Review: Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #5 - Dark Horse Comics

Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #5
Writer: Jim Shooter
Artist: Roger Robinson & Agustin Alessio
Colorist: Wes Dzioba
Letterer: Blambot
Cover Artist: Michael Komark

Buy it now!
Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom #5 at TFAW.com

Take a look at the stunningly gorgeous panel below, and give me one good reason why you aren't reading Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom!
The fifth issue came out yesterday, and is the start of the second story arc. Well, it's actually the start of TWO new story arcs, both written by Jim Shooter but drawn by different artists; Roger Robinson and Agustin Alessio. The two stories take place a few weeks apart, but intertwine perfectly. We're given just enough info in each that one doesn't spoil the other, or anything to come.

Similar to how Marvel's Doctor Strange, with it's trippy visuals and mysticism, became popular in the 1960's counter culture at universities, Doctor Solar could easily become mandatory reading for today's science undergrads. There's some weird, trippy stuff going on in this book, but it's all science based. No magic hocus pocus here!

And if you ever need to know what an Ergosphere is, put down that Astrophysics text book. Jim Shooter explains all you need to know in two succinct panels! The entire description of the purpose of the black hole is so beautifully and concisely explained that I think Mr. Shooter missed his calling as a science teacher.

The first four issues of this series were a great introduction, and were infused with a lot of humour as the newly incarnated Doctor Solar found his way in the world. The first story in this second arc takes a bit of a twist and seems to have a far more sinister tone, hitting it's peak when a corpse carries a miniature black hole down the street. We also get another glimpse into villain Tanek Nuro's deviant nature. He is one sick puppy! The preview images had some posters rolling their eyes over Nuro's use of an "avatar", connecting it to the recent film of the same name, but there is no sense that Shooter is capitalizing or copying the film in any way.

The second story is the first part of Solar's origin. Reduced to a single sentence, it can be describes as a tale about a black hole consuming 80kg of mass. Somehow, Shooter and artist Agustin Alessio make it the most captivating book I've read in a long time, and I'll be surprised if it doesn't end up as my Book of the Year at the end of December.

The narrative jumps back and forth between Dr. Philip Solar describing the project's goal of creating a black hole to power the world with it's energy, and the day after disaster where the black hold consumes the earth.
If this were a movie, no doubt the scenes featuring the matter consuming black hole would be accompanied by some spectacular sound effects designed to unnerve the audience in their seats. The amazing thing about Allesio's artwork is that it gives you the same, ugly, terrifying feeling of impending doom in the pit of your stomach on the printed page, WITHOUT sound, motion, or high definition 3-D movie screens! I really did feel uncomfortable watching Solar get accreted.

Don't know what accrete means? Don't worry. Like I said above, Shooter does an uncanny job of making the science of black holes understandable to the layman!

While Allessio's artwork helps send this book into the stratosphere, it is not without it's faults, the main one being that it does seem to rely a little too much on photo reference in places. Phillip Solar is seen from different angles describing his experiment, yet it's obvious the same photo was used for reference in each case. In another scene where Gail Saunders is introduced, the fellow scientists in the crowd stare forward, as if this were a class photo, none of them focussing their attention on the character speaking. Also, doesn't anyone need to open their mouths to talk?
As enjoyable as Jim Shooter's Dark Horse work has been to date, this issue is elevated to an entirely different level. The pacing is perfect. The dialogue is natural. The stakes are high. It's a great story told from two different directions - the first arc with Robinson's more traditional comic art deals with the present, and the second featuring Allesio's more photorealist style looks back at a few weeks prior to Solar's origin.

The two stories look poised to merge over the next 3 issues, coming together to form a cohesive story arc that, judging by the first shot fired, is going to be epic.

Currently playing: Samantha Fox - True Devotion
Currently colouring: Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 11!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

MySpace Tshirt

Snapped a photo of this shirt on a recent trip with our daughter to the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature. I get a feeling this shirt was a lot cooler 5 or 6 years ago, when MySpace was actually relevant!

And even then, lets face it, this shirt is not going to score you any looks from the opposite sex!

The back of this shirt might as well have an arrow pointing to your underpants, saying "Wedge me".

While snapping this photo, I quietly wondered what social network the museum's shirt department would focus on next... Spacebook? Twitearth?

Turns out someone was two steps ahead of me! Both are already established websites on the internet!
Currently playing: Charity Brown - You Beat Me to the Punch
Currently colouring: Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 11!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Review: Magnus, Robot Fighter #3 - Dark Horse Comics

Magnus, Robot Fighter #3
Writer: Jim Shooter
Artist: Bill Reinhold & Mike Manley
Colorist: Wes Dzioba
Letterer: Blambot
Cover Artist: Raymond Swanland

Buy it now! Magnus, Robot Fighter #3 at TFAW.com

A few months ago, I wrote a positive review of the first issue of Magnus, Robot Fighter from Dark Horse comics. It's taken half a year to get the third issue out, which has been a minor annoyance.

