This is a quick wrap-up of Wizard World Chicago 08.  Whew.  Great show, but very different than 07.  The main difference (and what a difference it was!) was that this year the show was in June, not August.  Next year it goes back to August, so maybe it will return to the way it was.  Anyway, it seemed like there weren’t as many big stars at the con.  No Terry Moore, Frank Miller, Stan Lee, or (I believe) Alex Ross.  Artist alley was a bit more sparsely populated, and fan attendance didn’t seem as heavy.  With the weak economy, and the passing of Michael Turner, it made for a much more somber, thoughtful con experience.

That having been said, we were very busy, especially on Saturday, and we sold most our copies of “Johnny Saturn: Synns of the Father,” as well as many single issues, calendars, and Ogre Ale bottles.  We met some important people, and I’ll have more about that in future blogs as plans take shape, and we did two podcast interviews.  Benita was filmed for a local TV station while spinning, and she spread the word far and wide on the fiber arts.  We both passed out scores of free black & white Free Comic Book Day editions of Johnny Saturn, and we’re out of those now.

Having been a member of the indie comic scene for some years, I would like to say that you could never find a sweeter, more creative, more intelligent, more passionate community of people.  I’m proud to be among them.  After preparing for this show for so long, I’m truly sorry to have had it come and go so quickly. 

I would also like to share my admiration for Benita, who has truly become a mover and shaker in our Studio, and our well-spoken envoy to the community at large.

Scott.

Hi, Folks!

This is the Comic Related interview we did with the friendly and indie-friendly Chuck Moore.  We share this show with several other fine folks, including good friend Tom Stillwell, and Warrin Ellis.  Enjoy!

I got our Johnny Saturn Cafe Press site integrated with the blog tonight! You can find all fourteen cool items under the Cafe Press Swag page under the Store. My personal favorite is the Johnny Saturn mug, which is quite large and great for my morning (and all day long) coffee. I wore the Johnny Saturn black baseball hat, and several of the shirts, at Wizard World Chicago, and so did Benita–We were stylin! While the store in general is not set up yet, and probably won’t be fully functional until next week, the Cafe Press store is primed and ready to go.

So far, during the set-up and fine tuning of the site, I haven’t advertised. That’s about to change. Johnny Saturn has been running on the web for years, but I used to take the scattershot approach–I hosted the comic in up to four places at once, and I spread myself around various websites, forums, and social networking sites. This time, it’s different, because I’m pulling everything together under this single site. The old business plan worked fine for a long time, but the web changes often, and webcartoonists have to remain flexible. I’ve been doing a webcomic for long enough that at one time or another I’ve probably made every mistake that can be made–luckily, I’ve learned a lot along the way, and done my fair share right things too. I guess it’s time to level-up.

More tomorrow!

Scott

Story Studios

3.99@, color, 28 pages@, available now

Writer and artist: Scott Story

Reviewed by Kurt Anthony Krug ***1/2 in Comic Buyers Guide

For an independent comic book, the art, story, and even the colors in this mini-series are high-quality.  You’d swear this title were published by one of the larger companies instead of by Scott Story and his wife, Benita.

Johnny Saturn is a Batman-esque hero who dies at the hands of Dr. Synn, his arch-nemesis.  But death is only the beginning for both Johnny Saturn and Synn.  Character profiles bookend each issues.

Story said he was inspired by Watchmen and Frank Miller’s work on Batman and Daredevil.  There’s also a dash of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City and Neil Gaiman, as well as DC-Wildstorm’s Apollo (as seen in Story’s Utopian) and Midnighter.  The pacing remains excellent throughout, and the art is consistent, not to mention consistently good.  If you read only one independent title in the next month, make it Johnny Saturn.

By Benita Story

Finder Talisman by Carla Speed McNeil

One of the graphic novels I picked up at Wizard World Chicago was Finder Talisman by Carla Speed McNeil.  This graphic novel consists of Finder issues number 19 through 21, originally published in 2000 and 2001.

Speaking with Carla was very interesting.  For starters, here is someone with a lot of intense, quiet passion about the subjects of her books.  When I left her table, I knew this was one creator (for she does both the stories and the art) that was worth watching, and after reading this graphic novel, one worth reading as I come across more of her books.

Finder Talisman is set in the future, how far isn’t clear, but it is a future where people can “plug” in to computers, movies, music, whatever entertainment or activity that is wanted.  In a way, it’s like a pre-Matrix world where people are beginning to lose touch with the real world and are living more and more in their minds as fed by what they are hooked up to.  The main character, Marcie, is a bit different from the people around her in that she has been fascinated with real, paper and binding books from a young age when she was read to by a family friend.  To her, books contain magic and she finally decides that she needs to go to school (at age 7) so that she can learn to read books herself.  In this world, her elders try to talk her out of it saying it in an archaic skill that is no longer needed.  Luckily, Marcie is smarter than that.

