Hello Blog!

We haven't talked for a while. How are you? I am fine. I just drank a double expresso thingy in a can from Starbucks. (Or for you coffee/lefty snobs out there: Charbucks or $tarbuck$ ) A few things.

1. I dusted off Sean Lennon's album "Into the Sun" yesterday. It is still amazing, and I still love it.

2. Evangelion is still great. The detail and strong sense of being an engineered object that they put into their mechanical design, even down to the most trivial objects, is amazing. Everything looks like you could have it appear in real live and it would work, no modification needed.

3. Here are some reviews coming in of Five Fists of Science. I'm copying parts of the review that are about me (if available). Because this is my blog. About me. That said, Fraction did a insane job on the script. He fleshed out the characters in such a way, made them so endearing to me that I literally teared up when I was drawing the last page because I wasn't going to spend time with these great characters anymore. And the plot.. everything was just .. mwah. Getting to draw it was like riding a roller coaster that ran on distilled Fun.

Anyway! Reviews!

Jamie S. Rich

http://confessions123.blogspot.com/2006/05/hes-electric-hes-got-comic-book-full.html

I wasn't sure about Steven Sanders' art from the preview pages I had seen, but seeing it printed in gorgeous color on glossy paper, all doubts were removed. My favorite thing about his work is the sense of color. Particularly in the big battles, when the big guys are tossing electricity around like silly string, I was really digging it. His pencil style--and sometimes his facial expressions--actually reminds me a bit of Bill Plympton, a comparison that makes more sense when you consider how much comedy is on the page. Fraction puts a lot of business in his panels, and he doesn't take time to pause for the middle moments. He needs an artist that is willing to jump first and look to see if the bungee chord is attached later. Sanders fits the bill. Check, for instance, each time Tesla's assistant Tim (the fifth fist in the Five; one hand is prosthetic) gets socially cockblocked by his boss. Tim is stopped before he starts all in the space of one panel, and it always comes off.

I don't know what being "an artist that is willing to jump first and look to see if the bungee chord (sic?) is attached later." means, really, but it sounds positive.

From Warren Ellis:

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=2611

(This link has had a habit of not working for me. I pulled the entire section on 5FoS, but if you want to read the rest, go to his main page and scroll down until you hit the "This Week's Great Works of Comics Literature" section for 6/01/06 (Ellis' European format is 01/06/2006))

Five Fists Of Science GN $12.99 - this comes with my Highest Possible Recommendation. I have read it and it is wonderful. The book is full colour, but here’s a black-and-white preview.

Jog the Blog:

http://joglikescomics.blogspot.com/2006/05/25-knuckles.html

Notice must be given to Sanders' art, which reminds me a bit of Kan Takahama's approach to certain stories - gently-rendered lines made even softer through digital tweaking, though here it's Sanders' airy, sometimes faded colors that do the trick, nicely giving the whole thing a whiff of age, even when beams of light are blasting through the sky at evil forces. That's fortunate - anything that helps in holding all the stuff together is necessary in a diverse concoction of this sort.

Fourth Rail:

http://www.thefourthrail.com/reviews/critiques/052906/fivefistsofscience.shtml

Sanders's artwork puts me in mind at times of the style of Terry (Strangers in Paradise) Moore, but I also see a strong Guy (B.P.R.D.) Davis influence at play in his line art and design sense. The pencils are quite loose here, and I wouldn't be surprised if the final art was reproduced from uninked boards. The action gets a bit muddled at the story's climax when the Lovecraftian monster erupts into the story, but that's confusion is fleeting. I love the design for Tesla's war machine, and the creature Edison captures during the course of the story is not only menacing but convincing in its level of detail and design.

I noticed that I am getting compared to all kinds of different people, which I hope means that I have a fairly unique style. Which is either good, or a kiss of death if its not a commerically appealing one, and I have to end up putting out indie comics and living on saltines and park fountain water for the rest of my career.