But when a book contains as much fun, excitement and adventure as this one does, it's easy to overlook the wait between issues!

The preview pages that Dark Horse released made it seem like this was going to be a 22 page UFC fight, which would have been the dullest comic ever produced, but thankfully only a handful of pages take place 'in the ring', and many other great story elements are introduced.

The Lovejoy Corporation (also seen in the pages of Doctor Solar, Man of the Atom!) is looking like it's going to have it's fingerprints all over this line of books, and are shaping up to be a good mysterious villain. Magnus' relations with the supporting cast start getting explored. There's some great dialog between Magnus' mentor, the robot 1-A, and a nice friendship is blooming with the homeless Goph named Little Eddie.

Bill Reinhold is joined by Mike Manley on the art chores, and the two blend well together. The thing I like most about Reinhold is the consideration he puts in to his backgrounds. I don't recall a single panel that didn't give a hint of where it was taking place. His renditions of the shadowy ground level that exists at the feet of the stretching forest of milespires really helps set the scenes that occur there. I also love the designs of the robots and vehicles, all of which seem to pay homage to concepts of the future that were envisioned in the 50's and 60's. They are retro, but not dated. It's a fine line, and the book walks it well.

I also caught a tattoo on a great character introduced this issue named Hippolyta that bears a striking resemblance to a starburst that Reinhold signs his art with. I guess we know who came up with her design!
Wes Dzioba's colours in the book are also fantastic. As with everything I've ever seen Wes colour, there's great attention given to separating foreground, middleground, and background. It's beautiful how the shadowed announcers closer to the viewer are set off from the rest of the panel by using a darker purple hue.
There's also a great scene that takes place in a Goph bar lit with florescent countertops that is really well done. The colours almost give the bar enough character to be real.

There are a few minor nitpicks about the book. Some of Magnus' dialog seems a little wooden and makes him out to be a bit of a dullard. Would it kill him to say something that requires an exclamation point? (He does, but I can count the number of times on one finger). Considering that Magnus was raised in isolation by a robot, I suppose it makes sense that he would come across as a little robotic himself, so it may just be his character.

I also felt that the story was wrapped up a little too quickly, but this may be because the entire book moves so fast and packs so many story points into it's 22 pages. In all this is a good thing. I'd rather have Shooter's quick pacing on this book than the same story stretched out over a 6 issue arc. The climactic fight scene at the end seemed a little uninspired and lifeless when compared to the previous two fights that occur in the book. The punches don't look like they are overly powerful or threatening.

And finally, we all know that Magnus and Leeja are destined to hook up, but I'm not really sensing the love there! It almost seems like every other female in the book would be a better partner for Magnus! This is only the third issue, so I'll give this budding romance some time to blossom.

I do highly recommend this book, along with all the other Dark Horse comics Jim Shooter is putting out right now. They've all be fun, satisfying (if intermittent) reads.

We're starting to see some evidence of the books all being connected, despite occurring in different eras. It's probably best if you get in now before the the stories get even hotter!

Currently playing: Alias - When I'm With You (Live)
Currently colouring: Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 11!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Tight Western Conference

There's talk on JetsOwner.com, a local forum dedicated to the return of the Winnipeg Jets, that an NHL team in this city is almost a guarantee for the 2011-2012 season. Despite the circus that has surrounded the Phoenix Coyotes over the last 2-3 years, rumour has it that Atlanta is the prime candidate for relocation.

If that happens, apparently Atlanta/Winnipeg would move to the Western Conference, and Detroit would (finally) be in the East.

I've followed the Ottawa Senators for a few years now, and being a fan of an Eastern Conference team has been relatively relaxing. There's always a couple of points spread in the standings, and perennial bottom feeders make it easy to predict who is making the playoffs.

I don't think my heart could handle cheering for a Winnipeg team in the West! Look how tight these standings are! Between 3rd and 10th place, there is only 4 points spread in the standings!

You could be in third place, lose two games, and be out of the playoff race!
Contrast that with the current Eastern Conference standings, where the difference between the same spots is almost three times as great! 11 points!
Currently playing: The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Currently colouring: Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 11!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Hoarfrost

We're in the midst of your typical Winnipeg January cold snap, but that doesn't mean that there's not some beauty to be found in the frozen landscape! I woke up this morning to a world covered in hoarfrost! Hoar, of course, being an Olde English word meaning "grey or white with age". What a beautiful morning! Currently playing: Mike Macharyas - Donovan Currently colouring: Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 11! Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Go Moose Go!

