Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Raise Your Glasses to Ashes!

By Regie Rigby

We’re well into the New Year now – I’ve stopped putting “2006” on cheques and everything – so it’s time to stop looking backwards and start looking forwards. What does the New Year offer for comics hungry readers? Well, I must confess I lack a crystal ball, but fortunately I don’t need one because the great thing about being “that bloke that writes stuff on the internet” is that people tell me what’s coming up! Hell, sometimes they even send me copies of stuff so I can tell you what I think!

In that regard, I can tell you that this very morning copies of the sixth volume of Judge Dredd Case files, and the first in the companion series of Nemesis the Warlock collections dropped through my letterbox. They’re both looking good, and you can expect full reviews next week. Accompanying those books was another batch of 2000AD T-shirts, all ready to serve as prizes in another exiting FoolBritannia/2000AD competition, about which more next week.

It’s been a very good week for good news too. Regular readers will remember me raving about the astonishingly beautiful Malay Mysteries books from Shoto Press. You might also remember that I’d seen a .pdf preview version of the next instalment in the series, but was awaiting news of things like launch dates before telling you lot about it.

Well, if you slide on over to the Shoto Press Website you’ll be able to see full details of The Island of Glass and Ashes. This much anticipated continuation picks up where the previous book, The Ghost of Silver Cliff left off, although as with all good serials you don’t actually need to have read the previous episode in order to understand what’s going on.

The supernatural odd couple of Wise Woman sourceress Marsiti and the scientifically sceptical Hidayat are aboard ship after freeing the spirit of the aforementioned ghost. But magical machinations draw their vessel to a volcanic island of black sand beaches and strange fauna, where a powerful sorcerer guards a terrible secret: an ancient hidden evil guarded by hordes of the walking dead.

Suspected of witchcraft by the ship’s crew, Marsiti and Hidayat are abandoned to their fate and must face the sorcerer and his undead slaves alone. There are two stories of ill-fated love here, and Marsiti's magic may not be strong enough to vanquish the evil that rules the island. What is more, one of the sorcerer’s secrets involves her.

Series writer Jai Sen turns in the kind of dark, pacy script we’ve come to expect, but there’s a slightly deeper level of introspection here that we’ve seen previously, and it’s good to be finding out a little more of Marsiti’s mysterious past. What had initially concerned me was the change of artist. Anyone paying attention over the last few years will know how highly I regard the work of Rizky Wasisto Edi, who wielded the pencil to such good effect on the first two books – indeed it is his work that has graced the top of this very column since 2003.

So, however much I’ve been desperate to get hold of Jai Sen’s stories, I was a little apprehensive about the new kid doing the pictures. M. Reza Aribuwana has, however, settled my nerves rather well. He has a sharper, more angular style than his predecessor, but that actually suits the tone of this story very well. Marsiti and Hidayat remain Marsiti and Hidayat, avoiding the problem that so many books have when artists change and the physical appearance of the central characters change with them. (The otherwise excellent Queen and Country is a particular culprit for this…)

The upshot is that the The Island of Glass and Ashes looks different that the previous two instalments, but still looks wonderful. Everything else about the design is unchanged. This is still the same compact “widescreen” format, with the pages oriented to “landscape” rather than the more usual “portrait” position, and although the obviously won’t display on the laptop monitor I used to read the .pdf version, Jai Sen assures me that the subtle metallic silver inks that have graced the series so far are still in use.

That’s not the only innovative thing that Shoto are doing with this book though, far from it. If you trot along to the Shoto Press Website you’ll see that as well as the conventional printed paper version of this book they’re also offering the chance to buy the digital version using the BitPay system. It’s an interesting idea, which I know has been trialed (and indeed actively used) elsewhere, but I’m very interested to see how this facility is used.

The digital version of the book is a truly beautiful thing to behold, and certainly well worth reading. But readers who want to appreciate the full magnificence of this will need to get their hands on the paper copy. I’m also not sure about the desirability of comics as digital entities in any case. I mean, for convienience you can’t beat a .pdf comic. They cost almost nothing, they can arrive almost instantly and you can certainly read then just as well as you can a regular paper comic – there’s none of the loss of quality you experience with mp3 sound files. Indeed, the landscape orientation of the Malay Mysteries makes them perfect for screen reading because they’re screen shaped already!

But comics aren’t like music tracks. Yes, when people eventually stop buying CDs something will be lost - we won’t have all those lovely crystal cases and sleeve notes to file in alphabetical order (or is that just me), but ultimately the listening experience is unchanged. (Yes, there is a loss of quality with mp3, but you’ll only notice it if you’ve got really amazing speakers.)

That’s not true with a comic. The image quality is unaffected by being digital (unless you’ve got a really crappy screen, or there are metallic inks involved) but there is a fundamental difference between reading from a screen and holding a comic in your hands – and it’s a difference that will remain until we have workable digital paper. (It’ll happen eventually…)

So for now, I suspect that people may well be using the digital download version of comics like this as “trial issues”. Spending a few cents on the download to see if you like it before you blow ten bucks on the real thing makes a lot of sense. But there’s the rub – the print version is still the real thing! In any case, I’m here to save you those few cents on the download version. You don’t need to test out full details of The Island of Glass and Ashes, because I’m telling you that it’s too good to risk missing. Go and tell your retailer that you want one now!

But that’s not all we have to look forward to in the first part of this new year, oh no! Comics legend Bryan Talbot will soon be releasing his latest venture, the long anticipated (by me at least) Alice in Sunderland, about which more next week. Honestly, if we keep going like this, 2007 is going to be an amazing year!