ABC Family has made the pilot episode of The Middleman available as a free download from iTunes a week before the shows airs on television. Despite some reservations after seeing the trailers, I went ahead a watched the show.

"Reservations?" you ask.

See, I've read all the Middleman comics and they were indeed rather funny. But television is a different medium and I've found that it's rare that comics and television translate very well from one to another. A lot of things that work in comics can't work in TV, and vice-versa. They're just different media and have different strengths. Which is fine, but what often ends up happening is that either A) the creators work incredibly diligently to translate the story as religiously as possible, ignoring the change in medium and all the pitfalls that entails, or B) the creators twist the concept so far from the original to make it fit the new medium that it no longer bears any real resemblance to the original. (I happened to watch for the first time Rise of the Silver Surfer earlier today as well; that is most definitely a case of bearing no real resemblance to the original!)

In any event, the trailers I saw initially struck me as not really showing anything except that the executives who made them really had no idea what the story was about. The PSA spots were much better and showcased a tone and style that was more reminiscent of the comics. Which, to me, means that there a number of people working on the show who all have different visions and interpretations of how it should developed. Which further means that there's going to be internal struggles and some discongruity, and the whole show will go down in flames.

That being said, though, the pilot episode covers the basic story of how Wendy Watson signs up with The Middleman. It's the origin story. And it's almost frighteningly similar to what was originally published in the comic. In all seriousness, it looked like they used the comic book as storyboards. In fact, with the exception of Natalie Morales looking nothing like the red-headed, freckled Wendy shown in the comic, it's almost exactly the same. And what's frightening about that is: it works.

All of the timing and dialogue delivery and camera angles and costumes and gadgets and everything else that was created for a two-dimensional, black-and-white comic book is translated exceptionally well into real life. (Well, as close to real life as one can get in Hollywood.)

There were a few updates that I caught, without comparing the show side-by-side with the comic. But they were relatively minor, and only really served to make the show a little more contemporary. For example, in listing the comic books Wendy reads, she cited Mouse Guard which was not published until after the first comic series had been completed. But everything else about the comic was there, and I give the actors all a lot of credit for pulling off some unusual dialogue, not necessarily intended to be spoken, in a very natural manner.

In short, The Middleman pilot was every bit as good as The Middleman comic. Presumably, two future episodes will closely follow volumes 2 and 3 (in which case, I'm eager to see an army of Mexican wrestlers) but I'm now certainly interested to see what other stories can be borne out of the idea but have yet to have been translated to the printed page. I'm hoping the production team can keep the momentum flowing, and I'll be interested to see how the show is received by the public at large.

Sea Freak was originally a short play by Jonathan Case, but he's recently begun expanding on the story and putting it into comic book form. The self-published story is about an atomic sea mutant named Grue, who feeds off humans and their passions. He's not wholly comfortable with this, however, in part because he's read a great deal of Shakespeare -- in the form of pages ripped from books, corked in Kiki Cola bottles, and thrown into the sea. Grue seems to have learned English entirely from these pages, and seeks to find the source of his knowledge.

During a... unusual sojourn onto the beach, he follows a boy selling Kiki Colas back to his mother's boat. He further finds another woman, Giulietta, who has indeed been placing passages of Shakespeare in bottles and tossing them into the sea. Grue's style of speech and Giulietta's love of Shakespeare bring them together, but Grue soon finds tragedy as he learns that she is emotionally unable to leave her room.

And thus ends the first three chapters of Sea Freak.

The story took me a bit to warm up to. Much of what we see happening in the first two issues isn't really explained until the third. And, as Case has noted that he has written this as a seven-chapter story, it strikes me that it's suited better for a graphic novel format than a more serialized tale. That being said, though, I understand that the financial constraints of self-publishing are difficult, to say the least, and I don't know that it's reasonable to expect Case to publish this out-of-the-gate as a graphic novel.

I'm almost certain Case's decision to publish this as a series of individual issues was dictated by financial concerns because he repeatedly shows his aptitude with the sequential art format. Take, for instance, this double-page spread...
Case is able to easily manipulate our reading of the sequence as we run down the left side, and unnaturally back up the right. And, yet, on the chance that we read the sequence out of order, it still flows and makes enough sense to understand what's happened. And so it's this ability that says to me that Case would've preferred this be published as a single volume, if he were given the opportunity.

