Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Joe and Monkey, Zip and Li'l Bit, plus a Review

I've had a chance to check out "Joe and Monkey," a Webcomic by Zach Miller and a fellow nominee for the Lulu Blooker Prize. It's an interesting, creative strip about Joe, his monkey, some robots, and...some other guys. I like Zach's lean and confident linework. "Joe and Monkey" also illustrates a characteristic that I think separates exceptional Webcomics from the 97.5% that are ordinary or worse: it offers something new every day. Zach's archive holds an impressive 718 episodes of "Joe and Monkey" and he clearly treats it like a profession. I think after you've done anything 718 times you get pretty good at it. Good luck to him.

Cartoonist Mike Lynch (two cites in one week!) alerted me to a very nice review of Mom's Cancer that Gina Ruiz wrote for the online "Blogcritics Magazine." I particularly appreciated the fact that she understood some of the choices I made in writing it. "Mom’s Cancer isn’t some overly sentimental cancer story," she wrote. "I was a bit hesitant to read it, thinking it was going to be a tear-jerking, sentimental story meant for a movie of the week. I was more than surprised at how personal the story was, at how it was gentle, honest, and true without being sloppy."
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Hey! I meant to do that! Many thanks to Ms. Ruiz.
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Just to avoid writing about Mike Lynch again any time soon, I'll mention an outstanding Webcomic he turned me on to a while ago called Zip and Li'l Bit whose creator, Trade Loeffler, just finished a 62-page story featuring a young boy named Zip, his sister Li'l Bit, their bobbie friend Officer John, and their adventures in the world of "Upside-Down Me." It's wonderfully drawn, evocative of Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo," Sendak's "In the Night Kitchen," and similar stories that capture the semi-dreamy state where a clever child's imagination can make anything happen. I thought it was terrific. The complete story can be read via the link above (go there and just click on "First"), and Trade promises to begin a new story in September. I'll look forward to it.

Zip (on ceiling) and Li'l Bit begin the
adventure of "Upside-Down Me" by Trade Loeffler

2 comments:

ronnie said...

Speaking of reviews, were you aware that Mom's Cancer has a Wikipedia entry?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mom's_Cancer

Brian Fies said...

Yep. I get a surprising (to me) number of visitors from there. I had nothing to do with it and very much appreciate the effort of whoever did.

However, I have run up against the Wiki policy/preference/guideline/rule that the subjects of Wikipedia entries aren't allowed to revise or correct them. This strikes me as strange--seems to me that the person it's about might be the most accurate source of information--but I guess such input is considered insufficiently "neutral." So it is what it is, and I'm happy it's there.