Comics Lowdown | Paul Rainey wins Jonathan Cape Prize

Plus: New manga licenses, minicomics reviews, and more!

Paul Rainey has won the 2020 Observer Jonathan Cape Comica Graphic Short Story Prize for his story Similar To But Not, a memoir of a chance encounter with a celebrity in a local pub in 1975. Rainey’s story and the runner-up, Ellen Durkin’s The Worm, are both available to read online.

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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.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Jason Thompson and Jumana Al Hashal on ‘Cartooner’

Jason Bradley Thompson and Jumana Al Hashal discuss going from gamer to creator.

What’s it like to go from gaming to creating your own games?

The husband-and-wife team of Jason Bradley Thompson and Jumana Al Hashal have plenty to say on that topic. Both are serious gamers who are running a Kickstarter campaign to fund their second game, Cartooner: The Fast & Furious Game of Drawing Comics. Cartooner focuses on the creative elements of comics and allows anyone who can draw a stick figure to make their own—while the clock is ticking. We talked to Jason and Jumana about how they created a game that turns the players into comics creators, and they also shared some of the game art by Konstantin Pogorelov.

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The dead of summer brings ‘Dead of Winter’ #1 from Oni Press [Preview]

New comic based on the tabletop game kicks off this week from Kyle Starks and Gabo.

As announced at C2E2 earlier this year, Kyle Starks and Gabo have teamed up for a new horror-comedy mini-series based on the board game Dead of Winter by Plaid Hat Games.

The first issue arrives this week, and publisher Oni Press has shared a preview:

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Comics Lowdown: Sophie Labelle’s webcomic hacked

Plus news and updates on Don Martin, Todd McFarlane, Tom Spurgeon and more.

Webcomics creator Sophie Labelle reported on Facebook yesterday that her webcomic about a transgender girl, Assigned Male, had been hacked and the page was down:

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