The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli is a reminder of the fun and unpretentious adventure comics of the “Silver Age” (1960’s an 70’s) and before, in this case updated with a bit of anime flavor in the way outline and flat color drawings of the characters are set against rendered and 3-D backgrounds.

Drawn and written by Maine artist Jay Piscopo, Capt’n Eli was created as a promotional vehicle for a specialty root beer company. Comics and characters created in that kind of role are often half-hearted, designed-by-committee and drawn by disinterested commercial artists. Capt’t Eli, on the other hand, is a delightful exception to that rule, and surprised me when I first encountered it to the extent that I likened it to finding a classic Fantastic Four comic in your shredded wheat box.

Capt’n Eli carries a bit of that 60’s Marvel flavor, plus some of the wonderful camp feeling of earlier “Golden Age” comics (to which it makes reference with the character of “Commander X”), plus a healthy dose of Johnny Quest, which featured the character design work of Alex Toth. Capt’n Eli is an undersea sci-fi adventure story featuring high-tech submarines, flying mini-subs, time travel, monsters, robots, nefarious villains and lost civilizations; in short, a nice mixture for all-ages adventure comics fun.

The submarines, helicopters, robots and other tech gadgets in the story are rendered out as 3-D models, giving an additional flavor of Popular Science stories on wild designs for future submarines and aircraft. I particularly like the enemy subs that have a feeling of the Nautilus from the classic Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The combination of the outline and flat color drawings against rendered backgrounds and 3-D objects may seem jarring to some, though anyone whose seen my own webcomic knows I’m completely comfortable with it (grin), and the use of that approach in Japanese animation has made it seem less unusual in recent years.

It was through my webcomic that I encountered Capt’n Eli, when Jay Piscopo wrote me several years ago and asked me to take a look at the strip, which was then available as a webcomic. I did, and wrote a nice review of it on the Zark Comics Links page. Piscopo subsequently asked me if I would like to write a foreword to the new print collection, which I was delighted to do.

It took a little time to reach fruition, but The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli has finally been released as a 104 page trade paperback (“graphic novel” format) containing two Capt’n Eli stories and a “Golden Age” Commander X story, and is available through the Capt’n Eli site for $9.99, on the same ordering page with the company’s root beer and other sodas (read “pop” for those of you in the U.S. and Canadian midwest); along with other Capt’n Eli gear. You can also find it on Amazon.

The volume features a cover by comics artist Steve Rude, and pin-ups by Rude, Herb Trimpe and Howard Chaykin. You can see a few (unfortunately small) sample pages from one of the stories by selecting “The Story Begins” at the bottom of this page. You can also read the full first Capt’n Eli webisode, The Mystery of Me, and some earlier material in the Archives (though, again, the web versions are kind of small).

The Capt’n Eli site also has a gallery of pin-ups and a bio of artist Jay Piscopo, who has a background as an art director at Tom Snyder Productions producing educational CD_ROMs like Fizz and Martina Math Adventures, created the The Scrap City Pack Rats comic for Goodwill Industries, and was an animator for the ABC Saturday morning show Squigglevision. Piscopo teaches classes in cartooning at the Maine College of Art.

The second volume of The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli is slated for release in October of this year and should be available though the web site, Amazon and a number of comic book stores.

Oh, and the root beer’s pretty good too.

When I first wrote about Zuda Comics back in July, DC Comics’ venture into creating an online comics community and developing a commercial line from it was barely more than a web page and a promise.

In the intervening time, however, the promise has begun to fill out, and there is now a substantial presence, with some 20 or so webcomics running, and more competing for viewer votes to gain a slot in the roster.

Basically, anyone can submit a webcomic, registered site visitors can then vote on the comics. There is also a provision for leaving feedback on the postings of individual comics and a more general message board.

Those whose submissions are chosen to run as features are offered contracts for a certain period, over which they agree to produce a certain amount of material. Unlike a lot of webcomics, there is actual payment and the potential for royalties here, though not at the same scale as in traditional print comics lines.

I have to point out that I have not read their terms and agreements in detail, and those interested in submitting webcomics for consideration should, of course, carefully do so. There are three agreements listed in their FAQ, and submission instructions here. I would be particularly cautious in making sure you understand the rights being assigned and how that is applicable to your ownership of the material.

On the reading side, after more than 12 years(!) of crabbing about how monumentally clueless Marvel and DC have been about how comics can work on the web, I have to admit that Zuda, at least, is getting many things right.

First of all they seem to finally be aware that computer monitors are horizontal, not vertical like a comic book page, and have created a standard size horizontal format within which all of the comics are presented.

The way the comics are presented is also well beyond the usual clueless interface disasters the the big companies think are appropriate for presenting online comics (which are usually focused on preventing you from “stealing” the pages, and shoving ads in your face in the process).

The presentation of the Zuda webcomics is within a very nicely implemented Flash interface. (This is not a contradiction in terms as my previous rant may suggest, such things are actually possible!) I’m not sure who designed the interface, but someone who worked on it had a good grasp of interactive information design and it works very well.

