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Tomorrow, May 22nd, Greg Rucka’s new novel Alpha drops, introducing new protagonist Jad Bell. You should really get out there and buy it, or click on your digital readers and order it.
If you don’t know Greg’s work, he’s known for many things, from writing every major hero in comicdom to the supremely awesome Lady Sabre and the Pirates of the Ineffable Aether. He writes books, too, great books, and every one of his novels feature a great eye for detail, jargon, place, and character. Exciting plots. Great stories. If I could, in all honesty, turn and point at the author and writer I want to be, I’d point at Greg. I study his work to try and improve mine, and anything I do well of late, I can pretty much lay at his feet.
I was fortunate enough to get a look at Alpha, the first Jad Bell novel, before it hits the streets. I don’t think it’s unfair, having read everything else Greg has done with prose, to say that he’s created his best action hero yet. We walk with protagonist Jad Bell through a damned spectacular set of confrontations with a series of terrorists, who take over WilsonVille (essentially a variation of Disneyland) and start doing all those terrible things we see in our post 9/11 nightmares. There is a complication, I won’t spoil it, that makes the conflict personal between Jad and the terrorists, and it changes duty-bound conflict into personal moral terror. The end result is a satisfying tension that I envy, I envy, I envy the man’s ability to create, and a satisfying read.
As a breakout novel for a series character, this is an amazing debut. As a standalone novel, it blew me away. I say, without being glib, that I’m looking forward to the day not long from now when I see this on a big screen, because if this book doesn’t get the treatment, there’s no damned justice in the world. Yes, I know there’s very little justice in the world, but live in hope. If we can have Battleship, I will see an Alpha movie.
It’s the subtle touches that make the book. The prose is masterful. The flow is superb. Jad is a wonderful, technically spot-on character, and his family and crew grant flavor that makes you truly care. The world, even, gains a character that I’ve rarely seen in prose, with such attention to the surroundings that you start to feel a part of the scenery, but without that awful sense that the writer is describing wallpaper to pad the word count. Every inch of WilsonVille feels real, and the details surrounding it are used to enhance the peril and give you a precisely cinematic feel of the world you’re mentally walking around in.
From the establishing moments to the exciting climax, this is a book I’ll study in the years to come, and have already studied, to learn how to do what I want to do better. If you don’t, it’ll be your loss.
Full disclosure: Greg and I know each other. Even fuller disclosure: I don’t plug a thing unless I really, really dig it, even if someone I knew wrote it, so ignore the first disclosure as journalistic duty.
I’ve been reading and enjoying the work of Eric Trautmann and Brandon Jerwa for some time now. I’ve also been quite fond of Steve Lieber’s work. When I found out that the three were doing a graphic novel together, it made the pull list immediately. I expected a good read. I expected a fun, honest comic. It’s what those gents do, after all. They’re among the few I turn to when I want to know what I should do when creating a comic book for a reason, and their friendship has sustained me through much doubt of my own ability and simultaneously it’s given me the courage to forge on.
What I wasn’t expecting was nearly being reduced to tears multiple times. I wasn’t expecting such an amazing piece. I went in, as one often does with familiar faces, with the expectation of good or better. I got what had damned well better win an Eisner, or I’m gonna find me some judges and mete out justice.
My dad served in Kuwait. My grandfather served in World War 2. I grew up in the area where most of this book took place. I was born in a military hospital, Madigan. Fort Lewis was a place I spent a great deal of time cavorting around on in my youth. The military culture that is ever-present and a part of life in Tacoma, Washington, in the northwest in particular, gets into your bones and defines your culture. It makes us who we are even if, like me, you’re a relative pacifist and find war a last resort. Still and all, you know fifty soldiers and you almost never meet one who isn’t, to a man or woman, courageous. Worthy of a story. As this book illustrates, war and its ins and outs are neither good, nor bad. It’s not black, nor white. In point of simple fact the realities are almost impossibly complex, and dealing with it drives great men and women to their graves. Those who survive can come through numb, and even those on the periphery are touched by the brutality of war and our need for defense, a need that has costs. The book covers all of this and more, and without being on the nose or delivering a soapbox message.
Without attaching itself strongly to the heavy politics of the last decade (which played hell on formerly idealistic me), this story approaches the human side of the war without being preachy, in a strong, real, human way. Without giving away the punch of the story, the trade follows Terry Glass through a series of trials and travails that have him questioning himself, his role in the world, and the role of the military and private contractors. From the low pay given to soldiers to the perceived high life of private contractors, the graphic novel runs the gamut from the perspective of a central character you ache being close to as he gains and loses things that give his life meaning, fighting goalposts that move in sometimes severe, chaotic ways. We see the impact that loss, war, and bureaucracy have on the life of someone who, in almost every situation, just does their best to do the right thing. It’s a story of what happens when being the best man you can be isn’t good enough, and it’s also a story of finding out that even the best people, when confronted with the realities of war, can swerve on the path to righteousness.
Lieber draws as he always has, with a very human touch. Even the battle scenes are about the people, and when the shock moments come, when the brutal glorious crescendos hit, they punch you in the gut. Trautmann and Jerwa teach me (as they have since I started trying to write these here funnybooks) what it means to tell a story in pictures, and I sit here in awe, furious that they’ve kicked my ass at the craft yet again, because this isn’t just a good book, it’s a fucking great book, and if you don’t pick it up, it’s your loss.
You can find it here.
Go.
That’s right, folks! Now you can buy the first issue of Cura in color! It’s the first twenty-five pages, through the introduction of Headquarters.
