Wonder Comix, $2.50
Short Review: Uh... Astonishing. Really, really astonishing.
It's wonderful what you can do with computers. What you're doing now, for example, is a wonderful thing, and I want you to know that each and every one of you are giving me a little glow inside. Computers also have great applications to comics, of course, and in the right hands, can do stuff like the backgrounds to the beautiful Martha Washington Goes To War. Nils Osmar, unfortunately, is not the right hands.
The plot, if such we may term it, revolves around a pair of guys hired to test a virtual reality machine, who get sucked into the machine, and end up fighting a crazed consciousness imprisoned inside. That was what happened in the two previous short issues that preceded this full length one, and it doesn't get better here. There's a lot of bad expository dialogue, and a gratuitous love interest, and a plot to take over the world. Bad, bad, bad.
The art, on the other hand, is terrible. The effects are made up of computer generated stuff, interspersed with manipulated photo images. Originally, it was to be in colour, until Nils got a clue as to how much colour costs, so now it's in black and white. Some colour versions of the interior art is on the cover, and show clearly how lucky Nils was. The colour art dismisses any illusions provided by B&W about the look of realism. The panel on the letters page that explains how it's all done states that the only actual photographic images are the rocks (here he's lying, or else he must have the combined computing power of California and Illinois), which are one rock repeated. And when you go back and look, it's clear that this is so. Except if you look at the cover, where the rocks are clearly and obviously just one rock repeated. Similarly, the backgrounds, which look vaguely cloud-like in B&W, are clearly the same explosion in colour, rotated and zoomed in or out. Hint to Mr. Osmar: explosions grab the attention, and so make very bad backgrounds. The repeated reuse of certain faces is also fairly clear, even in black and white, and culminates in one of the worst "face over body that doesn't belong to it " shots that I've ever seen. Bad, Bad, Bad.
Andrew These reviews are copyright the authors