ankewehner.de » Webcomics

Mixed Visuals

Anke — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:19:22 +0000

Once upon a time in Gürbetal, Switzerland, there was a car parts dealer who after finishing cannibalising old cars parked them on his property. This happened from the 1930s to the 1970. A lot of the cars are still there.

Official website (German)
Forest of Sleeping Cars flickr sets by elessar_ch
Album on mth-fotografie.ch

Steampunk webcomic find: 2D Goggles – The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Some rule of cool and/or funny revisionist history in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace didn’t only design a working computer in theory, but it actually got built.
Updating schedule is “a batch of pages whenever I have them”; so far there are the “origin” chapter plus two episodes, and a bit of smallstuff. Lots of links to the creator’s research material in the author’s notes, just the right thing for some types of geeks.

Deep Sky Colors
Astronomical photography.
Wired.com had a step-by-step example of the photo postwork which I found very interesting.

Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris
A study of different versions of letters in graffiti tags.

Villafane Studion pumpkin carvings
Pretty impressive, particularly the Predator.

Webcomics and links

Anke — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:57:42 +0000

Digger, my all-time favourite webcomic, finally got out of its “subscribers only apart from the newest page” cover.

As to the comic: It’s epic, the titular character is the only sane person (also wombat) in a somewhat crazy, rich world. I’m also a sucker for black and white art.

Here’s a shortcut to page 1

Speaking of webcomics… I recently got back into Magic: The Gathering (a fantasy-themed collectable card game), and while poking around on their website, I found that they had made some, too, about Planeswalkers… You can ignore “Chandra’s Ultimate”, because it’s repeated as part of Chandra Nalaar: Fuel for the Fire, Part I … That story (all 3 parts together, not only the first) is my favourite on the site.

In Magic lore, Planeswalkers are very powerful magic-users which can travel between planes/dimensions/worlds, and each player of the game is a Planeswalker. The way Wizards of the Coast is pushing that theme lately looks a bit odd to me, because on the table its more of a strategy game with high random factor than anything involving playing a role.

Oh, well, the whole “you are misunderstood and don’t fit in because secretly you are superspecial-magical” apparently can work well for marketing, when you’re aiming at misfit geeky teens*… Look at Spiderman, for example. Bullied goodie two-shoes geek power fantasy to the max.

Lastly, two articles that may be of more general interest I found hidden between the Magic-specific ones:

Frakkin’ Zounds, about cursing in speculative fiction (nothing terribly exciting, but a nice nudge to think about it if you haven’t yet)
Tipping the Scales, about ways to make big monsters look big even in tiny images. All those “tricks” of course work for bigger pictures, too, and it looks quite useful to me.

* Like I was when I got my first Magic cards. I guess now I’m a slightly less misfit geeky twen.

Webcomic recommendation

Anke — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:18:04 +0000

Uku is a wordless, painted fantasy comic, telling, as far as I can tell, the story of a cave painter looking for paints, and finding instead something entirely different. Visually, it’s on the bright and cute side, story wise, well, it has only 10 pages so far and being just a reader I don’t know where it’s going.

The main reasons why I’m drawn to it are the style of art, and, I guess, that wordless comics are rather unusual.