Who's Who in the CBU 2008

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

Reynard City

By Regie Rigby

Look at it this way – I’m late again, but not very late. And the good news is that I now have may home internet connection up and running again! Yay for Orange Broadband!

Not that any of that matters to you of course, and why should it?

Now, I know I’m supposed to be talking about 2000AD this week, and I will, honest – it’s on my list for next time – but it’s been brought to my attention that there’s one outstanding find from Bristol that I still haven’t talked about. Given that Bristol was now more than ten weeks ago, I figure I ought to deal with that before I do anything else – don’t you?

So, my foolish friends, let me take you to a place unlike anywhere you’ve ever been.

Let me take you to Reynard City.

It’s an interesting place. There are no humans there, it’s a world populated by humanoid animals. And it’s a world under threat. A world being invaded by, well, by robot humanoid animals.

And now I know what you’re thinking. Well, think again.

Oh, I admit that superficially it sounds like a million other “world under threat from alien menace” SciFi schlock fests. But the key word there is “superficially”, and you know what? I know there’s nothing superficial about the people who read this column. So let’s look a little deeper, shall we?

At heart, this is a great anthropomorphic romp. A small core cast of characters finds itself pitched against impossible odds as literally thousands of marauding robots invade, led by the evil Mega Fox, described by his creator Will Turner as “a real super villain: the brains of Lex Luthor combined with the power of Doomsday (with the ego of Dr Doom, expanded because as a robot he's convinced he's perfect!)”.

And that’s just issue one.

Because when I bought Reynard City at Bristol, I didn’t just get one or two issues. Oh no. In the traditional sense I didn’t get any issues at all. What I got was a nicely packaged CD-ROM containing no less than seven issues in .pdf format, and a collection of related prose stories and images.

All this for a fiver.

So, it’s inexpensive – but is it good value? After all, if the content is cack, it really doesn’t matter how much of it you get.

Well, I can honestly day I thought it was hellishly good fun. Will Turner paces the story well, opening with our heroes surrounded by the invading hordes and preparing to make their last stand. As they charged into the wall of invaders I was hooked, before we flashed back to a peaceful meadow two hours earlier as two of our core ensemble change the pace by getting romantic.

And I though two hours?!

They’ve gone from peaceful pastoral scenes to the edge of a final battle in two hours?

Wow.

Now that’s pace.

I rather liked the way the characters were introduced in this way – the action packed opening pages give the reader a chance to see them in a heroic pose, but the immediate switch to a more peaceful situation allows Turner to show that they are fully rounded individuals.

Not that he gives too much away in the first issue. There’s a foxy young couple (I mean this literally) called Sally and Guillermo, a boisterous woman called “Vibes” who clearly likes to fight and has a truly bizarre allergy to caramel. Then there’s Rote, a scruffy trench coated bloke who describes himself as Vibes’ mechanic. Oh, and lurking somewhere in the background there’s “The Chief”, who in those opening pages sends Vibes off on a mission that she may or may not fail.

And that’s all in the first fourteen pages of issue #1.

There’s a lot going on here, and like I said, it’s all tremendous fun. As the story develops (and it develops well) we learn more about the characters – both good and evil – the true nature of Vibes’ allergy, and a whole load of other stuff. I really loved this story, and I’m very much looking forward to volume two, which I’m told should be available by Christmas.

As you read through the seven issues on the disc, the influences become clear. Turner was clearly a big fan of 90's cartoons. You can see that he must have watched an awful lot of the Ninja Turtles, the X-Men, Sonic The Hedgehog and the like. Mind you, didn’t we all? I rather enjoyed the references, and I also saw elements of my seventies and eighties favourites in there too. The “Chief” in the background reminded me very much of “Security Chief Anderson” from Battle of the planets, while the anthropomorphic nature of the characters put me in mind of Thundercats too. And how can that be a bad thing?

There’s a rather nice tip of the hat to the Asterix books too. The name of Doctor Antibiotix raised a more than fond smile. Indeed, although the stories are utterly unrelated I also couldn’t help wondering whether the creative team had ever read Hepcats. There seems to be a deliberate attempt to take the anthropomorphism away from the cartoony styles of the likes of Stan Saki and into the more self-consciously realistic “they’re people with animal heads – get over it” stance that I remember so strongly from Martin Wagner’s classic series.

Whatever happened to that anyway? I’m fairly sure there were still some loose ends to be tied up.

If I have a criticism to make, it’s the art, which I found to be jarringly inconsistent. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, it just varies a whole lot. Reynard City is a collaborative project, with different artists working on different issues. They are all good in different ways – and perhaps if the issues were being released in a more conventional way it would be less noticeable. If I were picking up a book a month (or, even less frequently giving the scheduling restrictions faced by most micro publishers) the look of the first book wouldn’t have been so fresh in my mind as I opened the second.

As it was, I actually had seven .pdf files open on my screen at once and was free to flick between them, which made the profound differences in art style contrast even more. It is though a small thing when placed against the sheer audacity and scope of the whole project.

For a start, it’s good to see people playing with new technology in an interesting way – so-called “new media” offers a number of opportunities and far too few people have explored them. Originally the issues were presented as single downloads for £1.60 each. This approach was slow to take off, probably because of the huge quantity of free content on the web – it certainly wouldn’t be the first pay-per-download .pdf publication to struggle like that. CD collections met with more success, and I can see why. A CD allows readers to own something physical, something to put on a shelf.

The electronic format still allows the creative team bit of freedom though. While I still express my luddite’s preference for comics on paper Turner was keen to tell me that “we can put things on the CD you can't put on a comic (for example, if we can get enough sales, we will be able to put a game in one of the next volumes)”.

Now we’re talking!

Reynard City is an exciting project on so many levels. A good story, a variety of art styles (if you don’t like it, come back next issue and it’ll be different) and a real determination to play around with as many of the possibilities presented by technology as possible.

I loved it.

You will too.