RANT: Dave's Late Rant: AmyUnbounded,Stinz
Dave Van Domelen
Amy Unbounded #1-8 "Don't Ever Lose The Child In You"
Stinz: Charger TPB "Halfhorse, Twice Human"
Before going into the Capsules, just wanna mention that Toys R Us now
has the backstock of unsold Acclaim "Adventure Zone" comics, the 6"x7"
slender digests that went for $4.50, for fifty cents a piece. It takes some
digging to get anything resembling complete sets, and some issues may simply
not be in the pile (I managed to find the first and third VH2 "Turok" ones)
and they aren't numbered. The VH2 ones aren't bad, being written mainly by
Nicieza, Slott, Washington and Layton, but are definitely pitched at kiddies.
CAPSULES
Amy Unbounded #1-8: Pug House - Fun stories in a more-or-less believable
setting. Art is cartoony and primitive at the beginning, but improves over
time, and Hartman avoids the trap of trying to copy someone else's style, a
problem I've seen in minicomics before. Recommended. $1.50 per issue, size
ranges from 20 pages to 32 pages, minicomic format. Not available in
Diamond, check http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~rjhartma/amy.html
Stinz: Charger TPB: A Fine Line - 235 pages of collected stories,
putting together what had previously been in two TPBs. Terrific stories, and
an interesting artistic study as Barr's style shifts radically over the
course of the stories contained in the TPB. Strongly recommended.
$20.00/$25.00Cn. If you have trouble getting it from your store (or your
store has trouble getting it from Diamond), check www.stinz.com.
Best Book: Stinz: Charger TPB. Yes, it's a reprint, but it's still the
best thing I've read this week.
"Silliness Is Its Own Award" Award to Amy Unbounded #1-8
"To Make A Long Tail Short..." Award to Stinz: Charger TPB
No real need for spoiler space...Stinz is a TPB, most of the Amy issues
came out months or years ago, and I'm not really going to go into plot
details anyway.
RANTS
Amy Unbounded: Okay, this is a minicomic, which means you can expect
several things. One, it's going to be hard to find in stores. Two, it's
going to be photocopied sheets folded over and stapled, maybe with colored
paper for the covers. Three, it's gonna be a work in progress.
There's evidence for the third point in both story and art. I'll go
with the art first, because it's what strikes you first on looking at the
book. It appears that the creator, Rachel Hartman, has had some training in
art. Her backgrounds are pretty well laid-out, her inking is good, she has
an eye for details and keeps them the same from panel to panel, and she's
able to give the book the "middle ages" look and feel that it needs. I'd
hazard a guess that prior to doing this comic, Rachel's main artistic work
dealt with research into history (yes, this comic practically screams
"history major/grad student" }->). However, her figures are rather sketchy
at first, like she's not quite sure how to go about making them cartoony (as
opposed to trying to make them look realistic, which she does not seem to be
attempting). As the series progresses, the linework becomes more confident
and new characters have a bit more refinement to them, but she chooses to
stick pretty closely to the first issue designs on the older characters. A
few of the more extreme features (like Amy's father's nose) are toned down a
bit, but she doesn't let her improvements in drawing make older characters
unrecognizable, which is a Good Thing.
Now to the story. Amy is the daughter of a barbarian clockmaker and a
non-barbarian weaver. Mom's the barbarian. As the daughter of two creative,
intelligent and strong-willed people, Amy is naturally something of a holy
terror at age nine. Full to the curls with imagination and the desire for
adventure, she's stuck in a house with people who have found excitement and
adventure in tasks that Amy can't really see much fun in. Your basic
artisan's/academic's kid, in other words. Been there. }-> However, her
life is not totally without adventure and intrigue, and there's just enough
to make any real nine year old green with envy at the amazing life Amy's
leading...without there being enough to satisfy Amy. Not that anything
would, I suppose.
The eight issues take place during Amy's ninth year, but not necessarily
all in order, or all what Rachel initially intended to tell. But, then,
Rachel is a grown up Amy, and in the very first issue Amy says that she has
so many stories in her that sometimes she can't figure out what order to let
them out in. Still, there's enough thematic flow that the mild disorder in
the timing of the stories isn't a big problem.