I took my daughter to her second hockey game today*. It was an AHL tilt between the hometown Manitoba Moose and the Abbotsford Heat, farm teams of the NHL's Vancouver Canucks and Calgary Flames, respectively!

The game was televised on CBC, and Madelyn and I were on television FOUR TIMES! (Four and a half if you count a shot of my forehead!).

The quality is a little crummy, as it's a photo of my television, but here's us at the end of the game. The Moose won, and the arena got loud. While my daughter had an absolute blast at the game, that didn't mean she wasn't going to protect her eardrums!
*The first hockey game my daughter attended was in Ottawa! We saw the Senators beat the Phoenix Coyotes 6-3. She LOVED that game too, even though she was only 10 months old! She fell asleep during the entire third period!

Currently playing: Keith Richards - Make No Mistake
Currently colouring: Marvel Masterworks: The Avengers Volume 11!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

The circle is now complete: an unexpected Christmas present

Now that I'm a parent, I'm starting to live Christmas vicariously through the children around us, and see the wonder and anticipation in their eyes as they open their gifts.

I was a Star Wars nut as a child, and when I was six, I got one of my most favourite Christmas gifts ever. It was a Dewback, a toy that combined two of my favourite things from that era: Star Wars, and Dinosaurs. Sadly, almost three decades later, I actually had to google the name of the toy, as any encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Wars universe I may have posessed evaporated when I became a man. But I still recall with photographic detail the fun I had pulling the toy out of the box, getting bundled up to head outside, and making it crawl in the snow drifts off the side of the front steps of our Davidson Avenue house.

A few days ago, while scouring the toy aisles looking for last minute Christmas gifts for my daughter, I stumbled across this.
The toys themselves didn't really pique my interest, but the book packaged with these two action figures did! It's a copy of Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars Rebellion #3.

I helped colour that issue!

My good friend, Wil Glass, was the colourist for this series. And anyone who knows the workflow involved in producing a comic book will tell you that us colourists, being the last stage in the artistic process, frequently have to make up for the deadlines missed by the writers, pencilers and inkers that need to do their work before we get it. Most professional colourists today have someone assisting them during deadline pinches, and I was honoured to be asked by Wil to follow his lead and lend a hand.

Little did I imagine that almost a half decade after I worked on this comic, I'd be staring at the book's cover sitting behind two Star Wars action figures, packaged up and ready to be wrapped and opened on Christmas morning by some other 6 year old kid the same way I opened up my Dewback in 1981.

The circle is now complete.

I can imagine the smile I'd see on the face of the six-year-old Donovan if I could go back in time and tell him that one day he'd not only be getting paid to colour comic books, but that they would be packaged with Star Wars action figures and sold in toy stores across the continent.

It would probably be very similar to the smile that the thirty-five-year-old Donovan is wearing right now.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Currently playing: absolutely nothing...
Currently colouring: The Chronicles of Conan Volume 21: Blood of the Titan and Other Stories
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

2010 Central Canada Comic Convention

I had a great time at the 2010 Central Canada Comic Convention on the weekend!

Comic books are really just the art of telling a story by skillfully combining words and artwork. It’s a medium I’ve been in love with for a long time. Not only was it great to have a weekend to celebrate it with friends, it was nice to meet a few artists and see this art form get the respect it deserves!

Okay, so some respect for comics was lost when I passed by the following boxes of books for sale. Sigh...
Big Boob Girl Comics?

Really?

After experiencing this low point in comics, my opinion of humanity was lifted after I got to meet Scott Kolins! Besides being a fantastic professional artist, he is also an incredibly nice guy! Before I left my job doing colour separations at Digital Chameleon I got to do some work on his fantastic Flash run for DC comics. His work is full of tiny little details which made it both exciting and maddening to colour! I love his style!

In the last year I’ve begun commissioning artists to do sketches on the inside covers of books they’ve been a part of! It’s easier to store a work of art in a book on a shelf rather than trying to frame and hang them. Plus, there’s only so many drawings of superheroes a grown man should really have hanging on their walls! ;)

Here’s a great sketch Scott did of Captain America taking on Baron Zemo in my Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes hardcover – a pivotal scene in the book!

Scott Kolins also went all out in this drawing for my Beyond! Hardcover of all the main characters caught in The Stranger’s grasp!

All in all, a fun weekend! It also gave me a bit of a kick in the rear to keep the ball rolling on a book I'm hoping to self publish next year - Spacepig Hamadeus and the Captive Planet!

And hey, be sure to "Like" the Spacepig Hamadeus Facebook page!

Currently playing: The Payola$ - Here's The World
Currently colouring: An upcoming book for Dark Horse Comics!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Make your own Sad Keanu photo without transparency!

