Farsong Blog-o-Matic - Steampunk and Cats

Alpha-Shade

I should probably be scolded for not reading this comic before now, only reading through the archive for the first time yesterday. But while it is still fresh in my mind, I write:

Alpha-Shade is a flash-based comic, as in, the website and all its pages are kept in a flash-based archive, and the comic its self is made in Flash—though, oddly enough, the site won't run properly in Firefox on either of my Macs (Opera and Safari are fine). That's the first thing one notices when first coming to the page, and makes the drawings very smooth and crisp, though I notice the method used to achieve a focus blur is actually a slight ghosting of the image outlines, which happens to be exactly the way astigmatism works in my eye. Of course, there is also a low-bandwidth version of the comic, in the form of jpegs, but this detracts from one of the coolest things about the comic: the ability to zoom and look at small details of the pages.

And this is a very attractive thing because the art and the detail that is put into each panel almost begs the reader to examine the pages more closely. In many cases, there are details hidden in scattered pages and corners of rooms—details only testifying to the thoroughness of the artist.

This level of thoroughness is carried throughout the pages of Alpha-Shade, shown in the detail of the airships, weapons, and other vehicles, including the flyers—great blue birds-of-prey carrying agile riders; these happen to be my favourite. Every character is different and instantly recognisable, though the style of drawing makes the characters look rather young. The scenes that are created are fantastic, packed with steam-powered airships and all kinds of detailed weaponry creating a wonderful feeling of knowing and being part of the world. A steampunk world—initially what attracted me to the story.

But yet, this also seems to be one of Alpha-Shade's drawbacks—it seems to be continually focused on all these explosions, as if it is only retains excitement through these sorts of things. It feels as if the story is sometimes nothing but one unexplained explosion after another, and this detracts from the slower reasoning why and how.

And there is certainly a story there—one filled with war and secret alliances between empires, betrayal, robbery, explosions, and, if I had to guess, Zeppelins. And it's a hell of a story. There is only one problem: suspense. The entire first chapter definitely sets up the world, but it is seemingly left behind in the next two chapters, though many of the characters have somehow come from this steampunk world to the Earth as we know it. It builds suspense, yes, but this can be a problem, too—the comic is only up-dated once a week, and with as in-depth a story as this, the comic could go on for a long time, and there are a number of things that could be explained further, though this could potentially happen later in the story.

The biggest problem is that nothing feels resolved—it feels as if there have been big broad chapters setting things up, but each of these seems to leave a reader with more questions than answers—“What happened to that character?” “What is the reason for this event or character?” I do think that most of these will be answered in time, but it leads me to wonder whether a serialised format is the best for this story. Transmetropolitain by Warren Ellis was a somewhat-serialised comic, consisting of three chapters that were first released as issues, and then as individual volumes—somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten such volumes by the end of the series. Each set of three had its own mini-arcs that would be contained within each chapter, resolving at the end, but with arcs that would span all three chapters, finally being resolved at the end of the volume—a very clean format. I do wonder if Alpha-Shade could be better-served by a form like that, or whether it would work well in a large book made up of many chapters.


Of course, this is not to say that Alpha-Shade is bad, because it's not—it's excellent, and a great amount of work goes into each page. The art is crisp and clean and highly-detailed. The worlds that the story is set in are amazingly detailed, and filled with dry humour (such as a pizza parlour called “William Theodore Franklin Pizza” or “WTF” for short). the comic is filled with colour and great and original drawing, but I can't help but feel that the pacing is slightly off.

Alpha-Shade is a fun comic set partially in a steampunk universe with an interesting story—and it doesn't update nearly as often as I would like.