"Eye of the Beholder" webcomic with Ruben Cordero, page 6

Here's page six of "Eye of the Beholder", where truth begins to come to light.  The end is in sight!

Earlier I talked a little bit about some of the other entires in Strip Search, the collection for the stories featured in Dark Horse's online contest - now let's talk about the overall winner:

Stop Light by Jeff Kilpatrick

I think it's easy to see that this artwork is top-notch.  The layout of the entire story was also quite dynamic and interesting.  In addition, the winner of this contest was chosen quite democratically, so Jeff certainly won things fair and square (that's quite the cliche, isn't it?).

When I found out that "Stop Light" had won it all, though, I was surprised for a few reasons.  First of all, I was almost sure that a color strip would win over one that was black and white, regardless of the overall quality.  Secondly, while a number of other stories in the book were pretty condensed, this six-page story is one short sequence with few words to accompany the pictures.  Not to imply that more words equals a better story (there are many, many examples to the contrary), but I thought that one of the more in-depth stories would take the prize.

Please don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to disparage "Stop Light" in the least, and I'm certainly not trying to say that "Eye of the Beholder" should have won the contest.  I do like my entry, of course, but in all honesty I wouldn't call it the best in the book.  This will come as no surprise, but my choice for "best in show" would have been "The Mighty Skullboy Army" by Jacob Chabot, probably followed by the "Haunted Cipher" shorts by Eric Haven (both black and white stories, by the way).  While "Stop Light" was a solid entry and certainly deserved to be in the book, I don't know that it held my interest for long enough for me to rank it up with some of the other, more thought-provoking tales.

In any case, though, Jeff Kilpatrick won the prize and for that I salute him!  It was a year-long contest and he pulled it out.  I wonder what he bought with all that prize money?

That's it for today.  I'll post the penultimate page of "Eye of the Beholder" soon!

(Very) Strange Tales

I think that Marvel's new indy-style anthology, Strange Tales (this has got to be at least the fourth time they've used the title) is something the bigger companies should emulate more often - lesser-known but nonetheless talented creators working on out-of-continuity stories featuring big-name characters. While it does seem like Marvel threw this compilation together from stories they just had lying around the office (The Incorrigible Hulk feature was supposed to see print in, I think, 2003), I still applaud the effort, which can produce such gems as Jacob Chabot's entry, "Lookin' Good, Mr. Grimm!"

Chabot is probably best known for his creator-owned The Mighty Skullboy Army, which I'm a huge fan of - Dark Horse published a digest sized collection after it appeared in their Strip Search publication (which, ahem, I was also a part of), though right now he's providing the artwork for Marvel's X-Babies miniseries. Yeah...X-Babies. I never quite got the point behind the concept, but I'll vouch for the artwork, at least.

In any case, one panel of the Fantastic Four send up caught my attention. As everyone knows, because I am so tremendously famous and wealthy as a result of it, I have an online webseries called Franks and Beans that is so hilarious you just might die after watching it. Or something. Anyway, one of the earlier episodes is titled "Mustache", which features me growing a mustache and saying the phrase "Hey, mustache buddy!" That's...basically the joke for the episode. It's also close to the phrase in this Strange Tales issue, but you can tell that they are quite distinctive as Chabot spells his phrase "moustache". Which, now that I think about it, might be even funnier.