How the Life Is Strange Comic Managed to Surpass it's Source Material - An Obscure Comic of the Month Special Edition.

This column normally takes a look at obscure comics. For every every sixth month, instead of taking a look at a comic that nobody talks about, this special edition will take a look at a comic I feel not enough people talk about.

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Life is Strange by Emma Vieceli, Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo 2018 - 2022

Contains Major Spoilers

The year is 2015. It's a good time for fans of adventure games. Thought long dead or relegated to cult status for years, the runaway success of Telltale Games' The Walking Dead had heralded a return to form for the genre, as well as fulfilling the promise of actual episodic gaming that had eluded developers for so long, treating each episode as though it were an episode of a TV show, and the entire product as a season.

Yet despite the success, few were willing to throw their hat into the arena. One contender, however, would walk in with their own comparator to Telltale's monopoly, and that was Dontnod Entertainment's Life is Strange. Far from the grim apocalypses and far off worlds that Telltale had offered, Life of Strange was a slice-of-life mystery. Concerned with a young woman's return to her home town. The plot escalates as she saves a friend's life and discovers that she has the power to re-wind time.

The time travel mechanic was primarily touted as what set Life is Strange apart from Telltale's entries to the genre, but it was the slowly unfolding mystery that kept people around. Drawing elements from Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko and numerous teen dramas, Life is Strange soon picked up a strong following. While it's student vernacular was lightly mocked, the characters in the story quickly drew audiences in, and soon enough, the shipping began.

I don't know whether Dontnod always intended for there to be romantic chemistry between Max Caulfield, the protagonist, and Chloe Price, her abrasive childhood friend, but I certainly expect the developers pivoted to play more into this aspect once they saw how much of the fanbase was made of young gay women. This, however, would prove to be a double-edged sword, as the more the story played up the relationship between the two women, the greater the betrayal it felt once the ending finally hit.

The game concludes with a player choice, rewind to the start of the game and allow Chloe to die in order to reset the timeline, or witness the town and most of the other character in it be destroyed by a time-vortex hurricane. This, alone, was controversial in and of itself, robbing the player of any possibility of a happy ending for Max and Chloe, but the way it was executed would proceed to draw a great deal of ire from the fanbase. Max and Chloe would only acknowledge romantic feeling for each other with a kiss in the ending where Chloe dies, while the ending where she lives felt underwritten and far too brief to feel satisfying.

The term queer-bating is used to describe a situation where a writing team plays up the possibility of a same sex relationship between two character to drum up interest from gay audiences without ever planning on following through. To many, Life is Strange was guilty of such a crime, and debate ranged heavily on the quality of the endings, with many labelling the game problematic, while others wrote the game off as not worth playing at all.

The fury would soon cool however, in part thanks to a well revived prequel in Deck Nine's Before the Storm, that stayed mostly distinct from the plot of the main game and focussed on an unambiguously queer relationship between Chloe and Rachel Amber, the missing soon-to-be-found-murdered girl of the first game. Likewise, metric tonnes of fanart and fan fiction, where creators chose to just come up with their own ending, cushioned the blow.

Still, with news that series was going to continue with an anthology format, focussing on a new story and new characters with every game, it didn't seem as though we'd be seeing Max or an alive Chloe any time in the future.

However, in 2018 there came an announcement that nobody saw coming. Titan Comics would be publishing a comic sequel to the first game, continuing on from the ending where Chloe lives and Arcadia Bay is destroyed.

Expectations were positive, but tempered for a lot of reasons. The outcome of the Sacrifice Arcadia Bay ending was lamented as too grim and underdeveloped, with many worrying that the comic would fail to improve upon this. Likewise, the decision to release such a story while the main games continued with a new cast of characters caused many to wonder if the comic was being released merely to placate people who just wanted more Max and Chloe. On top of it all, while Titan Comics has had a fine pedigree of solid comics, it's video game spin-offs tended to fall on the superfluous side, and rarely ran for more than four issues.

All in all, a cynical shadow hung over the series like the storm clouds over Arcadia Bay. So it was to the surprise of many that the first story arc in the series turned out to not only be very enjoyable, but intriguing and thoughtful too.

Jack's October Update

As we continue through autumn into winter It's time for me to start rounding up my current state of affairs when it comes to the remainder of the year's projects.

