektra is native to Greece. Emma Frost is white. Emma Frost is upper class Boston old money. Luke Cage is black, but he’s Harlem black. James Rhodes is black, but he’s South Philly black. Peter Parker is white, but he’s Forest Hills, Queens white. Night Thrasher is black, but he’s upper class New York City black. Steve Rogers isn’t just white. He’s from the LES during the depression.

I’m black, but I’m Warner Robins, Georgia black, where the black folks can be found watching NASCAR, mud bogging, rolling with blue flags out their back pockets, and working on an air force base.

My littlest brother is half-black, half-Egyptian, and has a name that’ll keep him on no-fly lists for his entire life. He’s living with my mom and her husband in New England. He’s going to be a different kind of black than I am. My younger brother, who’s about to turn twenty, is a different kind of black than I am, and we lived in the same house for twelve or so years. That’s three males, raised by the same woman, who aren’t the same kind of black. I can’t replace either of them and they can’t replace me. I’m absolutely certain that that applies to white people, and Chinese people, and whoever.

This race thing isn’t as simple as a skin tone and nappy hair. That’s kiddie pool anthropology. That just reinforces the idea of white as the default, in that it ignores the rich culture that white people hold dear. It reinforces the idea that non-white characters don’t matter, because why would anyone cast Jubilee in a movie? Why would anyone go see a movie about Misty Knight or Luke Cage? Let’s flip Jean Grey and Cyclops to being Indian and Chinese and roll with that! Progress!

But hey, here’s a counterpoint: Spider-Man and X-Men didn’t start this burst of superhero movies in Hollywood. No, Wesley Snipes as Blade did that. Black hero with a black love interest and everything. And before the movies? Blade was lame. All he had going for him before the movie was awesome Gene Colan art and we got two great movies out of him and one awful one. As far as quality of Hollywood superhero flicks go, he’s matched Batman (both 1989 and Begins franchises), Spider-Man, X-Men, and Superman. Blade beats Hulk, considering that those movies were mediocre at best.

Imagine what we could get for Aya. Or Jubilee. Or Dizzy. Or Loop. Or Misty. Or Luke. (Or Hypno Hustler.)

You mean to tell me that nobody would go see an action movie about a black chick with an afro, a robot arm, a sneer and a half-Japanese sword-wielding BFF in 2010? That they’d rather see The Dark Dark Phoenix Saga instead? Get outta here. If we can buy Matt Damon as action star, we can buy a black character as a black character, rather than a palette swap.

Chromatic Comics is tokenism, or maybe lip service. Either way, it’s not powerful. It’s not respectful. It’s not even anti-racist. It ignores what we already have in favor of continuing to worship exclusively white characters as if they were the end-all, be-all of comics. Hey- Marvel and DC already do that. We should do better than flipping a switch or using the paint bucket in Photoshop and calling it a day. We’ve got some diamonds in all this rough. Let’s act like it.

In the end, 2009 is going to be the year that I stopped caring about superheroes.

As a kid, I loved them. Then I hit my teens and realized how bad they were and quit them. Then I came back to the US after high school, discovered Frank Miller’s Daredevil for the first time, and got back into them in a big way. Gimme everything you got about Spider-Man, Daredevil, and the X-Men. Add in some Flash, too. And now? Now, I’m bored and tired of them.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Dwayne McDuffie was fired off JLA after being hired, hamstrung, and toyed around with. Hiring McDuffie seemed like a no-brainer. He did a stellar job writing and managing an entire DC Universe, one that’s almost universally loved, and there’s no reason to expect that he wouldn’t bring that same magic to the comic series. Except he was hampered right out of the gate, forced to tie in with the wedding of two C-list characters, and then with every other DC event after that, including such unreadable crap as Tangent, Salvation Run, and Countdown. Then they started picking off team members. The most famous characters? Gone. Flash? Gone. Anyone you’d actually expect to see in a book called JLA? Gone. I’d mention Ed Benes’s art, but I think I’ve talked about him enough recently.

And then there’s the bit where DC made a big deal out of bringing Milestone into the DCU, only to flip the script and stick Static into a book that hasn’t been good in three (or more) years, shuffle the characters off into Brave & the Bold, and then step back like “Oh, we only wanted Static, anyway, you keep all them others.” In other words, “This guy made some other people a fat stack of cash, now we want that stack of cash.”

The thing about the JLA, DC, and McDuffie situation is that it is what is wrong with mainstream comics in miniature. It was an eye opener for me. What is important is not the stories, not growth or evolution, but the trademarks. The characters are what matter. As long as Hal Jordan makes a giant boxing glove and is the manliest man ever, as long as Superman has a spit curl, as long as Wonder Woman is in that stupid looking costume, things are okay. What is important is that books with these characters are on the shelves, because if they are on the shelves, they might get noticed, and if they get noticed, we get a movie or money or a game or something.

This year has seen Geoff Johns repeatedly trying to bring childhood nostalgia in line with adult sensibilities and cranking out books that explain why superheroes wear bowties or that feature dudes having sex with corpses. It’s scare quotes edgy, the sort of thing a teenager draws on a binder when he wants to rebel but isn’t sure how. Of course the love army are a bunch of shrill, possessive, needy women who don’t wear clothes. Of course these anger dudes just vomit blood uncontrollably. Doesn’t all this gore and sexiness makes these books grown up, instead of barely adolescent? Look at it, they’re drowning in it.

(Blackest Night is fundamentally stunted from a storytelling, emotional, and craft perspective.)

Brian Bendis and a few other Marvel writers spent a decent chunk of time this year hammering home the childishly binary view of “Villains kill, heroes don’t.” Meanwhile, their top villain was shooting passenger planes out of the sky, having government employees back handtrucks full of gold bars to known mass murderers and antisocial types, ordering assassinations of American and foreign citizens, and stocking the roster of a government agency with criminals who have pretended to reform. But hey, heroes don’t kill. They just kinda sit around and beat people up a little and sleep the sleep of the just. And in the opening pages of Marvel’s Siege, the newest big ticket crossover, Norman Osborn orchestrates the murder of sixty thousand people at a football game. But hey, in Siege #4, Spider-Man will punch him in the jaw, throw him in jail, and feel good about being a hero.

Have you ever seen the cover to Amazing Adult Fantasy #9, the series that eventually gave birth to Spider-Man? It’s a Steve Ditko joint, apparently. It’s got this giant monster with underpants, a helmet, and boots on, and the cover copy says “Ever since the dawn of time, nothing can match ‘THE TERROR of TIM BOO BA!'” Below that, the copy declares “The magazine that respects your intelligence!”

The Avengers books don’t respect your intelligence. It’s another entry in this absurd game of “Can you top this?” where the villains are getting exponentially more vile (Dr. Light goes from goof-off idiot to stone cold rapist to rape addict to a guy who is doing something vile off-screen to a recently murdered young girl’s skull, the villain of Blackest Night literally has sex with dead bodies because he’s ka-razy go coconuts, even though before he just kinda shot laser beams at people, Moonstone suddenly wants to put it on anything with a third leg when before she was just a scheming psychologist-type) and the heroes are… stuck in 1961.

Put plainer: Spider-Man could pull Norman Osborn’s whole head off at this point and it would be much, much better than watching him and his buddies circle jerk about how “heroes don’t kill.” Man up, you child.

Marvel and DC’s books, with a few notable exceptions, are ugly, stupid, cruel train wrecks that are busy trying to recapture past glories. I love Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, and Amanda Conner’s Power Girl, but for every one of those, you get a Ms. Marvel, a Mighty Avengers, and a JSA. For every New Mutants, you have to wade through Uncanny X-Men, Dark Avengers, and Flash Rebirth.

And I’m bored. I don’t care why Barry Allen wears a bowtie. That is the exact opposite of what I want to see in a comic book called Flash. I don’t want to see a villain who gropes corpses and has all the depth of the worst of a high schooler’s dirty drawings. I don’t want the fifth version of Superman’s origin to be told in ten years because who cares? Who wants to read this?

I’m bored to death. My pull list for singles is Amazing Spider-Man, Criminal: The Sinners, Hellblazer, King City, and Unknown Soldier. Everything else I either cop off the racks or follow in trade because it just isn’t worth picking up monthly.

