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New Weekly Feature!

Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 6:07 PM EST

Updated: Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 6:07 PM EST

Starting next week, my pals Brandon Hanvey and Sean Whitmore (art and story, respectively) will be doing a new comic on the blog every Wednesday!

It’ll be called Comic Critics, and it is about, well, two comic critics. They review comics online, so there will be comic reviews in the strip, but we will also see them behind the scenes, so there will be a story on top of the reviews.

Here’s a quick sample, mainly to show you the style Brandon is using…

Brandon and Sean will also have a separate blog where they’ll talk about the strip (and it’ll have an archive of the strip).

Next Wednesday will be the first installment!

42 Comments

That’s awesome.

Especially considering I never got around to doing a webcomic for the blog like I said I was going to.

Ha!

That’s right, I forgot about that.

We’re also a couple of reasons shy, by the by. No pressure, of course. :D

Quiet, you.

Everything is coming! Eventually. My promises aren’t empty, they’re just… mostly hollow.

Thanks, Brian.

Here is the site/blog.

http://comiccritics.com

I’m still slightly tweaking things (such as adding cast picts).

[…] CSBG has a preview of my new comic which will start next Wendesday. […]

Will the images be published behind a cut when the comic begins running?

I was the critic on the right five years ago.

That said, I’m still looking forward to the new Hulk movie.

This blog has jumped the shark.

So who is Fonzie me or Sean?

This blog has jumped the shark.

Thank you, that was some constructiv….oh wait, no, you’re just a dick.

Glad we cleared that up.

This comic has already won me over…

Will the images be published behind a cut when the comic begins running?

I dunno, I haven’t decided yet, actually.

Probably above the cut.

Danielle Leigh

June 10, 2008 at 5:04 am

how very cool, Brian! Looking forward to this feature!

This blog has jumped the shark.

AH! An anonymous poster thinks CSBG is passe, I must listen to them stop coming here!

Seriously, keep up the great work. This feature looks and sounds great. Wait, there’s not supposed to be audio….

Please consider publishing the comics behind the cut. I have no problems with the site running comics, but it seems a little discourteous to make all users load the images for the foreseeable future.

I agree with Taledo.

This looks to be fun-I’m excited and looking forward to it. Keep up the great work.

You probably ARE Taledo.

Zing! Wouldn’t be surprised.

I have to agree with Lynxara. Putting the comic after the jump may be better when it is on this site. Especially since the comic will be 500 x 750. But that is up to Brian.

Why do people keep reading if it’s “jumped the shark”? I mean, don’t you stop viewing something when it sucks? That seems logical.

The comic looks fun. I’m looking forward to it.

That’s giving the Lee Hulk movie a lot more credit for actually accomplishing what it was attempting than I would, but the comic looks good, regardless.

Dan,

I think Sean was going for that both sides of the augment are valid.

The Mad Monkey

June 10, 2008 at 1:11 pm

I don’t understand why there’s already negativity towards this strip/column.
For starters, we’ve only just gotten a taste of what this is about. How ’bout everyone waits to see the whole product before you start slapping overused Happy Days jargon around? At least give it a chance…*geez*…
Secondly, all I see here is just a progression and expansion of CBR to provide their visitors with more options to get a wider range of critical opinions. I mean, Hannibal Tabu (as good and well thought-out as he is) is not the be all and end all of comic reviewers.
Thirdly (going along with the above two), if you don’t like it then don’t read it. There’s no law that says, “You MUST read this column or you will face martial law.”

Incidentally, Ang Lee’s Hulk was so bad that I actually saw it twice. Does he really have to include a treetop battle in all his movies? Granted, Brokeback Mountain didn’t have a fight atop trees…but, the fight that Jake and Heath had before they…ummm…you know…did take place near a forest.
Okay…I’m just rambling now…

Abe el is some sort of Newsrama troll. I don’t know about Taledo. Both can be safely ignored.

What I’m saying is that Lee’s Hulk was not psychological, in my opinion. Regardless of whether that’s a good quality or not, I don’t think it even achieved it.

And while I don’t agree with the troll-y comments about the strip, I don’t think it makes any sense to tell someone they should wait for the whole product, when talking about a serial webcomic. I mean, are you suggesting that they withhold any opinions until the strip stops being produced?

Sweet! Sean’s writing is always funny and I love Brandon’s cartooning. I hope this is big… might it be a PENNY ARCADE-style webcomic for comics fanboys? I hope so.

Three cheers and huzzah! Does Sean still do those comics where he poses action figures and makes fun of DC and Marvel’s big blockbuster events? Those were awesome.

