The Webcomics Weekly #84: Every Day is New Comic Book Day (4/28/2020 Edition)

On the Internet everyday is new comic book day, because that’s how timezones work! This week: “Agents” has some well done character drama and begins to peel away at the lore of the Other Realm. Chandra keeps on going as Jason works through the second chapter of “The Otherknown.” AWA studios webcomic conversions continues to be an area of interest for our webcomic wranglers. Ron Randall leaves Mercy St. Claire in a tough spot in “Trekker.”

In the previous batch of pages Louis was slowly building and building until one of the Agents finally snapped! It was Paige, she was rightly not going to have any of this. Normally this is the sort of group argument moment that could come off as cheap or weak drama, it doesn’t however due to both how well the personalities of the characters have been developed and the recognition of growing knowledge gaps between the Agents and Jade. Paige’s reasoning for not putting up with any of this tape review make perfect sense and fit her character, as the studious and organized one of the group. Of all the Agents she would be the run to stand up to Jade and poke holes in why they’re being called into review tape so early in the morning. Just like it makes sense that Kendall is the one trying to play peacemaker as Paige storms out. Eventually leaving just Norah and Adele with hologram Jade and no where to really go, because it’s their room.

Louis changes up their rendering of Paige for these few angry pages to great effect. The art work isn’t suddenly hyper detailed, angry manga faces, but gestures in that direction enough that it becomes perceptible without overpowering the page as a whole.

Jade’s Monday morning quarterbacking works both from the perspective of her role on the team. She’s their Professor X or Charlie, the voice in their head who tells them to go do but shares little of the immediate physical danger. At the same time her knowledge as the instigator of all this is what makes valuable. These traits are than mixed with what we saw glimpses of early on in the chapter with the realities of her situation in the Other Realm sets up the stress and lack of control she is feeling due to what day it is. Which results in the only thing she thinks she can do to gain some sense of control: reprimand her partners over inter-dimensional Skype and feel “big.”

“I sure as hell heard how you were talking to them” is a dagger of a line from your partner, it’s both parental and just leaves you with no good response. Jade was caught and there’s no way around it to make it look not like what it is. The color coded lettering comes into great effect here as it coheres a good amount of dialog and allows Louis to show Norah and Adele just perplexed at the whole thing.

With nothing else to do Jade begins to tell them her backstory and so we transition into a new stage of chapter 6, to be continued in the next couple of weeks.

Welcome back to more “The Otherknown!” Do you know what’s crazy? Its the last week of April 2020. That’s insane. Nonetheless, hopefully you and yours are doing well and being safe. Now, let’s see how Chandra is faring in Chapter 2, Pages 30-36!

As we all figured she would do, Chandra escapes the vision of her Aunt and the robots to try to meet up with Reed. I mean, I don’t blame her, the circumstances she was under didn’t seem fun. But, even though we figured she would escape, we wondered how she would do it. The manner fits her character perfectly while being hilarious and fun at the same time. While her Aunt’s robots (Prati, Senti) watch Chandra they try to get her to pass time by playing with a “Rubix Cube.” An old “ancient human test of wit, from Earth.” That’s a nice way of telling us the timeframe Merriman!

With the Rubix Cube in hand, Chandra tricks the robots into sibling rivalry to see who can complete it. I absolutely loved this moment and is totally in character for Chandra. Yet another fun point of this is Merriman’s art for the robot’s competition. When the siblings are Rubix Cube battling a constant word bubble pops up with them setting new records. Then Merriman shows the duo in parallel panels showing the battle of the ages.

When they are solving the cube she portrays them in a manner befitting of “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.” In these singular panels, the robots are tense and rapidly solving the cube with “TURN” sound effects surrounding them. This moment is so fierce in its execution, yet works perfectly. A final note on Merriman’s art is that I absolutely love how she shows the lighting from monitors. In some comics when a character is looking at a monitor in a dark room, the monitor’s light never shines on them. But, Merriman adds the shine, which is a small thing, yet shows a visual eye.

There wasn’t too much happening in these six pages, which is totally fine. Instead, Merriman showed the ruthlessness of Barthélemy Chenu in a few panels, and Chandra’s escape. Honestly, I loved Chandra’s distraction plan, especially since she got it from Reed.

