Webcomics Wednesday: Skin Horse vol. 1

Skin Horse vol. 1 is the print edition of the webcomic by Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey C. Wells. (Volume 2 recently completed it’s Kickstarter funding project and should be out fairly soon.)  The comic is about a government agency called Skin Horse that deals with nonhuman sapients and features quite a number of oddballs on its staff, from Tip the cross-dressing ladies’ man to Unity the multi-ethnic zombie to Sweetheart the talking dog. The volume begins with Tip’s first field assignment, talking down a lion with a chunk of human DNA and ends in a mission involving an attack helicopter that’s had a human brain implanted in it. Just to give you an idea about what their work environment is like, the field agents of Skin Horse have a swarm of bees for their boss and a robot that tried to destroy the London Exposition of 1851 as the receptionist. Sounds like a fun place!

The print edition presents the daily strip webcomic at three strips a page, resulting in a lot of work (Wells says the volume collects one year of the webcomic) into about 150 pages for $13.99.  Not bad a bad price at all. Garrity’s art isn’t my favorite, it’s a decidedly rough style, but I’ve gotten over any initial dislikes and moved onto what I do like about her style. She draws some adorable cobras, for one, and I like the way she handles Unity’s different skin colors with cross-hatching instead of a different color entirely. A gray tone wouldn’t have fit in with the rest of the black and white color scheme! Anyway, Garrity’s art might not be clean and smooth, but her characters are still cute and expressive. That’s all that matters to me in the end.

Admittedly, the beginning storyline of Skin Horse, the one with the lion, happens to be my least favorite. While it is to be a decent introduction to the main characters, it lacks spark and I found it hard to read through when I first got into the webcomic. The next storyline, one that involves difficult conflict management situation between separate colonies of government agency basement dwellers, is much better and really allows the readers to get to know Tip, what he does and how frustrating his job is. From there on out, Garrity and Wells’ writing begins to take on a unique humor all its  own and becomes a very enjoyable read. While the strip’s a little slow online (especially when you catch up to the new updates), the condensed format of the book really helps eliminate those feelings.

Book extras include a comical take on employee training videos, but that’s pretty much it except for the introduction by Jeffrey C. Wells. While I personally liked the introduction because it gave a good amount of information on the world of Skin Horse and its creation, it doesn’t make for much of an extra when you’re looking for serious incentives to buy this book instead of reading it online for free.  Even I bought it as a gift for my boyfriend, who’s also a fan and turned me onto the webcomic in the first place. Plus I wanted to meet Garrity, who is also a freelance manga editor.

If you love Skin Horse already, I’d say buy the book and do good by these two creative and funny people. If you’re not 100% sold yet, then I wouldn’t rush out to buy it until you read the webcomic and make the decision whether you love it or not.

You can find Skin Horse vol. 1 at the Couscous Collective, an artists’ collective site that sells both Skin Horse and Narbonic volumes as well as a few mini-comics, prints and shirts.

My San Diego Comic-Con 2010: Part 2

My this is late. Sorry everyone, I had to take care of a loopy boyfriend on Monday, Tuesday was just non-stop for me and last night I just forgot. (He had a medical procedure done that involved anesthesia. It was sort of fantastic to see him all wobbly and slurring his words. Best of all, he forgot a sock at the doctor’s office. Never mind the fact that he didn’t take his socks off during the procedure.)

Onward!

Friday: I started my day off with the Moto Hagio spotlight panel. (Horrendously under-attended, might I add.) Before I launch into an explanation of the panel, however, let me explain this: Moto Hagio is pretty much why I was at Comic-Con this year. I am not kidding. I was SO DEVASTATED to hear that she was coming and I wasn’t. And then I realized I could get a professional badge! Oh joyous day! I adore older manga and I was quite looking forward to seeing one of the Magnificent Forty Niners and a great mangaka talk about her career.

That being said, the spotlight panel was everything I could have ever hoped for!

Hagio-sensei launched into a short overview of her career, starting with her short stories and then with The Poe Clan, which was her first longer narrative about boys who are stuck as teenagers after being turned into vampires. The Poe Clan‘s first collected volume sold out on the first day, which allowed her to continue working on Heart of Thomas, which was considered unpopular by editors at the time. After that, she began working on They Were Eleven and Marginal, both scifi manga influenced by her love of Western scifi, a genre she read passionately as a child.

My favorite part of the panel, however, had to be Hagio-sensei’s discussion of the various issues surround her stories. Many of them were very personal, including her mother’s strong dislike of manga and criticism of her career. She also spoke about her interest in psychology and child abuse and how this lead to short stories such as Iguana Girl and Hanshin as well as longer narratives such as A Cruel God Reigns in Heaven. For her to share such personal details about her career takes a lot of courage, but it made everyone in the audience feel ten times closer to her than someone who feels the need to talk only about their stories and not the personal influences behind them. It made the panel much more interesting than any canned answer from a Hollywood exec in Hall H. (I will never venture there as long as I live, I think.)