As mentioned previously, I'm still having problems with the tendonitis in my left wrist, so I'm having to choose my projects carefully as not to exacerbate the problem. I was hoping that the pain would start to dissipate after a few weeks away, but it's sticking around. I'm currently investigating further treatment that will hopefully provide a permanent solution, but for now I'm going to try and not let it interfere with my creativity too much.

- As you may have already noticed, a new Sea of Spheres story, The Right to Know, has just commenced. Part one is up, with the remaining three following each Monday. Artwork, as ever by the fantastic Windlass.

- Work continues apace on my collaboration with SLAM! The artwork on this comic is looking fantastic, which you can see a little bit of below, and I can't wait to show more of it to you.

- I'm continuing to get The Illustrated Guide to Drinking Beer out there. Physical copies of the comic are now available at the Ennerdale Brewery and The Harbour Master Whitehaven.

- It's been confirmed that a follow up to the West Coast Minicon will be happening on the 25th March 2023 and I once again will be in attendance selling prints and books. I'll post more details closer to the time.

- I'll once again be heading to Harrogate Thought Bubble in November. Not exhibiting, just visiting, happy to say hello and chat.

- Other than that I'm currently working on a few more projects that I'm not ready to give more details on, but expect more comics and short stories to be in the pipeline. Next month marks the one year anniversary of my revived Obscure Comic of the Month column so expect an extra long special in celebration of that.

As ever you can follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Deviantart and find all my recent writings on AO3.

Thanks for reading.

Obscure Comic of the Month - Twenty Thirty Three

Obscure Comic of the Month is a column where I take a look at a comic or series that hasn't really been talked about. This covers independent comics, zines, weird spin-offs, webcomics and more.

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Twenty Thirty Three Special Edition by En Gingerboom – 2019

Mild Spoilers

When writing about comics for this column it sometimes becomes difficult to know exactly what to qualify a comic as. In the author's notes, En Gingerboom classifies Twenty Thirty Three ultimately as a failure of a project. It originally started life as a children's book, bouncing between fantastical fairytale fair and a more grounded, but still optimistic, post-apocalyptic tale of survival . The various iterations were something that the author developed over a series of years, and ultimately settled on a short, dialogue-free comic featuring reinterpretations of the more fairytale versions of the characters.

As a supposed failure I'm not really sure how to talk about Twenty Thirty Three. So I'm just going to talk about it as a I would any comic. From the get go the story is deliberately vague. We only know the character's names and circumstances from ID cards printed behind the front and back covers of the book itself, and the rest of the story simply gives snapshots of a life lived by three young girls travelling from somewhere to somewhere in Britain.

To tell a story with such sparsity requires a great sense of place and character. To be communicated entirely through images even more so. The tone carried entirely by what we see, not by what we are told. At this Twenty Thirty Three is very deft and intriguing from almost the outset. The nature of the apocalypse, if it can even be classified as one through what little information we actually have, is left deliberately obscured. In a sense it doesn't even really matter, it's the survivors that this story is concerned with.

The young girls Molly, Ruby and Phyllis all have distinct visual flair, and as the story goes on, strong personalities. Flipping through the pages, moving from panel to panel, you will find yourself moving backwards and forwards, re-reading earlier points with a greater understanding of who these people are and what motivates them. While there are moments of threat, the heart of the story is about the act of living. Food is cultivated, stories are shared and love and friendship happens almost between the margins.

The grounded nature of the story for the most part does not prevent some of the more fantastical and fairytale aspects bleeding through . Mrs Mackenzie, the girl's magical witch mentor in earlier iterations of the story, still appears in the main plot and this serves to make the scope of the story feel larger. Likewise there are implications of greater supernatural events happening in the background, and at one point more explicitly in the foreground, but again their nature is left vague and open to interpretation.

The exact message of the story itself falls into the hands of the reader to decide. Is the story whimsical, or is there a more sinister edge bubbling under the surface? Ultimately, I think it's this ambiguous nature that makes Twenty Thirty Three so successful. The story is like a puzzle, with the reading and re-reading akin to fitting jigsaw pieces into place, and while I don't think this picture will ever fully be filled out, there are greater mysteries to be explored for those willing to look.

The Special Edition includes all the work in progress from earlier iterations and the writer's commentary, which makes not only the further study of the plot more engaging, but also serves as an intriguing look behind the curtain at where the story started and how it got to where it is.

