Nominate, don't await

Same as yesterday, to award the ledger's Gary needs nominations, these nominations then form a list that people vote for; whoever and whatever gets the most votes wins.

International Title of the Year
There was a nice big list on ozcomics telling me which oz creators were working on what - but it wouldn't have helped much since writing done my list of international titles I bought only gave a list of 7 or so.


Order of the Beasts

The first couple of Elseworld stories were good; Norm's Holy Terror, mignola's Gotham by Gaslight, but then they just got dumb. Order of the Beasts takes back the Elseworld line to goodness. I saw Eddie's painted pages for this last year and they looked lush, printed even better. The story itself is good, but it seemed short, that either they got pages taken away by editorial or Daren was trying to fit too much in or maybe I'm just wrong, I dunno. It was still written very well and I hope the Brisbane trio; Daren, Eddie and the other Bloke get to do some more work for DC.

Egg Story

A little graphic novella (with a spine!) released by Slave Labour by J. Marc Schmidt, unfortunatly this went under most local's radars, and its a shame because its a great cute book. The life story of an egg captured and taken from its mother escapes the fridge and becomes a ninja. The ninja stuff (this is hard for me to say) is a bit dumb but the book is so sweet you can't help but smile. Hope we see more work from mr j.

Singularity 7

You know when you go to a film and you expect it to be crap and when its not, its a pleasant surprise and you end up liking the film. Well I wasn't expecting Ben Templesmith's Singular 7 to be crap, i just wasn't expecting too much. Ben's art is really great, i think his story telling is a bit dodgy and subsequently didn't hold much stock in his writing. Fears banished - it was really good. Its a simple story, end of the world apocalypse stuff and the characters aren't spectacular or well defined but there are enough twists and "oh cool" moments to carry it along. All the good bits of the Matrix trilogy (all 45 minutes of them) in a comic. And the presentation by IDW is really nice. Hunt this down in single issues because IDW tends to have expensive trades.


Small Gods

Another Surprise, written by Sydney Lad, Jason Rand. I was turned off by the psychics aspect of the story, I think that sort of stuff is too much of a crutch, but reading the first story arc, guess what, i was surprised. The telepathy and whatnot is just a trigger, that the story flows from not a cheap device that keeps the plot moving and tries to be interesting. The characters are well rounded, dialogue crisp - all in all good writing. The art is ok, not keen on photo-realism that it sometimes leans towards, makes it a bit flat, but its ok. A trade will be out next year, if memory serves me correctly.

District X
David Yardin did some nice work in this, you can tell its been well reasearched because every detail seems important, it all gives atmosphere. The plotting was a bit slow for my tastes and it felt stretched out too much but that might be just me. I didn't mind the ending even if it felt slightly hollow. David did issues 1,2,4,5 (I think) and Medina, the fill in artist, wasn't up to scratch. Yardin at the moment is working on some graphic Novels , for the really nice Realm of the Claw series which looked beautiful when it was first released.

Also consider, Nicola Scott's great art in Star Wars 27 and 28 (or 28 and 29), Gary Chaloner's John Law trade from IDW (shipping hopefully 31st of December), PC's the watch and if you are desperate Doug Holgate did some grey washing in Daisykutter #3. I haven't read it but Shane McCarthy did some Batman work (I think in Detective and Legends of the Dark Knight) and Ashley Wood did some work for IDW this year (popbot and solid snake). And I keep meaning to pick up Hawaiian Dick but I'm slack but the art looks right up my alley.