Comical Musings Read more comics. Way back in November, almost last year, I wrote about Something Wicked #10 from Futurequake Press. I have a facebook/comics acquaintance/friend who got his first ever published work in the anthology and I thought it dumb that no one had reviewed it for him. So, I did. I read it and found that although horror comics aren’t really my bag, I liked it. The anthology was enjoyable and many of the semi-pro writers and artists in Something Wicked #10 had standout moments and showed great potential for success in the industry. One such standout was Jimmy Furlong‘s short story “The Last,” which I deemed:
…clever and intelligent with it’s pacing
Well, Jimmy saw that as high praise and wanted to show me what he could do with 9 pages. Jimmy is no stranger to anthologies. He has been featured in Future Quake and Something Wicked anthologies previously. The issue he sent me, however, was British Showcase Anthology #1 from Markosia. His story in it is called “Tomorrow Will Be Different” and features Valentin Ramon Menendez as the artist.
I found this story to be fun. It borrows from some genre tropes, but is ultimately successful in telling the story that Jimmy and Val want it to. I am not sure how much influence Furlong had on the art side of things, but I see the same high points in pacing that I have in his previous work and mentioned above. The story moves along comfortably and leaves room to grow in the end. There’s a scene in it where a character turns on Bach’s “Orchestral Suite #3 in D Major” and for fun, I turned it on while I read it for effect. It really added to it.I really like the way that Jimmy phrases things and in this story his words add weight to what was already an imaginative plot playing out in vivid drawings. Val Ramon’s art is simple when it needs to be, but doesn’t miss on the fine details in the important moments of the story. Particular kudos to Val for not choosing easy animals to draw and putting a lot of life into the dying dog at the end.
This strikes me as a fun little comic that gets optioned into a movie property. There’s a scene in it where a character turns on Bach’s “Orchestral Suite #3 in D Major” and for fun, I turned it on while I read it for effect. It really added to the emotion of the scene (See “A Clockwork Orange”) and I could easily see “Tomorrow Will Be Different” being a film. Sure it would travel down familiar paths of other “utopian future with a dark undertone” stories, but could also be successful in bringing the enslaved hybrid animal person rebellion story conceptually into mainstream media. If it were bought by a pitch man, I would hope that they would give Jimmy and Val creative input into it…or just lots of money.
I give this short story 4 Union Jacks
If you want to support cool people like Jimmy Furlong and Val Ramon Menendez, you should support Shit Flingers (when it comes to Kickstarter in February) and D4VE! If you wanna’ check out British Showcase Anthology, you can buy it here.
Until the next time a cool person from England sends me comics to review 🙂
~ Scott Deaux ~