While following Marcie as she grows up in this surreal-feeling world, a world with no new books, no creative originality, and no original thoughts the story begins to unfold, and those of us who cannot imagine a world without these precious things slowly become horrified at what these people have allowed their world to deteriorate to.  I think one of the reasons I do not watch television is because, even at an early age (about 9) I realized I had a better imagination than the writers of these shows, and would spend the time my family spent glued to the TV writing stories, drawing, sewing, reading, etc.  I did not let my imagination atrophy for lack of mental exercise, and I seriously believe that is why I have the active creative life I have today in my mid-40’s.

The black and white art in this book is very well done.  It is clear, concise, evocative, easy to follow and read.  Carla’s art has two levels, first the first glance art that follows the story and gives it a background.  Then, there is a secondary level to the art that you must pause and look at.  There are quite a few extra story elements thrown in here and there that tell an even deeper story for those willing to look.  I especially enjoyed studying this deeper level.

I purposely have not been giving “star” ratings to the reviews I have been doing because it seems a little too cliché to me.  I’d rather just tell you what I think and let you read the story for yourself and make up your own minds on it.  I will say this, though – I will be reading more of Carla Speed McNeil’s works.

Johnny Saturn is in a new stage of life.  We never stopped producing episodes, but we did change how and where and when they are distributed.  Originally, we ran the strip with a full page once a week.  It began on Graphic Smash, moved to Komikwerks, then back to Graphic Smash, and then to Comic Genesis and Drunk Duck as well.  For a while, that scattershot approach worked well, and we built a readership of several thousand per day, and our combined numbers looked quite good.  (I do not know what the hits versus unique visitors was, because none of these systems reported that data.  Nowadays I know better.)

After reading “How to Make Webcomics” by the Half-Pixel cartoonists, I decided on a different approach for Johnny Saturn.  I would gather all our content onto one site, along with a store and daily blogs, and we would then proceed to build a single audience and more clearly focus all our energies on one site.  We still run Johnny Saturn on Graphic Smash, but we run the strips a day later there, one Tuesday and Thursday, not Monday and Wednesday.

These days, I divide each page of Johnny Saturn into halves, running the first part of the page on Monday, and second part on Wednesday.  My original thinking here was that offering less content more often was better than running more content less often, and to a degree I believe this is true.  In reality, however, it worked out differently, and it came to mean more content more often.  Each web episode needed to include some entertainment value and had to somehow advance the plot, so it resulted in more panels and more text per page.  It’s more work for me and Benita, my co-writer, but ultimately worth it, I believe.

Johnny Saturn always has been and underdog.  In a webcomic world that favors gag-a-day strips, and often caters to college students and young professionals, Johnny Saturn has defiantly featured superheroes, middle-aged or elderly characters, and close looks at villains and deeply troubled heroes.  There hasn’t been any nudity, and we haven’t sexualized or characters or sensationalized gay characters.  Drug addiction?  Clinical depression?  Grief?  Suicide? We’ve dealt with all of them, but in a straight forward manner, but we’ve left the melodrama at the door. 

Nowadays, there is a political theme underlying the strip.  The beauty of comics is that we are able to tackle the key issues of today in an allegorical fashion, personifying political forces in fictional garb.  The Oppression Wave?  The Star Cabal?  You can read these as pure entertainment, or you can go deeper.  Either way, I invite you to keep reading Johnny Saturn.

By Benita Story

Mouse Guard – Winter:1152 by David Petersen

According to Scott, David Petersen’s Mouse Guard is a highly regarded series and David is well-known and respected in the independent comic book scene.  For me, whose comic reading has been limited to the web, mostly, it’s new.

Again, what caught my attention while wandering among the tables in Artist Alley at Wizard World Chicago was the cover art.  A warrior mouse in medieval garb, trudging through the snow and smoking a pipe – Yup!  Interesting!

So, I spoke with David, he explained the series to me, and I bought one issue.  I wish I had bought them all!  I will not be waiting for next year’s convention to gather more of his work – I will be contacting him this next week and see what he can send to me.  I hope I’m not too late for the rest of the storyline I have started.

The art is absolutely fantastic, the coloring rich, and the story-telling compelling and spell-binding.  This is the fourth book in my series of Indy Friday reviews, but it is my favorite, so far, and I really loved Vögelein.  Okay, I love medieval stories, and I have never gotten over my love of animals as characters.  Even in my days of playing D&D, I’ve rarely played pure humans, preferring to play Maldretch (A wolf-like humanoid), Half-Ogres, gnomes and elves. 

The mice in this story are not the fearful, cowering mice like the rats in the NIMH books, but are trained warriors, medicine makers, merchants, everything that is needed in their society.  In the book I have, which is the first book in the Winter: 1152 series, I even see them facing down an owl on the hunt for supper, and coming off the best for it. 

If I were to give stars, this one would get all five of them -  one for story-telling, two for the art, three for the coloring, four for the characterization, and five for the believable setting.  This isn’t just another cute, fuzzy animal story.  These mice mean business!