February Zuda Reviews: Part 2

Welcome to part two of our February Zuda reviews. Yesterday we brought you the first batch of five hopefuls, so, naturally, today sees the other half of the field. And so far this month, unlike last month, nobody has been forced to dro out of the competition, so that's a positive as well (though I wouldn't really miss a couple of these to be totally honest). So will today's group be stronger than yesterday's mediocre crop? Let's find out.



Island, Alone
by Rich Fuscia & Shawn Aldridge

The comma in the title is perfectly appropriate for this comic, because there are a number of superfluous commas in the text and dialogue throughout the story. Maybe that's a minor thing, but it irritated me. Anyway, other than that this was pretty good. The art was solid -- starting of a little frenetic for my taste but getting better as it went -- and the plot was okay if nothing groundbreaking. There were a couple non-comma issues with the dialogue, mainly becoming too expository at times, but overall a pretty decent effort that ended with a nice tease.

My Grades: B-. It would get a B if not, for the use of, commas.



Monsterplex
by Brock Heasley, David Schlotterback & Michael DeVito

Monsterplex is a fairly fun strip that uses horror tropes for humorous effects; the cineplex in question, which shows only horror movies, turns out to be a full, live experience complete with vampires and zombines and the like, all running roughshod over the (often eaten) audience. While the pacing and dialogue were just a bit on the stiff side, particularly in the beginning, the story ended with a nice twist while the art, though a little bit to Erin Esurance for me, was similarly solid. One of the better efforts this month.

My Grades: B. I'm not sure it will win, but it wouldn't bother me if it did .



New Morning
by Louie Chin

Let's start with the good parts: the graphic design for New Morning is cool and some of the little footnote jokes are amusing enough. The art is also solid, particularly on the first page, which had some bold set-up panels to establish the scene that I thought worked nicely. On the down side, the "narrative" was pretty choppy and barely recognizable as a story. I'm not always a fan of decompression, but some could have been useful here, even if it would have meant some of the material wouldn't have fit inside the eight page restriction.

My Grades: The flavor is nice, but the aftertaste is sour. C+.



Sci-fi Drive By
by Ryan Estrada

On the other hand, Sci-Fi Drive By similarly doesn't present a coherent story, yet I enjoyed it all the same. That may be in part because the vignettes are fairly delineated into separate gags, meaning I wasn't expecting more than separate. I'm not sure how well this kind of structure will hold together in the long run, but for eight pages it amused me. That's not bad.

My Grades: The art was solid even if the last "wi-fi" joke sequence was a bit flat overall. B.




Techno Insecto
by Samir Barrett

Don't look now, but there seems to be a superhero comic in this month's Zuda competition. And even more surprising? It's pretty good. yes, there are some clunky bits of exposition that could be safely removed (such as the main character exclaiming "It's you! The Techno-Organic Insectoid Mechanism!" in his best Stan lee impersonation) as well as some cliched bits (the old "he's not shooting at me after all, he's shooting at the menace behind me!" bit) but overall this is a fast, fun read, thanks in large part to the sharp character designs and vibrant coloring that make the artwork look more like cels from an episode of Teen Titans than a comic book.

My Grades: It could be tightened up some, but it's a pretty convincing package overall. B+.

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February Zuda Reviews: Part 1

Welcome to this month's batch of Zuda reviews. Okay, the month is more than half over, but what are you going to do, right? The important thing is that voting is still in progress, so it's not too late to weigh in on this month's competitors. My comments will be somewhat briefer than usual, but no doubt that comes as a great relief to many of you, so no problem.

Enough chatter, let's get to the comics.


Aliens vs. Ninjas vs. Samurai
by Darrin Stephens & Jorge Vega

This story pretty much delivers exactly what the title promises, although the aliens don't really show up until the last page. It's a cute enough concept I suppose, though not exactly cutting edge (only lacking pirates and Chuck Norris to fulfill internet mandates), but the art is so stylized it was hard for me to get into it or necessarily follow what was happening. It was like Mary Blair doing thumb puppets. I'm sure some people really loved the art, but I wasn't one of them.

My Grades: Eh. A C. For what it is, I've certainly seen worse.



Divided By Seven
by Scott Boyce

What if the Flash was actually a holocaust survivor from the future? That seems to be the premise of Divided by Zero, which tells the story of a dangerously emaciated speedster who has had some sort of unfortunate experiments done on him. The art was a bit uneven; some parts looked really sharp, while others were a bit too stiff, especially in depicting the runner's form. There seemed to be the germ of a solid idea in there, but it didn't develop quite fast enough for me, instead running in place. See what I did there?

My Grades: A strong C+. I think there's potential here but Boyce needs a bit more work on his storytelling to realize his vision.



Fulcrum
by Alexander Diochon

I have to hand it to Fulcrum creator Alexander Diochon for one thing at least: he uses a lot of words. that's not something most creators these days seem to like doing, and for an old school comic fan like myself, it's nice to see someone who remembers that words are half of the magic of comics. Unfortunately, none of the words he uses were interesting to me. This story of prisoners fighting each other or something inside a prison city just left me cold and suffered a bit from what a lot of Zuda entries suffer from, namely a lack of sympathetic characters. I say execute them all.

My Grades: C+. It just didn't do anything for me.



Gelgun
by Lazarus Ray Berry

Well, this one is interesting. The art is pretty good throughout, although it occasionally suffers from over ambition, particularly in Berry's attempts to fuse a gritty fantasy style with manga-inspired character designs. That doesn't always work, but it makes some sense for a story that seems to be trying to combine Conan-esque fantasy with supporting characters form Inuyasha. I didn't hate it, but this may be a case where the creator's vision is too specific to translate well for anybody else reading it. I could see what he was going for, but I couldn't quite see why he was going for it.

My Grades: Another C+, though separately, most of the individual elements might get higher scores. The whole is less than the sum of the parts here.



Hawkrider
by Marco Palombelli

Hawkrider is like 20 pages of story fit into an eight page structure not by compressing the storyline but by the simple means of leaving out the rest of the pages. You might be forgiven for reading this through several times to figure out just what is happening, if you happened to like it enough to re-read it, which seems unlikely. I don't mean to sound overly harsh -- the art has potential and the basic concept seemed solid enough -- but I just didn't get this one at all.

My Grades: C-, with the occasionally cool artwork saving it from a lower score.


Tomorrow: The other half of the batch. Will they be more exciting than this group? Based on these grades, you'd almost think they have to be, right?

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