Coming Soon To A Computer Screen Near You: Si Spurrier's Urban Fairytale



Earlier this week, Avatar announced Disenchanted, a new webcomic by Si Spurrier (he's having a big couple of weeks!) and German Erramouspe. The pair will publish twelve pages weekly, and then those pages will be gathered up and put into physical format about twice a year, a system that Avatar, and Spurrier, has already had a certain degree of success with. This sort of serialization is intriguing to me, because it doesn't follow the model of a syndicated newspaper strip, out of which grows the publishing strategies and schedules of most webcomics. Instead, Disenchanted will more closely resemble a weekly digital comic book; a certain number of pages with a clear beginning, middle, and end, comics serialized like television is serialized. This arrangement seems like it might be more narratively satisfying, somehow, although it will be interesting to see how exactly Spurrier and Erramouspe break their story up.

Anyway, Spurrier's description of the project should get you hooked, just in case you don't get off on the relationship between publishing strategies and narrative structure like I do:

Listen: I’m not going to lie to you. There are faeries in it. Actual one-inch-tall faeries with pretty wings, pale skin, a pathological obsession with knotting human hair, an addict’s approach to teeth and all the rest of that floaty pseudo-Victoriana pre-Cottingley arsewater. But don’t panic. What we’ve got here are non-glittery, non-wanky, non-wish-granting faeries. What we’ve got here are substance-abusing, bar-brawling, civil-rights-demanding, murder-committing faeries. The good kind. The old kind. What we’ve got here is a miniature city made of scavenged soda cans, cereal boxes, dirty syringes and condoms. A city hidden beneath the streets of London. What we’ve got here are pixies, brownies, kobolds, leprechauns, boggarts, goblins and all the rest of the twee “Little People” of yesteryear who, despite being forgotten by mankind, have been dragged along by time and trend into the unsentimental Urban Century.

Just like the rest of us.


Wednesday's New Things: Jason, Number Crunchers, Quantum and Woody

1. New from The Long and Shortbox of It's all time favorite Norwegian cartoonist, Jason, is a full length (!) detective story about a man who finds a lost cat, falls in love with its owner, and then finds that she, too, has become lost. New Jason is always, always, a welcome thing. Preview pages here


2. (UPDATE: Number Cruncher actually comes out next week. My bad!) Originally published in 2000 AD and now seeing repackaging and rerelease from newcomer Titan Comics is  supernatural heist book Number Cruncher from Si Spurrier and P.J. Holden. Spurrier is the author of the recent, and excellent, Six Gun Gorilla with Jeff Stokley as well as the ongoing X-Men Legacy and hysterical X-Club miniseries for Marvel. Holden's name is unfamiliar to me, but, after quickly looking over his portfolio page, I think I'll like his art, which is a little bit like Jeff Lemire's, but less impressionistic and with a much cleaner line. This will be an interesting book to watch, as it's one of the first releases from Titan Comics, an arm of the U.K. based Titan Books. It's always seemed to me that British properties, although obviously not British creators, have had trouble finding an audience in the United States. I've often wondered if this is in part because of the anthology format, which isn't very popular in this part of the world; if Number Cruncher, or any of the other Titan releases now published as stand alone comic books, finds a decent sized audience, that might begin to change. On the other hand, it may just mean that the talented Spurrier gets a shot on a higher profile Marvel or DC release.

3. Quantum and Woody is the newest of Valiant Entertainment's back catalog reboots. Although the only of these books that I'm reading regularly is Fred Van Lente's Archer and Armstrong, the preview pages on this one are convincing enough for me to give it a look, although mostly on the strength of Tom Fowler's clean expressive pencils and Jodie Bellaire's excellent color work. We'll see if the writing manages to catch up. 

Process: David Aja

David Aja's guides for Hawkeye #11 page 15 (via his Twitter)

Process: Kevin Huizenga

(via Kevin Huizenga's tumblr)