What Did I Learn?

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Lullaby "Wisdom Seeker"

Created and art by Hector Sevilla, written by Mike S. Miller and ben Avery, colors by Simon Bork, David Curiel and Ulises Arreloa, lettered by Bill Tortolini

Lullaby is this delicious mix of fairy tales and literary sources with an edge. The characters are familiar yet have some twists to them, as you can see from the picture. Alice, Jim Hawkins and Pinnochio are not what you'd expect, are they? The art is perfectly suited to the subject matter, too.

I don't want to give the first storyline away - Alice describes how she came to be in this place and what has happpened to her. I haven't yet read on to see what happens in the rest of the series yet. I wanted to see how my thoughts changed from these first impressions compared to the whole work.

Using the basis of fairy tales, your expectations are trained by sheer repetition of all those images in children's books. Alice should be this look like a little blond girl and be very meek in stance. Don't mess with this Alice. She's got a little attitude. All the other characters, while familiar, are very different from your trained expectation.

Lullaby is the kind of story we wish we had written. In addition to the creative visual twist, there are little storytelling techniques used that play to the themes of living in a fantasy, fairy tale world. If you've ever read Grimm's Fairy Tales, you already realize that those tales had consequences. Rapunzel was not rescued, for instance. There's a certain logic to them that the characters had to adhere to. You can't ignore the witch's prattling - that's what we would do in that situation. Lullaby, in this first comic, respects that sort of tradition.

What did I learn?
There's always a new take on old stories while still staying true to them. You can download your own pdf copies of Lullaby from here and the creators get paid for it, ot you can see Lullaby online right here.

Previous Reviews

Battlegate| Butterfly| Good Ship Chronicles| Evil, Inc.| Madscott| Jefbot| Chronicle| Sheldon| Stardrop| Theater Hopper| Knave| Lullaby| High Moon| Metadawn| Dead Days| PC Weenies| Ask Maridee | Tiny Folk | Gordian Algebra | Starslip Crisis | The Front | Coffee Time Comics | Patches | Little Creature | The Horrible Pirates | Serenity Tales | Crashlander | Girl Genius | This Is Me | Handle With Care | SuperFogeys | Copper | Eskimo Dave | Real Life | Chateau Wonderful | Count Your Sheep | Breakpoint City | Eeekeemo | Boxcar Astronaut | Zip and Li'l Bit | Wally & Osborne | Jump Leads | Dr. Sheep and the Aardvark | Station V3 | Dresden Codak | Lab Ratz | Toyzville | The Boids | Cow and Buffalo | Casey and Scotty | Just Outside | The Pretentious History of Everything | Tia's World | Quirks | Patrick Grey | For What It's Worth | The Sixth Dimension | Max and the Gorilla Goon Squad | Rainbow Orchid | Neko and Neko | Lions, Tigers and Bears | Spacequint | Lessons In Fire Safety | Corrupt Hardware | Enker's Tale | The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo | A Rusty Life | You'll Have That | From the Margin | Jitterati

About These Reviews

I love comics and I'm always looking at how I can improve my own work by examining other creators' works. It's such a wildly diverse field that it's not advisable to make sweeping generalizations and ignore special circumstances and subjects.

There's a lot we can learn from one another. And while there are many forums where you might discuss this, I haven't found any lengthy discussion on what we can do to make our comics more successful. There are a few good books on the subject but the aspiring webcomic creator is forced to learn by sheer brute force practice how to adapt his/her personal style to the medium. This is not as efficient as it could be.

Also, there are literally thousands of webcomics but only a handful of places where you can find decent, regular reviews. The focus of my reviews will be on trying to determine what is positive, successful and worth emulating about each comic. You might even get hooked on a given comic you read about here.

You may also wonder where the 'criticism' is and where the negative things about the comics are pointed out. As a matter of fact, I did mention some dissappointing issues with layout and such in my initial reviews. I quickly came to the realization that it's easy for any viewer to know what they like and what they don't. I don't need to call extra attention to the negative. I have, on a few occasions, emailed a webcomic author with a few ideas for improvements but there's no need to make that information public.

I'm not trying to sugarcoat anything, mind you. I just wish to have an open discussion about what good comics do. Hopefully, more voices will join in.