Apodaca - Just once, say something positive without a note of faux-intellectual condescension. I dare you.

There’s not a single note of condescension in either of my comments for this post. My negative comments are about the movie, and in both comments, I give the strip a positive response.

And because I can’t resist a dare, check Brian’s post about Len Wein making more money from Lucius Fox than Wolverine. You’ll find my positive comment among one of the first, and that’s from less than a week ago.

Or go ahead and keep taking potshots at a stranger on the internet because they don’t like something that you do.

The term “jump the shark” has itself jum- er, outlived its natural lifetime as a useful phrase, and usually indicates a pretty pathetic individual when you see someone who still uses it.

Arrested Development used it well, but it could be partly due to the fact that they didn’t actually say the phrase.

The Mad Monkey

June 11, 2008 at 5:30 am

By my use of “the whole product”, I mean…
Let’s see what the first few columns/entries are like before anyone makes any rash judgments. Just because we’re given a description and a preview of a panel, doesn’t mean we’re getting the complete scope of what this new addition is trying to accomplish.
Apodaca, I didn’t take your question to be negative or snarky at all. I took it as a legitimate question about some minor confusion concerning one of my statements. Hope this straightened it out for all who may have the same question. :-)

That’s a fair way of judging the strip, I think.

Thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Well there will be somewhat of a storyline that can be followed through the comics, but most will be stand alone that can be read without having to read what came before.

FunkyGreenJerusalem

June 11, 2008 at 11:07 pm

Dan,

I think Sean was going for that both sides of the augment are valid.

Brandon,

Sean is wrong, if that’s the case - the movie failed on all fronts.

No, the idea is that there are _plenty of people around_ who hold one of the two opinions shown in the panel about that movie. Showing two characters having those opinions is not the same as saying either is right, or that both are equally right, just that people have different responses to the same thing, and that different people even use the same language when praising something as when criticizing it.
To respond by arguing about which of the two characters is right or wrong (whether one or the other, both or neither), or indeed to argue about the merits or flaws of the movie at all, is beside the point, and silly.

Something that bothered me about this particular joke (though even given that it’s not bad) is that the way it’s constructed carries the implication that all opinions of Ang Lee’s Hulk are basically one or the other. Neither stance reflects my opinion, though, which is that it was just hilariously incompetent. Seriously, I saw it on opening day and I was laughing so hard that I almost had to leave the theater.

Well, sure there are other opinions, but the two shown are probably in the majority of positives and negatives, and are familiar to most comics fans. To start nitpicking in terms of whether it reflects your own opinion, or whether it addresses what’s good about or wrong with the film, way is to be like one of those people who make it impossible to make an analogy or tell a story:

A: “So, imagine the best chocolate you’ve ever had…
B: “I hate chocolate.”
A: Okay, well, let’s see, if you don’t remember to feed you’re dog every day…”
B: “I don’t like dogs.”
A: “Your cat then…”
B: “I’m allergic.”
A: “What do you have?”
B: “A snake.”
A: “Okay then if you don’t remember to feed you’re snake every day…”
B: “Shows what you know, snakes only need to eat once every-”
A: “You know what? NEVER MIND!”

You know?

No, I don’t know. What the hell kind of point are you even trying to make?

You appear to be trying to argue that the joke is fine, and the fact that it doesn’t resemble any argument about the Hulk I’ve ever seen humans having just means that my experiences are somehow flawed and invalid. From there, you seem to be arguing that I have no right to express myself if I’m going to say something you find mildly disagreeable, and instead correct behavior would involve– to extend your metaphor– pretending to like chocolate even if I’d never tasted the stuff.

The entire audience I saw the Hulk with on opening day had severe issues with inadvertent laughter. All anyone talked about on the way out of the theater was how ridiculous the film was. Without any sort of characterization to shade the humor here, the argument just feels very false to me and so isn’t very funny when I stop to think about it. Since the form of the joke here is observational humor, that struck me as bothersome enough to be worth remarking upon. Perhaps it was an angle the creators hadn’t considered (it only now struck me).

I wasn’t being hostile or attacking anyone, so I’m not left with any clear idea of why you think it’s an awful horrible terrible thing to point out that the reality the strip was joking about was one I had managed to never experience despite constant involvement in comics fandom. Unless your argument is that I’m living wrong, at which point I’m going to stop caring about anything you have to say.

Yeah, it’s not a dispute about the strip, just people voicing their own opinions.

Which is the whole point of the internet.

The first comic will debut tomorrow the 18th.

Looking forward to it!

[…] gave CSBG a preview of the comic which will start next […]

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