Is the comic a failure? I don't know, but if it is it's certainly an interesting one.

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Jack Harvey 2022. Gawain and the Green Knight (c) 2019 En Gingerboom . Images used under Fair Use.

Sea of Spheres - The Right to Know

 

Welcome, once again, dear readers, to the next instalment of the Sea of Spheres series. This story, The Right to Know, is a bit of a departure from the previous stories in the sense that it leans into a more science-fiction influenced part of the setting. I've tried to balance the writing in such a way as to make it believable that this takes place in the same, more fantasy influenced world of the previous stories.

Of course, as ever the artwork is by the fantastic Windlass, who has if anything absolutely nailed the balance and really stuck the right aesthetic of 'fantasy world with modern technology' that I'm trying to go for.

In the aftermath of a catastrophe that left an advanced dimension jumping ship crashing into the savage sphere of Gemini, the Horns that reside there soon found themselves with technology far in advance of their rivals, but with little practical knowledge of how it all worked. A half-century later, detectives Garrick Ceraface and Cardina Mordang, while on the trail of a missing scientist, soon find themselves on the wrong side of the law, and learn that the cost of keeping their civilisation afloat might be far greater than they could ever conceive.

Link under the cut:

Obscure Comic of the Month - Gawain and the Green Knight

Obscure Comic of the Month is a column where I take a look at a comic or series that hasn't really been talked about. This covers independent comics, zines, weird spin-offs, webcomics and more.

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Gawain and the Green Knight by Emily Cheeseman – 2017

Mild Spoilers for a centuries old folk tale

Normally on these columns of mine we'd spend most of the time talking about the story of the comic I'm writing about, but things are a little different this month, since Emily Cheeseman's Gawain and the Green Knight is, as you've guessed, not an original tale, but rather an illustrated adaption of the ancient Arthurian myth, we're going to be looking more at story decisions and interpretation through adaption.

Standing more as a singular fable, rather than a core part of the larger canon of the Arthurian saga, Gawain and the Green Knight tells the story of the haughty and ambitious nephew of a now settled and ingrained King Arthur. Eager to prove his mettle, Gawain stands in for Arthur to take up the challenge set by the mysterious, and possibly supernatural, Green Knight. Cast a blow against the knight's neck, and be returned in kind within a year.

The Green Knight is one of those stories of which it's component parts can change from telling to telling. Most recently the 2021 film adaption chose to give the story a dark and surreal edge, leaving Gawain and the Knight's ultimate fate ambiguous. Cheeseman's take, by contrast, leans much more optimistically in it's flavour, Gawain is ultimately well meaning, though too quick in action, and his entire quest only begins in part due to Arthur doubting the Green Knight's supernatural prowess even exist.

Like most adaptions, Cheeseman has to decide what to keep and what to discard and so spends the majority of the book covering the later part of the story regarding the Lord and Lady of the Manor. She renders a mostly accurate version of this tale, reiterating the myth's themes of take and return, and chooses to ultimately link the subplot to the reveal that the Green Knight and the Lord of the Manor are one and the same. It's not a version of this character many adaptions choose to go by, but for me I find it a neat and tidy way of tying the story up, while hamming it's themes into a clear finale.

The entirety of Cheeseman's adaption is rendered wonderfully in her very simply shaded, but boldly coloured, characterization of the world and characters. The comic's mood sits somewhere between a picture book and concept art for an animated film. The characters are colourful but the simplicity of the design allows Cheeseman to communicate a definition to their personalities that a perhaps more gritty or cynical visual take would have made it harder to do.

Despite being a more faithful telling of the story without any significant twists or reinterpretations, Cheeseman manages to pull off probably the definitive version of the story in my eyes, and it's relatively direct and simple panel layout means I can go back to it regardless of what mood I'm in. While the comic is, if nothing else, ideal for any audience, as it loses nothing of its grand scale and sweeping vistas whether you're 9 years old or 90.

Gawain and the Green Knight is an expertly executed book, and highlights the vivid and magnetic quality that Cheeseman has as an artist and a storyteller. It's a warm and optimistic version of the story, but one that loses none of its wit or its sharpness, and is a clear example of why these stories and sagas from hundreds of years ago continue to resonate with us even today.

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Jack Harvey 2022. Gawain and the Green Knight (c) 2017 Emily Cheeseman . Images used under Fair Use.