I was thinking about this post while I was at work and went poking around for something. The last time I felt invested enough to write something positive about a Marvel or DC tights & fights book released this year, outside of linkblogging-related material, was September, when Black Cat returned to Amazing Spider-Man. I’ve made five negative posts about 2009-era superheroes since, and a whole bunch of posts about old superheroes or books from Viz, Boom! Studios, Image, Dark Horse, and other companies.

There are Marvel and DC cape books that I enjoy and purchase regularly. Spider-Man Noir was a great read and well worth the 15 bucks I spent on it. I like Eric Trautmann’s The Shield, Charlie Huston and Lan Medina’s Deathlok, the Fraction/Larocca Invincible Iron Man is aight, Rucka/JHW3 on Detective Comics is okay, Grant Morrison’s Batman & Robin is hilariously uneven… but by and large, I’m bored. I’m reading most of these in trades and I’m not reading B&R at all right now because Philip Tan is terrible.

Marvel and DC did a pretty good job of chasing me out of their universes. I didn’t even really notice it happening until it was done. They don’t want my money, and I’m not in their target audience, and I recognize that now. They’ve built a world that doesn’t interest me at all, and I’d be a fool to keep trying to force myself to care and be a part of that. Talking and blogging about it kept me in the world longer than I probably should’ve been, but I’ve finally learned.

So, like Tim and Chad and Geoff and Cheryl, I’m off that and looking for the next one. I’ll catch the good capery when it hits the trade, read books only when it’s clear the company cares as much about it as the creators do (i.e., no Peter David, Greg Land, Ed Benes, Tony Daniel, army of pencillers/inkers, crossover tie-ins, and so on), and keep on reading comics like I been doing.

-Emi Lenox of EmiTown creates one of my favorite online comics, and one of the few journal comics I’m willing to read on a regular basis. Her art is very endearing, and her point of view is always interesting. She did a comic in 24 hours in honor of 24 Hour Comic Day, and it’s a good one. Check out the comic here. It’s pretty awesome.

-Jason Thompson discusses Felipe Smith’s Peepo Choo, which looks like exactly the kind of manga I want to read. I may order Smith’s MBQ just off the strength of this feature.

-Chad Nevett, once again proving that my opinions are the best opinions, agrees with my unspoken opinion that the first half of Hancock was very good and interesting and that the second half goes completely off the rails. He’s got some good thoughts on the movie, and Hancock’s motivations.

-Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca are dropping an Afrodisiac book later this year. You have bad taste in comics if you don’t pick it up.

-Kate Dacey dropped her Manga Hall of Shame, a list of terrible books that she’s read. In what I hope is the first of many, Erica Friedman does her own list for yuri manga. I don’t know if I could make a list of my own. Maybe the Cowboy Bebop mangas, which were both amazingly not charming at all? The Gundam tie-in manga that Tokyopop put out when I was dumb enough to buy every manga on the shelves?

-Leylaaker (apologies if I missed a real name) writes about a pretty sour experience visiting comic shops on both coasts. Dear comic shops: get your acts together. Comic Shop Guy should be an aberration, not the norm.

-Ian from The Eastern Edge posts the final part of his six part Naoki Urasawa interview translation project. It’s a good read, and links to the previous installments are in the post.

-Brandon Graham’s blog is a must-read, though it’s sometimes NSFW. He renewed my eternal love in this post and with these words: “Where did that L7 square, space wingtip wearing motherfucker ever come up with the feet for that robot? Those feet were clearly designed by someone that regularly mastrerbates into a pair of 93 Reebocks.”

-Jog wrote a wrap-up of SPX 2009, and as usual, it’s must-reading. It ranges from a look at old Mazzucchelli art to panel recaps to books he picked up at the show.

-FBB did a podcast on Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons’s Martha Washington books. I haven’t listened to it yet, but black people.

–A brief bit of Richard Corben animation from 1968. NSFW, but guess what: it’s Richard Corben. Props to Sean Witzke for the link.

-Cheryl Lynn is reading a couple comics on recommendation from Ragnell and David Uzumeri. Which did they recommend? Tarot and Fantastic Four. Prologue is up, and part 2 covers Tarot.

