Axe Cop
What Are You Reading?
Hellblazer: India
Hello and welcome once again to What Are You Reading?, where the Robot 6 crew talk about the comics and graphic novels that they’ve been enjoying lately. Today our special guest is Bill Reed, who contributes to our sister blog Comics Should Be Good!. To see what Bill and the Robot 6 crew have been reading, click the link below.
Robot 666 | Axe Cop takes a swing at Halloween
from Axe Cop: The Night Monster
It was not even nine months ago that a brand-new webcomic called Axe Cop went viral within days of its creation, thanks in large part to its irresistible high-concept creative team: 29-year-old cartoonist Ethan Nicolle drawing the crazy action-adventure ideas of his 5-year-old kid brother Malachai. But I recently had occasion to read the entire strip in one sitting in preparation for a freelance assignment, and I was struck by how well the thing holds up long after you’ve gotten over the “haha that’s a great idea”-ness of it all. Nicolle the Elder’s art is uniformly kinetic, cartoony, and lovely, while Nicolle the Younger is obviously years away from running out of ideas for Axe Cop and his crew of very weird superheroes (or hitting middle school, for that matter). No wonder Dark Horse is releasing a collected edition this Christmas.
Anyway, the strip is still going strong, and this week it’s tipping its cop hat to All Hallow’s Eve with “The Night Monster”, a four-part saga of creatures who live in outer space in hopes of catching “space babies.” Yeah, it’s already wonderful, isn’t it? Check it out, and be sure to tune in for the remaining installments!
Comics A.M. | The comics Internet in two minutes
Rocketship
Retailing | Heidi MacDonald confirms rumors that well-regarded Brooklyn retailer Rocketship, the setting for numerous signings, release parties and art shows, has closed after five years. “We’ve come to the end of a five-year lease, and are deciding what to do now,” said co-owner Alex Cox. “Five years went by fast, and my partner and I are suddenly making some large life decisions about what comes next. We love the shop, and as fun as it is, we have to figure out what makes sense for us on a practical level.” [The Beat]
Pop culture | KRCW-Santa Monica (89.9 FM) will rebroadcast the 1991 radio production of American Splendor, starring Dan Castellaneta, from 7:30 to 8 p.m. PST today. This broadcast will appear on air and via KCRW.com live stream only, and will not be available on demand or via podcast. [KCRW.com]
Legal | The Wall Street Journal’s Tomomichi Amano looks at efforts by a newly formed coalition of Japanese and American manga publishers to crack down on U.S.-based scanlation websites. “People might say it’s like whack-a-mole,” says Vertical Inc.’s Ioannis Mentzas, “but we think even making one (legal) case will greatly change the situation.” [Japan Real Time]
What Are You Reading?
Fantastic Four
Welcome once again to What Are You Reading? This week our special guest is Justin Aclin, editor of ToyFare magazine and writer of Hero House and S.H.O.O.T. First, which you can read on MySpace Dark Horse Presents. To see what Justin and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below …
‘My five-year-old could write that!’: Bow before the blade of Axe Cop
Malachai and Ethan Nicolle's Axe Cop
Twitter has given us some good things — breaking news from Iran, Tom Brevoort — and some bad things — celebrity death hoaxes, #nowthatsghetto. Yesterday, it served as the social-media equivalent of Paul Revere, spreading word of a new webcomic called Axe Cop to every nerd and geek village and farm.
What’s so special about Axe Cop, you ask? Well, it’s an action-adventure series about a superheroic cop armed with an axe, joined by his partner, a half-man/half-avocado who used to be a half-man/half-dinosaur who used to be a cop who used a flute for a weapon. It’s illustrated by Ethan Nicolle, the Eisner-nominated writer-artist of SLG’s Chumble Spuzz.
And oh, yeah, it’s written by Nicolle’s five-year-old kid brother Malachai.
One look at its genuinely childlike imagination, action and sense of humor — my favorite bit is when a guitar-wielding supervillain called Bad Santa is defeated when another character gains his powers and becomes Good Bad Santa — seems to have been all it took for the twitterati to get hooked, no doubt recalling all their own afternoons spent making up stories and playing hero in backyards and basements. Indeed, the site has been fairly groaning under the collective interest of the Internet; it was completely down last night, and the strip’s image loading has slowed to a crawl as of this writing.
The elder Nicolle has been blogging about the strip’s literally overnight, Twitter-driven success, providing a unique in-the-moment document of a webcomic “making it.” (I did my part by reviewing it on my other blog.) Hopefully he’ll be able to shore up the infrastructure so that you too can thrill to the adventures of the coolest mustachioed hero since pre-goatee Tony Stark.