Obscure Comic of the Month - The Gatecrashers: Book Two

Obscure Comic of the Month is a column where I take a look at a comic or series that hasn't really been talked about. This covers independent comics, zines, weird spin-offs, webcomics and more.

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The Gatecrashers: A Night of Gatecrashing Book Two by Zachary Mortensen and Sutu – Ghost Robot 2016

Mild Spoilers

We last covered Zachary Mortensen's The Gatecrashers during my previous iteration of this column. I was impressed by his intricate cyberpunk adventure story, and found myself drawn in to the world, eager to see where the story was set to go. With Book Two, however, it would appear I'd have to wait a little longer to get there.

Rather than continuing the plot set up in Book One, the clandestine mystery Hex Spencer had found herself caught up in, Book Two instead jumps back to an earlier point in her life, to cover a period where Hex was just starting out as a Gatecrasher and still had one foot in a life of poverty and crime.

Why Mortensen chose to go in this direction I'm not too sure. Especially since the last issue of Book One seemed to be heading in such a definitive direction. I suspect that, given that the world of independent comics can be a flighty and precarious one, Book Two was intended to be a somewhat soft reboot. A brand new story that could appeal to new readers who had maybe missed their chance of catching Book One, with the intent to return to the main plot once a larger readership had developed.

Either way, this leaves us to formulate an opinion of Book Two on its own merits. Despite sharing Its protagonist and world, the pace of Book Two is very different, showing us a less responsible and more cynical version of Hex before she had taken a more principled direction with her life. The plot concerns the retrieval and delivery of a suitcase full of eyeballs, while tracing its journey to and from the black market. Book Two deals with a more morally compromised Hex, who has yet to decide how selfish she wants to be with her life.

Despite the brief change of direction, completely new secondary cast of characters, antagonists and a protagonist with a much different feel to the way she had been seen previously, Mortensen's writing is still as strong as ever, and it's clear he has a strong sense of place and a good connection to this fictional world. Even though I had initial reservations over the changing direction of the story, the writing drew me in straight away and even though the plot of Book One was on standby I was still eager to see the development of this new prequel-esque story.

Like the previous book Sutu's art is a wonderful fit for the plot and world, giving us another look at this vibrant and colourful cyberpunk city which for the most part takes place across the daytime this time around . Mortensen's writing and Sutu's art work fit together hand in glove, which much like the previous book delivers a setting with a sense of real place and identity.

It's now been a few years since The Gatecrashers has been around but, its story of walled-off residential districts and an almost vigilante scale attitude towards healthcare leaves the story feeling more relevant than ever in 2022 . I only hope that Mortensen continues the series. As the current day begins to more and more resemble the cyberpunk dystopias of the past, it falls to a new generation of writers and artists to depict our era through the lens of satire and allegory.

After two strong volumes I feel Mortensen and Sutu are well prepared for the challenge.

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Jack Harvey 2022. The Gatecrashers (c) 2016 Zachary Mortensen and Sutu. Images used under Fair Use.

Jack's August Update

As ever, projects have been ticking along smoothly, but I thought it was time for an update to clarify the state of things.

However, before we get into what I'm working on, I just want to explain why things might be slowing down for a bit. The tendonitis in my left hand has flared up again, to the point where I might have to take it out of action again.

What this means is that I'm finding it difficult to do artwork or any writing for long periods of time. I want to try and keep up with things, but if it gets any worse over the next few weeks, I'll have to put most of my projects on hold until it improves again.

The upside is that my right hand is still fine. I won't be able to bang out any long form writing, but comic scripts should be manageable. Obscure Comic of the Month should continue as normal.

On that note, on with the updates.

- The West Coast Minicon was a resounding success, and I never expected so many people would show up for a con in such a small town. It sounds as though another convention might be in the works for later this year, so I'll post an update as soon as I know more.

- A fresh Sea of Spheres story is already 'in the can' and I'm currently discussing the artwork with Windlass, so expect that to go up some time later this year.

- I'm also working on a short comic with art by SLAM! which you can see a sneak look at above. I'm really excited for this one and looking forward to getting it out of the gate.

- Like last year, I'm planning on going to Harrogate Thought Bubble in November. I won't have a table or anything, just going for a wander around, but I am eager to talk shop with other creators there.

That's about all for now. More info as and when it comes through, and you can keep up with more of my stuff by following me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading.