C2E2: Part 2 of X, where X = (However Many of These I End Up Doing)

Meeting Chris Hallbeck of The Book of Biff for the first time

Our conversation more or less went like this.

When you are a cartoonist, you talk to people by putting together words and pictures. Most of our talking happens with noises we make from our mouths, so cartooning is kind of an unusual way to talk. Some cartoonists are equally at home talking with noises or with silly pictures, cartoonists like Tom Brazelton or Kris Straub, cool guys who generally seem at ease chatting with anyone, even perfect strangers who visit their booths at conventions or dudes they know wholly through the internet.

But some cartoonists are most comfortable talking through cartoons. Nothing's stopping these cartoonists from coming to conventions, and if you go up to their booth, it's not like awkward silence is a given or anything. But your conversation will probably be weird, and if they do feel completely comfortable talking, it's probably because they're talking with you about what you'd like them to sketch for you. At comic conventions, you can meet cartoonists from all across the social spectrum.

I met a lot of cartoonists at C2E2.

It was undeniably cool to meet Chris Hastings of Dr. McNinja fame. I got to watch him draw awesomeness onto a fan's interactive poster, we talked some about creating the kind of comics you want to read and finding something marketable inside your heart, and we had not one but two deliberately awkward silences. I talked with Evan Dahm, who has plans to develop his fictional world of Overside even beyond Rice Boy and Order of Tales. I talked to people whose work I'm familiar with, and I met some new faces too.

Ed Conley creates the comic Ed Contradictory, a bizarre foray into self-aware cartooning, in which the characters berate the cartoonist, search for new characters for the comic, and travel back in time to keep themselves from time-traveling. The central cast includes a cute-mascot panda bear, a gentleman scientist and the fellow gentleman scientist whose brain he placed inside a robot, a mercenary, and the Magical Booze Fish. It's utterly nuts and unabashedly anti-fourth-wall, and Ed Conley was wearing a necktie when I met him. That's pretty cool.

I also got to meet Dawn Griffin, creator of Zorphbert and Fred. Her comic is about two aliens who don dog disguises in order to observe and study humans, but I'm largely aware of her work because her two lead characters have been sharing their webcomics Picks of the Day via their Twitter accounts. Dawn and I talked about a whole crazy spectrum of things, from balancing your day job and your comic, to her illustration work for the Abby's Adventures children's books, to self-criticism and self-confidence and how it's a good idea to get up and actually do athletic things once in awhile. Dawn is a pretty cool person with a pretty cool comic.

Do I have more things to say about C2E2? Certainly. Can I find time to say them? We shall see.

Don't forget I got a new "I am a Purchasing Rockstar" strip going up at Borderline Boy tomorrow.

Review: Rice Boy

It's been a long time in coming, but here it is: the Rice Boy review. It's a rather daunting task, reviewing a work like this, because Rice Boy is a different strain of webcomic. It tells a complete and self-contained story, to begin with; it's evident that comic creator Evan Dahm put a lot of planning into the storyline, from beginning to end, even as a lot of other webcartoonists are content to dive in and see where their comic takes them. And Rice Boy's story is epic: a full 439 pages.

So what's the story about? A diminutive armless person named Rice Boy, who looks sort of like a Fisher-Price toy. A machine man, known as "The One Electronic" or "T-O-E," informs Rice Boy that he is a possible "fulfiller" of an ancient prophecy. Despite his doubts, Rice Boy decides to set off and "give the prophecy a shot," so to speak. As T-O-E finds himself enlisting the help of his brethren the machine men, and Rice Boy journeys through such trying realms as Lonely Land and Underside, they encounter various adversaries. In pursuit are the hard-drinking, one-eyed mercenary Golgo (who has some past ties to T-O-E), and the ruthless King Spatch II, leader of a nation of militaristic xenophobic frogs. The story builds to a climax as all the peoples of Rice Boy's peculiar world take sides, invested in the ultimate success or failure of his undertaking.

Rice Boy's world is a strange one. It is populated by a variety of strange entities, not human but possessing very human personalities: not humans but still people. "Magical" or otherworldly phenomena are accepted as normal, and surreal Seussian landscapes and cities make up the native environment. The whole thing is drawn in a colorful style, simple but fairly detailed, which helps convey the unique character of the world. One gets the sense that one could live in the Rice Boy universe: that time and place run just as deep here as in our own history, as in the spaces we ourselves inhabit. One could live here.

Rice Boy's story is just as rich thematically as its world is rich in texture; its surreal inhabitants grapple with the same weighty and human issues that we all do, which helps to ground the comic. Religion, religious authority, uncertainty and faith are all a part of the world. T-O-E has met with several failures and false starts on his "mission from God" to find a fulfiller, Rice Boy himself wonders if the prophecy is not true, and T-O-E openly admits, "The whole business with God is pretty ambiguous." T-O-E speaks with conviction of the Creator of his disc-shaped world, but elsewhere confesses the distance and vagueness of the deity he serves. He openly admits a belief in a "god of the gaps." As if formulating an Agnostic's Creed, he declares, "My god is what I don't know." The themes of uncertainty resonated strongly with me, and even as a Christian, I could identify with T-O-E's dubiety over his distant deity. And I think we all can identify: whatever answers we've come by, at some point we've all had to admit some uncertainty on metaphysical matters.

Rice Boy also deals with self-doubt and self-confidence. Its titular character, as noted before, approaches the prophecy with reservation, a handful of "maybes," and little conviction that a small person like himself could restore order to his world. On the other hand, as a result of T-O-E's (incorrect) pronouncement that the first King Spatch was the fulfiller, Spatch II is convinced that he can do no wrong as a successor-fulfiller, and that his destiny is to conquer all lesser kingdoms in the name of the prophecy. T-O-E grapples with all of his past incorrect pronouncements, the false fulfillers that he was certain were the real thing. The tale's protagonists have to come to terms with themselves, and it subtly suggests that their self-questioning and realistic self-appraisal perhaps better qualify them to be heroes.

Even as the kingdom of Spatch, in Evan Dahm's words, "satirizes the bad bits of Christianity" [*], Rice Boy simultaneously echoes the paradoxical idea of "strength in weakness" found in religion. Rice Boy and T-O-E are unlikely heroes, who do not save the world through external force, nor even through force of will, but in spite of--perhaps even through--the hesitancy of their convictions. When thinking of "power through weakness" as it plays out in Rice Boy, I can't help recalling the Christian idea that Jesus Christ could save the world through death, suffering, and the ignominy of crucifixion.

Death, and death cheated, are also common themes here: the fulfiller must die in order to fulfill the prophecy, and T-O-E is the last standing member of a three-man cadre who were given immortality as long as they continued to search for the fulfiller. Later, T-O-E receives a mortal wound with a poisoned blade and is living on borrowed time, and more than once he is left for dead only to return. All of this is to say that Dahm, in creating this, clearly had his finger on the pulse of myth and has created a highly evocative story.

And this is as much T-O-E's story as Rice Boy's. In his choice of Rice Boy for a potential fulfiller, T-O-E apparently attempts to find redemption for his previous incorrect selections, for the tyranny that Spatch II has wrought. His travels are as much a focus of the narrative as Rice Boy's, and in reuniting with the machine men that he once left, he must return to his past (mistakes and all) before facing the future. Additionally, with an unforeseen twist at the end, T-O-E plays his role in the final conflict, and the story truly becomes as much his as Rice Boy's. It's a moment imbued with significance, and I won't give it away.

In short, Rice Boy is good, and if you enjoy a large, well-told story, you will enjoy reading it. There's a lot to talk about in this comic, and I've only touched on a bit of it. Also, Evan Dahm continues to tell stories set in the same world as Rice Boy, with his regularly-updating Order of Tales. Visit his website and read his comics--I fully expect that the visit will be worth your time.

The news this week is that Rice Boy was great.

That's actually not news, of course. Rice Boy has been finished for awhile now--like not just stopped or ended, but it actually reached the finale of its overarching narrative. A webcomic with a natural beginning, middle, and end, imagine that! A genuine story. And the "old news" that Rice Boy was great is not even new news to me--I finished reading it some three weeks ago. So why am I mentioning it? Because it was great and engaging and creative and I want to talk about it with you.

But that'll have to wait. For now, I've got a week-in-review writeup to write, and it's coming rather late in the day here. Thoughts on Rice Boy, maybe later next week. Right now, the writeup.

Let's start with today. Today's installment of Dr. McNinja simultaneously cracked me up and made me go "Wow," which it actually does fairly frequently. Honestly, it's been awhile since Dr. McNinja did that for me--it was starting to get all "Oh, the grocery chain owner with the big purple monster alternate form got stuck halfway into his transformation, and oh look, now his quadriplegic dad has turned into a giant purple monster that is still paralyzed, that's kind of unusual I guess." But today's comic ended with a total non-sequitur twist punchline that leaves you wondering, "How the crud did he know that?"

When you're piling on the weirdness, sometimes the best way to make things weirder is to throw in something comparatively normal. Go figure.

Next up, we've got Real Life continuing its storyline from last week with Alternate Tony and the plot hole. Tony's gunfight with his female counterpart gets interrupted for exposition in Tuesday's comic, and then in Wednesday's comic, Dave strolls in to deliver another interruption. Initially I was bummed--way to drag all the momentum out of your gunfight, Cartoonist Greg! But the gunfight didn't resume in Thursday's or today's strips, and instead we got another monkey wrench thrown into the equation. Female Tony ain't the only one out for blood, it seems. As it turns out, the whole storyline was well-paced, and my feeling on Wednesday just came from differing expectations.

Just goes to show, sometimes it pays to stick with a storyline and see it out to the end before passing judgment. Heck, that's half the reason I keep reading Sluggy Freelance! The other half is the puns.

Now, let's turn our attention to Starslip Crisis. In the most recent storyline, Vanderbeam has received his first exhibit job as curator aboard the Sai Kan: a collection of mask pieces. Interestingly, the artist himself has specified a detailed layout for the exhibit, ostensibly making Vanderbeam's job easier...but the artist has requested that the centerpiece of the exhibit be hung up across from the curator's bed. The centerpiece turns out to be a soul-harrowing monstrosity! And in Monday's strip, we witness Vanderbeam's first night sleeping across from the thing (I use the word "sleeping" loosely). Once again, a good storyline that gets better as you get into it. You can start reading it here.

And let's round things off with a clever setup and punchline from today's Dinosaur Comics. That's all I got, fellas. Tell me what you think of the storylines in Real Life and Starslip, or maybe drop me a comment and tell me what you enjoyed this week.

Me, I'm gonna go watch Iron Man on DVD with some friends now. Adios!