Last week, Mike looked at one of the AWA titles re-released as a free webcomic, “Archangel 8.” I wanted to take a look at another of them, “The Resistance,” partly because I’ll follow any JMS project and partly because it has the unfortunate honor of being a story about a sudden plague that wipes out hundreds of millions of people across the globe released during a global pandemic that’s, as of writing, killed at least 200,000 people globally. When JMS talked about the comic reflecting a superpower filled universe based in today rather than the 40s/60s of DC/Marvel, I don’t think he quite expected it to hit this close.

Deodato’s art and Martin’s colors may be the best I’ve seen from them together in a long while, really selling the humanity of the world without sacrificing the power or scale of the tale. Deodato’s art does have the problem that many of his characters are posed with taut or overly exaggerated faces, like they’re models from “Garry’s Mod,” which isn’t helped by Martin’s shading but I found myself forgiving much of that. Sure, there are silly faces that sucked me out of the story, and the fact that “Ed Harris” is following up on “Harrison Ford” as president, but the big emotional beats shone through.

I also did not expect to have wildly different feeling about these episodes, which cover the length of issue #1 and a bit of issue #2, from when I first read the comic to prep for the interview linked above. . .but it did. Part of that comes down to Jimenez’s adaptation of the original comic, which really takes advantage of Webtoons’ ability to control gutter space and extend scenes, but the rest is all down to our inescapable reality at the moment informing my reading of the story.

Honestly, I was more than a little unsettled by the first six episodes (issue #1,) filled with absolute dread, knowing that, while the science-fiction elements of this story firmly place this somewhere else, meaning that some parallels do not work, like the scene of the President in episode 2 since, lockdown measures and social distancing do, and are, working for us, there are enough elements extrapolated from reality that hit close to home.

But I’m even more invested in the book now thanks to those same elements.

Does a public health crisis bring us together or tear us apart? What factors are working to do what? Who will take advantage of this situation to further their power and who will do right by the people most affected? Now that the cracks in the system are laid bare, will we let the powerful strong arm it back into the shadows, or will we fix those problems, whether that means building a new system or actually funding our god damn public services instead of letting them go bankrupt so giant companies can get a bonus cushion.

It’s not a set of happy questions, though there is a clear undercurrent of positivity through the act of resistance to the worst forces of humanity. “The Resistance” begins in a bleak place, there’s no doubt about that, and the lack of an easy road to any answers to the above questions can make it difficult to read. Were this to have launched last year, I would recommend it to everyone. I can’t do that now. But reading a story that’s grappling with questions we will almost certainly be dealing with, in some way, shape or form, in the coming months to years, is what I’m looking for at the moment, strange as it may seem.

Maybe you are too.

The back half of ‘The Janus Voyage’ really goes places. For starters it becomes clear that Paul would not cut it on Murder She Wrote, he would quickly tire of all the death and hijinks real fast. By the end of the page he’s disappeared. By the end of the next page “Trekker” begins to turn into the start of Star Wars and Randall leaves things in a very different place for the first time. Like I said ‘The Janus Voyage.’

With Paul turning into thin air, a disappearance Mercy seems surprisingly OK with considering she admits things had been going well between the two of them. She had an escape hatch planned, to go after that Trekker from the last issue, just in case so she might as well use it now. Except plans change and she finds herself a few credits short. That is a lot to throw at two comic pages, it isn’t the most elegant thing in the world but it mostly works. Mercy not being all that interested in finding Paul is the part that stands out the most. Lucky for her she finds herself working as the body guard for a group of women on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan Mal and like Han Solo might get a hefty pay day for the missions completion. Once again I hope you had your narrative seatbelts on to protect against all this whiplash.

The quickness of it all turns into a strength as the issue concludes with Mercy being arrested! All is not it appears, for starters Mercy once again gets into a fight in a subterranean sewer like space. Which is an odd look for a space craft. Randall leaves things on a totally gonzo cliffhanger ending. The effectiveness of that ending can only be discovered in the coming weeks as a multipart story begins to develop. As a reading experience it wasn’t all that great, Randall’s technical execution was fine but the plot rollercoaster ride it puts you on is a bit much. Like the last issue I could see a logic in the choices so maybe this one will make more sense in retrospect.