Cheryl Lynn has another entry in her Black Trinity run. This time, it’s on Martha Washington, one of my favorite characters, as the Black Reality.

For the Black Reality is that you have to work twice as hard to get half the recognition. Martha works four times as hard and gets all of it. She saves her country numerous times. She exposes her detractors for the dangerous and deluded beings they are. Not for glory, but because her will and desire for freedom is simply that strong. She is that special.

Cheryl Lynn and I play this game on twitter. I’ll post a link to something I find interesting/funny/horrible, and she’ll click it and end up thirsting for vengeance and retaliate a few days later. I’m pretty sure that being linked to this essay on scans_daily is the latest volley in our cold war 2.0, and probably payback for the time that I called Brother Voodoo the Cam’ron of comics.

I’d actually slotted the post away to write about today, because it’s so wholly horrible. Setting aside the word “Thorm,” I could take issue with

Because as a starting point for hooking up 2 characters go, “storm deities living in New York” makes a heck of a lot more sense than “two black Africans who have met maybe twice”.

or

I always liked that aspect about how Storm’s features were the distilation of the best of the various human racial groups, something that pretty much seems to have been tossed by the wayside.

or

Who drew it? (i can’t read the signature) Storm’s features are so unique and diverse.

I mean, the last one bugs me on a grammar level (you can’t be “so” unique like lights can’t be “so” off) and a race level. I would’ve had this short-ish essay springboarding from the topic of Storm being some ridiculous mesh of all races into my absolute loathing of use of the terms urban/ethnic/exotic/diverse when all you really want to say is “black” or “not white.”

I think it would’ve been pretty good, honestly. I haven’t really dug into race&comics since black history month, and I rarely see other people doing it regularly. I was starting to feel that itch again. But, Cheryl beat me to it with this jawn, her long-awaited essay on the female half of Black Trinity. I wrote last year about Luke Cage as the Black Reality, Shilo Norman as the Black Fantasy, and Black Panther as the Black Ideal. Three aspects of one people: pure wish fulfillment, reality, and then the best we can hope to be.

Cheryl’s first entry is on Storm as the Black Fantasy. In her own words:

Today we are going to talk about the Black Fantasy from the female perspective. And the Black Fantasy is Storm. Storm is what black women want, or are constantly informed by the media that they should want, but are also told that they never will achieve. To be loved and to be beautiful. To be free. To be special.

Basically, you need to read it, and after you read it, you need to digg it. Link it around if you can. I noticed that it’s on Comics Blips, which is kind of like a baby digg. Get it out there.

Cheryl Lynn threw a link to Wide Awake Online up on Twitter yesterday, with a comment about how she liked the art. I figured I’d give it a look since she’s an Adam Warren fan, like all right-minded people.

What I found was pretty interesting. The artist, Mirco Pierfederici (some slight NSFW down the page), is an Italian cat who’s only done a few works in English, near as I can tell. I read Wide Awake, though, and was pretty impressed. His style has shades of Adam Hughes, Daniel Acuña, and Ryan Sook. I’m fairly certain that he does his own colors, as well, which is very neat. It’s an attractive style, and one that’s good enough for me to keep reading.

It’s a short look at the series, but pretty neat. Interesting, Greg Rucka’s buddy Eric Trautmann and Brandon Jerwa are writing it. Two decently established comics pros doing a free webcomic seems like it should be a bigger deal than it is. The only other guy I can think of who’s doing that off the top of my head is Warren Ellis, and maybe some of the Zuda crew.

The dreams of Amanda Carter, the main character, come to life every time she sleeps. It’s clear that there’s something else behind it, and finding out what that’s going to be is going to be pretty cool, I hope. Trautmann wrote a post about the series here with some background info. It updates weekly.

Johanna Draper-Carlson wrote a post about another new webcomic. 2D Goggles is a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Grandparents of modern computing. It’s a fun little ditty about equations, numbers, and science, but manages to be amazingly entertaining despite all of the gross science involved.

It’s a pretty clever strip, with lots of fun bits for careful readers. The Twitter joke is probably my favorite, but Ada thinking “Ponies + Numbers = :D” is also very funny to me. It’s totally a “Girls like ponies” joke, but it works. If you like historical fiction and comedy, or either of them, click on through.