Before I close this review, I want to point out that as I read #2, I hit
a line I felt described Amy and the series, and I knew I'd have to put it
into this review. Then I got to the picture Scott "Patty Cake" Roberts did
for #8, and saw he used the same quote. Well, part of it. Heh.
"It occurred to me then that silliness was its own reason and its own
reward, that humor was an adventure and a bond as real as any the Malou
sisters had ever known, that if we kept dancing we would never grow old..."
Stinz: I'd read all these stories before as borrowed books, but leapt at
the chance to own my own copies for a mere $20. "Mere," you say? Well,
consider that most of these eight issues would cost more than $2.50 each even
if I could find them, and the previous two TPBs collecting them were harder
to find than hens' teeth.
Stinz started out in various anthologies, and this TPB collects the
first eight issues he had all to himself, IIRC. A five-issue series, then
the first three issues of the current series (the cover gallery on the back
reverses v2 #2 and v2 #3 in order). Most of the issues since that have
practically been TPBs on their own, as Barr has shifted to the 64 page
format. As an odd side note, the copyright date on this is l999, not 1999.
That's L999, for those using fonts that don't distinguish between lower case
l and the number 1. Barr does this in email too. Not that this is the
oddest thing about her. }->
At the beginning of the first Stinz series, Barr was still working in a
more or less standard comicbook fashion. Pencil art on large bristol board,
then ink it and reduce it to comicbook size. By the end, she'd fully shifted
to her current style of direct-to-ink on pages shrunk only slightly (a few
percent, making sure that the art didn't get clipped off the page). An
interesting parallel is that the wartime stories get more and more rough and
cruel as the art gets more and more rough-hewn. Personally, I prefer the
older style, but the new style isn't bad either. It's a lot like the shift
in Matt Wagner's art from Mage to Mage II...rougher lines, more energy.
(Hmmm, is Barr represented by anyone in the Mage universe?)
Oh, there's one interesting parallel between Amy Unbounded and Stinz
(other than both being written and drawn by women with a passion for
history). Both are set in worlds that are very much like real historical
periods without actually being real historical periods...beyond the fact that
both have "mythical" characters in them, too.
Dave Van Domelen, "Hurrah democracy. Gimme a beer." - best line on a
randomly chosen page of Stinz (I'd go nuts trying to find the best line in
the book, there's too many of them!).
Pat Meadow
one with Ninjack on the cover titled "The Boss". They only did 3 of them
and wouldn't ya know it, I got them all.<G>
Todd VerBeek
[about Amy]
>...It appears that the creator, Rachel Hartman, has had some training in
>art. Her backgrounds are pretty well laid-out, her inking is good, she has
>an eye for details and keeps them the same from panel to panel, and she's
>able to give the book the "middle ages" look and feel that it needs. I'd
>hazard a guess that prior to doing this comic, Rachel's main artistic work
>dealt with research into history (yes, this comic practically screams
>"history major/grad student" }->). However, her figures are rather sketchy
>at first, like she's not quite sure how to go about making them cartoony (as
>opposed to trying to make them look realistic, which she does not seem to be
>attempting). As the series progresses, the linework becomes more confident
>and new characters have a bit more refinement to them, but she chooses to
>stick pretty closely to the first issue designs on the older characters. A
>few of the more extreme features (like Amy's father's nose) are toned down a
>bit, but she doesn't let her improvements in drawing make older characters
>unrecognizable, which is a Good Thing.
I agree with you entirely about Hartman's art, which I'd characterise as
"just about ready for prime time". For anyone interested in seeing some
representative samples of it, I have a few in the review I did on my web
site: <http://www.RZero.com/books/AmyUnbounded.html>
[about Stinz]
>As an odd side note, the copyright date on this is l999, not 1999.
>That's L999, for those using fonts that don't distinguish between lower case
>l and the number 1. Barr does this in email too. Not that this is the
>oddest thing about her. }->
Nor do I find it surprising. {smile} Barr obviously learned to type on an
old typewriter, made before they started adding a [1/!] key to the NW of
[Q]. To get a numeral one, you just typed a lowercase el, and if you ever
needed an exclamation point, you typed a period, backspaced, and typed an
apostrophe. So for whatever reason (probably either habit or willful
anachronism; given her affinity for the past, I'd guess the latter) Barr
continues to type that way.
Cheers, Todd (who still has such a typewriter)