I'm also partial to the illustration style itself. It's a very clean style, with very distinct emphasis on light and shadow. Case uses this to good effect, making clear when we switch scenes from a bright, sunny beach to a dark, cramped hold in the bowels of a ship.

The story feels rather Shakespearean in its delivery. Grue's style of speech, certainly, is modeled after the Bard's but the overall story, too, feels like a Shakespearean drama. There's a gravity about the tone of the book, and one just innately gets the sense of great tragedy just around the corner. I'm not familiar enough with all Shakespeare's plays to make direct allusions between those and Sea Freak but I don't doubt Case has studied those works more than a little.

Currently, Case has Chapter One available for free on his web site and the first three issues available for purchase in a pulped wood format. Definitely worth a look.

I have to admit that this review is a bit complicated for me. I want to, as I always try to do, review Coin Operated Boy on its own merits, free from prejudice of the creators. But, as I'll explain shortly, I'm finding that somewhat difficult due to what strikes me as a questionable origin.

The comic is by Steve Prouse, Rob Grabe, Mia Paluzzi, and Matt Razzano and published by Arcana. The storyline is fairly straightforward: Genesis, a young woman fed up with dating, creates a clockwork man who loves her unconditionally. The story tells of some of the pitfalls of such an approach, and ends up with the automaton's head knocked off and a flesh and blood man showing his true love to the woman.

Aside from the conceit that Genesis creates the mechanical man in her apartment on a whim over the course of a week, the story flows reasonably well and makes sense. The storytelling is serviceable, but the changing art styles was a little disruptive. It tells it's story in 32 pages, and there's nothing else to follow up on. No mega crossovers, no epilogues, no next issue. It's a fairly quick read, and a free one if you download it from Wowio so I can't complain about that.

But here's why I have trouble recommending it: the story is a unacknowledged rip-off of the song "Coin Operated Boy" by the Dresden Dolls from a few years earlier. Now, if it were just the title, I might chalk that up to coincidence, but there were a few lines of dialogue that tell me otherwise.

In the comic, we find: "I just want love without complications." In the song, we have the line: "Love without complications galore." Both the song and the comic make direct references to ensuring the clockwork boy is waterproof: "I can even take him in the bath" versus "I can take him in the bath." The song refers to the creation as "my new boy anvil" whereas the comic uses "my boy anvil!" And, while not quite so direct a reference, I couldn't help but think of the song's line "his pretty coin operated voice" when I read the comic's line "I'm glad I put that voice box in you."

Now, the comic, to be fair, ends the story differently with the destruction of the creature after Genesis realizes the error of her thinking. There's a very clear and direct moral to this story. In the Dresden Dolls' song, however, the protagonist is only hinted at just coming to that realization -- the video for the song ends with the coin operated boy cuddling the seemingly disinterested singer Amanda Palmer in bed. The song's moral, if it could be deciphered to have one, is decidedly more ambiguous and leaves judgment up to the audience. And it's primarily because of that why I think the song is ultimately more critically successful.

There's just enough differences to show that the comic is not simply an adaptation of the song, but I found the story impossible to read without referring back to the song repeatedly. And while I certainly don't have a problem with using others' creations to inspire one's own work, that such a direct reference goes uncredited seems to me very disingenuous at best. If you're going to shell out a few bucks for a story about a coin operated boy, I think you'd be better served going over to iTunes.

Jeremy Kirby has launched a new web site dedicated to his grandfather, Jack "King" Kirby. Much of the artwork and photos there are fairly rare and/or previously unpublished, so it's definitely worth a look if you have any interest in The King of Comics.

Bob Dienenthal died this past weekend. You're almost certain to NOT know his name, but he was one of the pioneers in bringing the digital publishing revolution to comic books, lettering comics in an ancient program called MacPaint. Peter Gillis has this wonderfully touching remembrance of him. Also in the same piece, for those who don't care to read about Dienenthal himself, Gillis side-tracks briefly with some technical notes of how computer comics were created back in the 1980s.

You know, it seems to me that there simply isn't enough information online about Ronn Foss. Until I get a chance to go back and re-read what I've got about him in paper form, and post that here, I'll present this tribute made for him by Scary Monsters Magazine shortly after his death in 2001...
I'll try to write/post something more comprehensive when I get a chance.