Available formats include CBR, CBZ, PDF, and RAR. If you need another format, let me know, I will endeavor to create it!
You can feel free to check out eight page samples, or to check out the individual JPGs. I have optimized the pages for a monitor width of 1280. If anyone is considering not buying because they want a different width or setup, let me know. This is a work in progress, and I will endeavor to craft to please.
FIRST NINE PAGES – PDF
FIRST NINE PAGES – CBR
FIRST NINE PAGES – CBZ
FIRST NINE PAGES – RAR
Bear in mind that if we can sell enough of these, more color issues will follow. If not, we’ll have to rethink things. I promise to do my best to keep them coming out, and rest assured, all cash is going toward production costs, so every purchase is helping to keep the color comics coming.
As mentioned in the last entry, the first issue will be $2.99, the second $2.99, and the third $3.99, and if you buy all three, you get the extended trade with extras for free when it’s finished, as a reward for supporting the color pages! If you want to wait and buy the full trade (assuming we can make it that far without individual issue support), the price will be $14.99 after a clearly marked window of opportunity.
You can purchase the comic at the store. Enjoy!
It’s DONE.
The first issue of Cura, pages 1-25, is now colored and in the can! I could start handing it out to you guys right now, but then, I have to figure out a few things first, and for that, I was hoping to turn to the readership.
This mysterious “color” thing has value in a digital medium. Maybe you fine folks can help me figure out what that is. Any comments would be appreciated.
Please note this entire conversation concerns DIGITAL copies, not PRINT copies. Print copies of color Cura are aways off, and frankly dependent upon future sales. Color is VERY expensive to print.
PRICE:
I’m guessing a good, fair price for a color comic these days is about $3.99. That’s what I see in shops. I want to price the first digital Cura color issue at $2.99. That’s a buck cheaper than your average issues, and it enables us to do the OTHER STUFF you’ll dig.
If this first issue (and the subsequent two) are moderately successful, my plan is to continue with the color issues until I have a trade, and when we get there, release the SUPER DUPER DOUBLE SUPER SECRET trade at a discount for loyal readers/buyers.. What that means, essentially, is that if YOU buy the first three trades you get the trade with all the bonuses and extras FREE, and at an extraordinary discount (33%). The prices would be $2.99, $2.99, and then $3.99 for the last one I’m thinking, because it’s 32 pages instead of 25 (1)/22 (2).
Everyone else would pay slightly more, after a deadline. Say, $14.99 for what the people who bought early and supported the cost of production would get for $9.99. Don’t worry, I’ll make the deadline for that very clear on the site, and given the fact that the SUPER DUPER trade has to be put together, you can likely buy all three after the third issue has come out and still get the deal. There will be a week to a month gap as I set up the trade.
THE SUPER DUPER TRADE
So, in the digital medium I have a ton of space to goof around. What does that mean? It means that when I do the digital color trade, I can throw in a ton of stuff I can’t put in the print trade. I can put in the FULL SCRIPT (minus stuff that gives away the big mysteries). I can put in ALL of Dex’s pencils. I can put in the ROUGH INS. I can put in EXCLUSIVE SHORT STORIES. That’s what we’d be fighting for, creating and buying these, supporting them. If that’s something you’d dig, let me know.
DISTRIBUTION
Hoo boy. Okay. I’ll be straight up with you guys. The distributors want a cut, and I don’t want to give them one. Why? Well, because all they offer me, potentially, is new exposure, and there’s no way that my comic is going to stand out next to THE MIGHTY INCREDIBLE ULTIMATE HULK AVENGING SUPERMAN. Not right now. It’s just not likely. I’m not saying I wouldn’t sell a few books, but I wouldn’t sell many, and it’s much easier to keep things simple and on this site with people who really do care to be here, as opposed to the cold sell with strangers. That said, I’m not a fool, and I know many of you probably use Comixology and/or Drivethru and/or INSERT COMPANY HERE to buy your digital comics. This brings me to a problem. If it’s on those sites, the digital copies are also easier to distribute/for you to read.
I am tech savvy with regards to digital comics. I know how to get a CBR, CBZ, PDF, or even individual images up on an iPad/computer and read them, conveniently, and easily. If you DON’T, however, if you’re one of those folks who get the comixology app and don’t want to screw with figuring out how to load a comic into a reader, then it may be frustrating to you to be confronted with local distribution. For instance, if you had to download GOODREADER to read the Cura comic, would you do it? Or would it being on Comixology with that simplicity make or break your purchase?
Rest assured, no matter HOW we did it, I’d have a set of easy directions for you to figure out the process, and it wouldn’t be more than a five minute thing.
I know I have no problem downloading/using new programs for that kind of thing, but I don’t know about you folks, and it’s important that I know so I can decide whether to do this locally or whether I’ll have to take cuts and worry about creator rights with major distribution companies.
SIZE
Right now, I am patterning my digital comic size off the average downloadable comic, which has a width of 1280. That’s about a fifteen meg file. It fills my large monitor really well. If you have a different standard/know something I don’t know, please tell me. I based it off some of the comics I’ve downloaded.
PREVIEW
Some time in the next few days, I will release a preview so you can see that what you will purchase has value. I am unsure how big of a preview is sufficient. When I see a preview on Newsarama that’s three pages, I’m like “Come on, guys, I need to see more.” When I see 10 pages, I’m like “Holy crap, they just gave away the whole comic!”
I am inclined to give away more than I am to be stingy. I am thinking a nine page preview. Any comments or thoughts would be appreciated.
SUMMATION
That’s… that’s about it. Let me know what you guys think. And let Dex know how awesome that cover is, huh? He really knocked it out!
N