Broken Frontier

I like to keep my eye out for new and interesting comics that make their debut as webcomics, and that fact that this often means they can be read for free doesn’t hurt either. This is why when Scott Ewen, a former classmate of mine from the Joe Kubert School for Cartoon & Comic Art, told me that he was working on a new webcomic with writer Kevin Sheath called The Sundays, I had to go check it out.

Okay, I have to stop myself here. While it’s true that I did give it a look as soon as the comic started, I didn’t read it right away. As much as I love the method of serializing a webcomic by posting one page at a time, I don’t actually enjoy reading them that way. I prefer to wait until a decent chunk of pages are up before I get into it.

So fast forward a couple of months to when I get a follow up post from Scott letting me know that the first chapter (24 pages) of The Sundays was done, I decided it was time to give it a read.

The title The Sundays has a dual meaning signifying both the day of the week the webcomic is updated and the last name of the two main characters, a father and son named Richard and Stuart. Part of the story focuses on their relationship (there doesn’t seem to be a mother in the story, nor any mention as to why, but I get a feeling that she’s no longer part of their lives in any case). This father and son storyline serves as the foundation for the comic, but much of the action actually takes place in the two separate parallel stories: one following the son, Stuart, through his life at school and his awkward social life, and the other following the father, Richard, at his office job and the high jinks he causes there.

In this way, it’s a like a mash-up of the movies Office Space and Superbad, if the main characters were father and son.

I enjoyed reading the first chapter quite a bit - the script is fast paced and the art and storytelling are very strong. I look forward to reading the second chapter when it’s completed, though I have to admit that I broke my own rule and read the first page of chapter 2 already since it was posted July 11. I still haven’t decided if I’ll continue reading it page by page each week or stick to my original plan of waiting for the chapter to conclude first.

Kevin and Scott’s plan for The Sundays is to do two chapters a year, serializing it online, and then printing the story when they have enough material for the book. Kevin says that he definitely wants to see this comic in print, even if he has to do a small print run himself. But there’s no word yet on when that’ll be.

One more thing that really should be mentioned: Kevin and Scott have also been working on another comic together. It’s a horror/comedy called Lightshade that was originally intended as a Zuda Comics submission (you’ll recognize the format) before Zuda shut down their contests (and now the site itself has been shut down, I believe).

The plan is to run chapters of Lightshade in between chapters of The Sundays. So when chapter 1 of The Sundays concluded on June 24^th, they actually switched to posting the first chapter of Lightshade before going back to the next chapter of The Sundays, which resumed on July 11th.

That means that Kevin and Scott will be trying to get two separate comics out there on a consistent basis. I know they already had that first chapter of Lightshade because it was a submission, so posting it gave Scott a break and time to gear up for chapter 2 of The Sundays. He won’t have that luxury when it comes time to make new material for Lightshade. We’ll see how well he can keep up.

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Tyler Chin-Tanner started his own publishing company, A Wave Blue World, where he wrote and drew layouts for Adrenaline, its flagship series, Adrenaline and wrote its latest graphic novel, American Terrorist.

© 2010 Tyler Chin-Tanner.  All rights reserved.
Email: tyler@awaveblueworld.com

www.awaveblueworld.com