Hagio-sensei was presented an Inkpot Award at the start of the panel and I believe she more than earned it by the time the panel was over when she generously donated all the manga she spoke about to Comic-Con for posterity. For more about Moto Hagio, check out Shaenon Garrity’s excellent interview.

A little while later, Yen Press had their industry panel, which was the only straight industry panel I was able to attend. (I skipped Bandai and FUNimation because I had heard most of their announcements at Anime Expo. Other panels I missed because I had to attend a wedding in Los Angeles on Saturday.) There, Yen Press announced new licenses including The Betrayal Knows My Name by Hotaru Odagiri, High School of the Dead by Daisuke Sato and Shoji Sato, Aron’s Absurd Armada by MiSun Kim and The Bride’s Stories by Kaoru Mori. They also licensed another arc of Higurashi When They Cry, but I don’t seem to have the exact title in my notes.

I am looking forward to The Bride’s Stories (Otoyome-Gatari) the most because I once pitched it (as a long shot) to TOKYOPOP. I was afraid the title would never come stateside due to the nature of the main couple (she is 18 or 20 and he is about 13, despite the fact that nothing happens between them and the manga is set over 100 years ago.)

Yen Press also gave us more information about the online edition of Yen Plus, their manga magazine that was recently taken out of print circulation. The viewer is not flash-based, which gives readers the ability to view it on their iPhone or iPad, and is region-free, which means readers around the world will be able to legally view the magazine’s contents. The month-to-month paypal payments cost $2.99 and also get you access to the previous month’s copy, in case you missed it. Not a bad deal!

My exhibit hall antics on Friday consisted of me and Gia Manry of Anime News Network storming around the exhibit hall looking for hard-to-find manga publishers after a nice chat with freelance translator William Flanagan. We met up with Ed Chavez of Vertical Inc. and met Felipe Smith, the creator of MBQ and Peepo Choo. Also, to our delight, Viz Kids had announced the licensing of an original Mameshiba graphic novel and there were Mameshiba toys for sale at the Toynami booth. There’s nothing like grown women plotting how to steal all the awesome Mameshiba products Toynami had on display, but not for sale. (Later on in the day, we met up with more grown women excited about the Mameshiba toys and we had a *moment* together. Good times.) I am overjoyed to hear that now I will be able to gorge myself on adorable dog/bean toys that make people uncomfortable with random trivia. Somewhere in there, I also managed to get Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu signed by Junko Mizuno.

In the evening, Jason Thompson held his Future of Manga panel. While there was plenty of interesting factoids about manga magazine circulation and such in Jason’s presentation, I feel like he got a little side-tracked by the past and the present of manga. He failed to speak about the future except for a few rushed minutes of speaking about online manga distribution in Japan, denying panel attendees any really meaty discussion. I feel like Jason could have spoken for hours and hours on end about manga and still not have touched upon the future of it, so I will blame time constraints and the vast depth of his knowledge. Nothing that can’t be fixed by more careful presentation next year. I still enjoyed it because it gave me a lesson on a good chunk of manga history, but I wonder if other attendees might have found it boring.

Saturday: I didn’t attend any panels, so I’m afraid I don’t have many personal experiences that were interesting to recount. I tried to get a robot signed by Tom Siddell of Gunnerkrigg Court (a webcomic with a print version by Archaia) and failed because I had to return to L.A. I succeeded, however, in getting autographs from the creators of Avatar: the Last Airbender and two of the artists who have worked on Vertigo’s Madame Xanadu, Marley Zarcone and Amy Reeder. Then I meandered around the con and wound up having an excited discussion about Oishinbo: A La Carte (amongst other things) with freelance Viz editor Shaenon Garrity at her booth. (She is also the creator of two webcomics, Narbonic and Skin Horse.)

I, sadly, just missed a signing for Felipe Smith (but made up for that one on Monday as he had a signing at my local comic book store), the infamous Hall H stabbing and the TOKYOPOP panel where the company announced the licensing of Mr. Clean: Fully Equipped by Toya Tobina, Pavane for a Dead Girl by Koge Donbo and Sakura no Ichiban by Chibi Vampire creator Yuna Kagesaki. Drawn & Quarterly, fresh from their double Eisner win for Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, announced that they will be releasing Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and NonNonBa by Shigeru Mizuki (of GeGeGe no Kitaro fame.)

Sunday: I wasn’t there. I totally just lazed around on my ass all day. (Except for writing my first SDCC 2010 post!)