Category: Uncategorized

Sinking (1992)
by James D Hudnall and Robert Ortaleza

This is the final thing Epic would publish in the “album” format, and looking at the cover, it’s … gonna be a weird one? I mean, there’s a gnome with a glowing ball on the cover? Or it could just be a badly drawn guy from an odd angle.

Still not a cover to inspire the book flying off the shelves, you’d have thought.

Hudnall is the writer of the well-received ESPers series (and the Interface followup), so I’m aboard for this.

Oh deer. I’m guessing that Ortaleza didn’t have much experience with doing comics? These paintings have that unfortunate look of a fumetti — every panel looks as if they’ve been traced directly from a photo, which means that every character is as convincing as the person acting out the roles are.

And the quality of these actors are… eh… well, you can see for yourself.

He does quite a wide range of rendering styles over the 80 pages of this graphic novel, which is something, I guess.

So what’s this story about? When I got to these pages, I had an unfortunate eye-roll accident, spraining my eyes permanently, because it seemed like this was going to be yet another comic about a sensitive nerd growing up. This is catnip for sensitive nerd readers, of course, but it’s been done to death and way, way beyond.

But then it takes an unexpected twist and (SPOILERS! STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN”T READ THE BOOK) it’s all about schizophrenia. And not the fun TV version of schizophrenia where you get super-powers, but the sad, gruelling kind.

(Oh, yeah, he’s supposed to be seventeen in the panels above, but I’m guessing that Ortaleza’s actor was in his 40s, so he looks like he’s in his 40s.)

I have to say that I found most of his symptoms to be very convincing and sad, but sometimes it does turn a bit… uhm… clichéd? But I guess most insane people aren’t very original, either, so perhaps that’s not really a valid quibble.

Now, that’s a painting of a picture of a really sad-looking actor.

Anyway, as a reading experience, despite the stiff, awkward figures that abound here, it’s a really positive one. There aren’t many missteps in the storytelling, and it seems much shorter than the 80 pages it occupies — it’s a sad and gripping story that seems quite true.

And it nails the ending, tying up things in a satisfying way, without being unrealistic. That is, the structure Hudnall uses here is totally on point.

Of course, if I had read the back cover first, I would have known that it was about a schizophrenic guy, and that would have removed some of the surprise at where this was going.

So don’t do that.

OOPS.

“Many people ask me”… Mm-hm. Sure.

This book has never been reprinted, but you can pick it up for half its cover price from ebay. So I’m guessing it wasn’t a … major hit.

I have been unable to find any reviews of this book at all on the interwebs or in the trade press.

Dinosaurs, A Celebration (1992) #1-4
edited by Steve White

What’s this then? Another series coming out of Marvel UK? It’s the third in a row on this blog, and I have them all as being published in November 1992… so was Epic doing an autumn cleaning of inventory from Marvel UK?

Anyway, this is a four issue, 48 page “prestige format” series about dinosaurs. Reading the introduction, it sounds like we’ll be in for the most pedantic saurian book ever…

… and about one third of the contents are pages like this, where we get an overview of different dinos and their characteristics. I have to admit that I mostly skipped these pages when reading this, because my interest in dinosaurs is pretty slight.

About… half? Of the pages, though, are comics, and I did read these. The writers definitely shy away from anthropomorphising the animals, which is nice, but which leaves them with something of a conundrum: What are they then going to have these stories be about?

And it’s seems pretty clear that the edict is that every story has to be super-dramatic, so all the stories have some killing or serious fighting going on. It’s the easy, obvious choice, and if you’re doing a book about dinosaurs, you should definitely have some dinosaurs fighting each other.

But in every single story? It’s a pretty small part of life for real animals, really. I mean, time-wise: Most of the time is spent lazing about, playing with the kids and socialising. And we get nothing of that here, which makes these stories, fine as they are in isolation, pretty mind-numbing after a while.

Hm… OK, that’s a pretty useful family tree.

A couple of the stories get pretty close to having a real narrative, which makes as change.

But perhaps the stories themselves are mostly just excuses for having some really good artists having a go at drawing dinosaurs? Well, why not?

There’s even some jokes! And this is a story that’s not about hunting! Variety! Yes!

So, this book is obviously not for me, and I think that dino fans will mostly find this a really entertaining and interesting book. Of course, the dino science has moved on quite a bit in the 30 years since this was published, but still…

Marvel published a collected edition of this series in 1997, but it doesn’t seem to have been reprinted since then?

This guy seems to know what he’s talking about:

The series was hit-and-miss. While the encyclopedia-type portions attempted to be educational, the short collections of semi-technical passages were dry and uninspiring, and the quality of the artwork varied from story to story. Late in the “Bone-Heads and Duck-Bills” issue there is a beautifully illustrated tale about an attack on a Pachycephalosaurus herd by a Tyrannosaurus pack drawn by well-known paleo-artist Luis Rey, but a comic about South American sauropods illustrated by Chris Foss in another issue directly lifts poses from other works of paleo-art, and the dinosaurs have a lumpy, muddy look about them.

This all reminded me of that funny article about flensed-looking dinosaurs that was published the other year. I have no idea whether this is a well-founded critique of paleoartists, but this is pretty funny:

Look at those murder spikes on that swan!