Keanu Reeves was photographed by paparazzi eating a sandwhich in a pensive moment a few months back. Since then, people have been wackily placing him into all sorts famous photos and movie scenes and posting them to http://sadkeanu.tumblr.com/

To make a simple Sad Keanu photo without a transparent Keanu or pds file, simply:

• download the plug in
• Select Filter > Keanu > Sad!
• Adjust sadness with slider.

Currently playing: The Office - Costume Contest
Currently colouring: An upcoming book for Dark Horse Comics!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Here's a cheap Son of a Pen for you....

A lot of waiters would be pretty honoured to have the opportunity to serve a real life swan, should one walk into their restaurant.

Although if it was this swan, I wouldn't go over board serving him. He lets you know right away that gratuities aren't really his thing...

Currently playing: The Who - Baba O'Reilly
Currently colouring: A yet to be solicited Omnibus for Marvel Comics!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Luke Geissbuhler: 2010 Father of the Year

Wow, Luke Geissbuhler wins the 2010 Father of the Year Award, 4,677,020 spots ahead of yours truly. How many dad's take the time out of their lives to devote this much time, energy, and intellect to their 7 year old sons?

Luke and his son Max attached an HD camera to a weather balloon, hit record, and let it float high enough into the atmosphere to make out the curvature of earth and see the blackness of space.

The results are breathtaking!

From the video:
In August 2010, we set out to send a camera to space.

The mission was to attach a HD video camera to a weather balloon and send it up into the upper stratosphere to film the blackness beyond our earth.

Eventually, the balloon will grow from lack of atmospheric pressure, burst, and begin to fall.

It would have to survive 100 mph winds, temperatures of 60 degrees below zero, speeds of over 150 mpg, and the high risk of a water landing.

To retrieve the craft, it would need to deploy a parachute, descend through the clouds and transmit a GPS coordinate to a cell phone tower.

Then we have to find it.

Unbelievable! The fact that they got their camera high enough to make out the curvature of the earth is jaw droppingly mind blowing.

I love space exploration, and will admit to multitudinous mental deficiencies in regards to landing crafts on different planets, but I don't understand why NASA can't mount a camera like this on a Mars Lander.

How cool would it be to hear the winds of Mars? To see the descent to the planet from space the way the Geissbuhler family's experiment did?

For more info on the project, visit the Brooklyn Space Program website.

Currently playing: Asia - Don't Cry
Currently colouring: A yet to be solicited Omnibus for Marvel Comics!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Spell check CAN make you hugenormousely smarter!

Some people stuck in the last century criticize things like spell check, claiming that they are preventing us from learning how spelling works through hard work and practice.

You know, the way us thirtysomethings did back during the Cold War!

Well today, it actually made me smarter! For years, I thought "ginormous" was a made up word, amalgamating "gigantic" and "enormous". Turns out it's been in the dictionary since 2007, nearly 60 years after it arose as a slang word by British Troops in World War II.

How would I have known that without spell check!

Now that it's been legitimized, I'll need to find a new amalgamation of synonyms with which to amuse myself with in it's place.

I think I'll start using 'hugenormous', although 'enormonstrous', or 'heftuge' are pretty good too...

Currently playing: Peter Gabriel - Big Time
Currently colouring: An upcoming book for Dark Horse Comics!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Tying a Windsor Knot!

Tonight, I'm putting every instructional pamphlet, book, and VHS tape I've acquired in my decades long quest to learn to tie a Windsor Knot.

As I type this, I'm wearing a freshly knotted, gray tie! I did it myself (finally!), and I owe all the credit to the video below!

So if you were in the same boat I was a half hour ago (in other words, googling "Clip-on tie"), watch the video and bookmark this post for future reference!



Currently playing: Billy Ocean - When The Going Gets Tough
Currently colouring: The Chronicles of Conan Volume 20: Night of the Wolf!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!

Tens of boxes to put my order into, and they had to choose THIS one...

Last week, I had my old friend Robin Kowal over to watch the season finale of LOST. To celebrate the occasion, we ordered Chinese food from what I consider to be the BEST Chinese Food restaurant in Winnipeg - Hong Hing Chinese Food Delivery on Ellice Avenue.

Not only do you get a lot of great tasting food for a great price, but it all comes packaged up in an inappropriately labelled box whose text you wish you'd never read!

Yeah, hi, Hong Hing? I'd like to order some Mushroom Fried Rice, Chicken Balls, and Stir Fried Veggies.

Oh, and hold the Bladder Control Pads, because.. uhh.. well, I can hold it.

Oh, and for the record? The LOST finale was AWESOME! I'm not sure what some people were expecting to see....

Currently playing: Men Without Hats - Living In China
Currently colouring: The Chronicles of Conan Volume 20: Night of the Wolf!
Proudly in my fifth Cola free year!