You can advance through the pages of an individual comic with slide-show style arrow controls, supplemented with a pop-up bar of thumbnail images. The interface tells you what page you are on and indicates the total number of pages currently available for that comic. The entire navigation can be tucked away at will. The Flash module even remembers where you are in a story if you click away and return.

The comics can look slightly pixelated in the window at first. This is actually because they are being scaled down in Flash. The comics are posted in high-resolution and they can either be scaled with a zoom slider within the default window, or toggled to full screen mode. In full screen mode only the comic is visible against a black background, and even the navigation bar can be hidden, leaving just a full screen of high-resolution comic page. This is a wonderful feature and my hat’s off to the Zuda team for making this call and carrying it through with such aplomb.

Of the 20 or so comics currently available, there is some variety of subject, approach and level of ability. If you roll over the comic’s panel in the selection page you get a brief synopsis and creator credits, with more detail provided to the right on the comic’s dedicated page. I haven’t had a chance to read through all of them in detail but there are a couple of standouts.

Bayou (image above, top), written and illustrated by Jeremy Love and colored by Patrick Morgan, isn’t afraid to take on topics like depression-era race relations in the American South, mix them with actual character development and throw in characters from fiction like Br’er Rabbit. The story is well paced and nicely drawn, particularly in zoomed-in or full screen mode, where you can appreciate the use of coquille-board style crayon textures. As of this writing, Bayou is up to 47 pages and feels like it’s just gaining momentum.

High Moon (image above, bottom), written by David Gallaher, with art by Steve Ellis and lettering by Scott O Brown, is only up to 8 pages so it’s hard to judge the story, though it seems to suggest “High Plains Drifter Meets the Werewolf”, but the art by Ellis is just terrific. Again, use the zoom or full screen feature to see his expressive line work, shape-defining hatching, solid draftsmanship and emotionally effective use of color and texture.

These two alone are enough to keep me coming back to Zuda, but I have a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more from this fledgling online comics publisher, and I hope this turns out to be a successful paradigm for the presentation of new comics stories and fresh talents.

I have to admit that I’m becoming a little tired of movie CGI, particularly when used with motion capture to portray fake humans; so I haven’t bothered to see the Robert Zemeckis Hollywoodization of the classic Northern European epic poem Beowulf.

Apparently millions of people who just fine with movies full of fake actors, probably inured to the effect from watching hundreds of hours of low resolution fake people in video games, have made the movie a hit. Of course every action/adventure movie of a certain stripe and degree of success has to spawn a movie adaptation in comic book form, and Hollywood’s Beowulf is no exception. These are usually imbued with all of the imagination and visual excitement of the legal contract on which they’re based. I took a cursory glance at the one on the comic shop shelves last week and didn’t see anything to immediately change my mind.

I was reminded however, that I had seen a gripping, well drawn, imaginative and worthwhile retelling of the original Beowulf story in graphic novel form a few years ago (and regular readers will notice I’m using the term “graphic novel” here without my usual complaint about its common misuse).

Gareth Hinds is a gaming concept artist and comic book artist who I had the pleasure of meeting at a Small Press Expo in Maryland several years ago where I was promoting my own graphic story.

Hinds took on the Beowulf story before it was fashionable, and gave it his own unique touch. In addition to his personal vision of the tale (which is pretty quirky as mythical legend type stories go), Hinds took a unique graphic approach, dividing the story into three sections, and approaching each with a different style and set of materials.

For the first he worked in pen and brush and ink, then scanned the pages and colored them digitally. The second was drawn and painted on wood panels with technical pen, watercolor, acrylic and colored pencil. The third section, like the first, was drawn in pen, brush and ink, but then colored using Dr. Martins dyes (long a favorite for comic book coloring before the process moved to digital), with touches of white chalk. (Images at left, top to bottom, show a page from each section.)

The story was originally self-published in three volumes, which Hinds re-published in one volume as The Collected Beowulf. It was later republished by Candlewick Press as simply Beowulf. I’ve given Amazon links here, but you can also purchase either version directly from Hinds’ site (sorry, unintentional pun).

Hinds’ web site also showcases his latest, even more ambitious literary adaptation into graphic novel form, King Lear, in which he is again experimenting with materials and techniques. His Lear will be followed next Spring by The Merchant of Venice.

You can also find some of his shorter published comics as well as links to Deus Ex Machina, his experimental online comic. It was one of the early ones, appearing on the web in 1997. You can still read that story on the site in its entirety.

There is an interview with Hinds from Sequential Tart from 2000, in which he talks about the creation of his Beowulf graphic novel.

So if you want a graphic story version of the classic Beowulf tale that hasn’t been filtered through Hollywood’s hyperkinetic, star obsessed lens (a CGI generated Angelina Jolie as Grendel’s mother? Excuse me?), try Hinds’ unique and original vision.