‘High Comedic Value’: A bit of truth in every drawing

In the brand-new ‘Alley Cats’ feature, Suzette Chan spotlights webcomics artist Husein.

Welcome to Alley Cats, a new feature by Suzette Chan that focuses on one of our favorite parts of any convention — Artists Alley. Chan spoke to some of the many talented craftspeople and artists at the the 2019 Calgary Expo in late April. This is one in a series of six.

Husein has been drawing a comic per week for the last five years, and has been doing comic conventions for almost as long. This year, he added a new element to his booth: the craft of drawing people as pop culture icons–badly!

Continue reading “‘High Comedic Value’: A bit of truth in every drawing”

2019 Russ Manning Award nominees announced

Annual award for the ‘Most Promising Newcomer’ comic artist will be presented during the Eisner Awards in July at Comic-Con International.

The nominees have been announced for the 2019 Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award, named for the creator of Magnus, Robot Fighter and illustrator of the Tarzan and Star Wars comic strips.

Presented annually since 1982, the award recognizes an artist who, early in his or her career, “shows a superior knowledge and ability in the art of creating comics.” Previous winners include Dave Stevens, Eleanor Davis, Jeff Smith, Marion Churchland, David Petersen, Tyler Crook, Dan Mora and Anne Szabla.

Continue reading “2019 Russ Manning Award nominees announced”

Role play as a role player in the ‘Die’ RPG

Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ comic about role-playing games naturally gets its own RPG.

If you’ve been Die-ing (sorry) to play the role-playing game at the center of Kieron Gillen and the amazing Stephanie HansDie comic book, you are now in luck — a beta version of the Die RPG is now available on the Die website.

The materials include a manual, character sheets and additional gamemaster materials, with something called the “Arcana” — “weird stuff and supplementary material” — coming with the next arc of the comic.

“It’s a somewhat meta RPG which is designed to let a group of players make their own version of the first arc of Die,” Gillen said in his email newsletter. “It’s about Die the situation rather than the specifics of Die. As in, you generate a group of real world people, who then sit down to play a role-playing game, before getting dragged into a fantasy world. Yes, it’s a little Meta. One of the playtesters described it as a manual of how to make your own Kieron Gillen-esque story, which I quite like. There’s a lot of me trying to explain how stories work, and how DIE works specifically. That means I suspect some of it will be interesting to folks who have no interest in RPGs at all. There are also at least three funny jokes.”

Continue reading “Role play as a role player in the ‘Die’ RPG”