Late last night/early this morning depending where you are, Tom Scioli (of “Godland”, “American Barbarian” and more) announced via his Twitter account that he was done with comics due to recent interactions with a publisher before subsequently deleting his Twitter account. Tom also reached out to us as we were planning to run an interview with him about his latest works, asking us not to post it due to this decision. It’s a strange and upsetting move for fans of his work, and it certainly calls into question the future of unfinished web comics “Satan’s Soldier” and “Mystery Object” or the upcoming finale to to “Godland,” a page of which Scioli just posted literally two days ago, all of which remains unknown at this time.
We reached out to and chatted with Tom about this decision and his reasons, and we respect his privacy on the matter as it stands. That said, we believe the comic world will be a much more sad place without his work.
Here’s why.
Every now and then, our usually steel facades of journalistic integrity are smelted off and we reveal ourselves for what we are: huge fanboys of comic books. And if you’re unfamiliar with Tom Scioli, then that’s a shame. An Eisner-nominated creator who made his way into the comic industry with “UnMortals” and the comic tie-in of Irrational Games’ Freedom Force, Scioli makes his home in the cosmic fringes of our world, content with nothing less than sci-fi comic operas.
Scioli’s work is intricate and precise and – and he gets this all the time – very influenced by Jack Kirby. However, while this may be a visual jumping-off point, his work never fails to elaborate and work-upon a style already established by the King, which seems to make Scioli the Prince of Comics. Scioli’s art, while inherently reminiscent of an era of comics long gone, ultimately succeeds because it reflects a wave of nostalgia upon the reader while evolving the slightly familiar in a modern slant. Add to that a refined color palette so potent and vibrant that the colors seem to irradiate and leak off the page and you’ve got yourself an artist producing work that is like nothing else on stands right now. There’s no doubt where Scioli’s work is rooted, but it has very much grown and evolved into a hybrid of 60’s aesthetic and 00’s ideals.
However, the Kirby comparison is only the beginning of what he brings to his comics.
“Godland,” Scioli’s creator-owned series with Joe Casey published at Image Comics, is an absolute thing of beauty. Written Marvel Style and feeding off ideas originally seen in books like “Eternals” and “Fourth World,” “Godland” is a modern Silver Age saga where one man finds himself elevated into universal conscious and god status. Marvel and DC’s space god books were always full of immense and grandiose ideas that didn’t seem like they could easily be contained on a page, and Scioli and Casey play this aspect up to its somehow logical extreme, offering a new twist on an old classic. “Godland” is one of those books that never seems lost for a new angle to exploit, a new idea to explore, and Scioli’s impressive and stylistic artwork matched with Casey’s penchant for not-so-veiled commentary, spastic dialogue and drug-induced sequences mix together so well that you’d almost believe Scioli and Casey are combining into one sort of super-creator. Both creators add such an intense set of mythology into the book, though, that whenever “Godland’s” final issue comes out, you can be assured that it’ll be one for comic’s history books.
Initially released online with a physical release through AdHouse, “American Barbarian” is Scioli’s epic tribute to his greatest mentor. Taking inspiration from “Kamandi” and running wild with it, “American Barbarian” is like a free-form jazz flow of ideas pulled from the most exciting recesses of Scioli’s brain. It’s an absolutely unpredictable work of genre fiction that defies the very genre it finds inspiration from, and at no point does the book seem satisfied with being any less grand than it is meant to be. As weird as it may be to describe, “American Barbarian” is the type of book that feeds off of itself in a very natural way, where at no point do you feel you’re following a story but rather that you’re watching events unfold in pictorial form, a truly legendary saga of one post-apocalyptic barbarian’s struggle against forces far beyond his skill and abilities to defeat in an unfathomable world that makes Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome look like a playground. It’s addictive, it’s exciting and it’s the type of book that will define Scioli as a writer/artist in years to come.
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Like “American Barbarian,” Scioli has published three other webcomics on his website, AmBarb.com, that offer different and fascinating facets of his work.
“Final Frontier” is, put in its simplest terms, a superhero rock and roll story. The tagline of the series is “No wonder people call them the Beatles of superheroes” and that line is put to the test instantly, as the first we see of the band is them playing a rooftop farewell concert. From there, the story spins in a few directions, either following Robot Dracula and Threed, or the doomed wedding of Dr. Stiff and Shadowidow, or the Silver Spider, or various other amalgams of characters you’ve seen before, but presented in hilarious new ways. Imagine 60’s Marvel through a funhouse mirror, throw in some great Pittsburgh slang (Double Yoi!), and a healthy dose of great music (“Can I punch you because you like robots?”) and you begin to get the idea of what sort of story it is.
“Satan’s Soldier” presents a simple premise: what if Superman was pure evil? Spoiler alert: he’d kill babies, break backs and have sex with, and destroy, anyone he wants to. The book isn’t presented in Scioli’s usual style, but rather is an uninked, digitally colored story that practically glows with the vibrant colors out front. Like much of Scioli’s work, it is very, very funny. There is some clever meta-storytelling about comics within, and Scioli has started to use some simple animation techniques in the coloring also.
His most recent project, “Mystery Object,” is a play on classic Nintendo games, presented in a truly unique style. Each installment is in the form of a long, vertical panel that drops the reader down into a world of misunderstandings, puns, and allusions. It is a complex, moving, piece that is only 5 pages in, and therefore perfect for jumping into.
If this is truly the end of Scioli’s work, he is leaving behind an incredible run of work that blends prodigious art, genuinely funny humor, and a sense of storytelling that harkens back to a classic time while staying modern. But that shouldn’t be enough – our industry is a legitimately worse place today than it was yesterday, when Tom Scioli still was making comics. Hopefully this article is out of date soon, when someone or something gets Tom to make another comic.
Until then, buy some of the guy’s work from his webstore and make sure he knows that he’ll be missed.
Additional Multiversity Links Covering the Works of Tom Scioli
