Monday, April 15, 2013

Review (and Interview and Mention) All Monsters



Hartley Holmberg from Vancouver's The Hartley Show attended Vancouver Comicon and spent a lot of time with Jason talking about Kill All Monsters. It's a fun interview and Hartley seems to have liked the book.

A bunch of other reviews have been coming in too. My pal Ken hadn't read the entire first volume yet when he wrote this post for That F'ing Monkey about KAM's being in Previews, but he's one of our biggest supporters and says about the part that's appeared online: "The story is full of that fun team dynamic. For some reason it reminds me of the adventure groups in a good table top RPG. [...] Jason Copland’s art is beyond words. The organic design of the beasts is offset by the mechanical battle suits. His line work is so clean and precise that you’ll spend time just taking in all the details."

Kris at Deeply Dapper also likes the book and calls it "only the bestest comic book ever."

CT at Nerd Lunch has a super-nice review and writes, "While May has done a great job at setting that scope, fleshing out the characters, and delivering the dialog, Copland balances that with dynamic, two-tone art. It's got a grittiness to it that is needed, but still clean enough to be able to tell what's going on. The action scenes come across well and Copland is able to display the weight needed to show these are behemoths battling over the city." He also draws a comparison to Thundarr the Barbarian, an influence I hadn't consciously been thinking about, but absolutely affects the world. I loved that show so much as a kid and recently revisited it with my son, so there's no doubt that that's in there from a world-building perspective.

Comic Bastards has a nice, thoughtful review that's complimentary while not completely so (which is perfectly fair). Some of the fights ran a little long for their taste and I get the feeling they would have liked some added emphasis on the monsters, but they seem to like the human characters and the robots and the way that the Kill Team's machinery isn't perfect. And of course the art. Overall, it's a very positive review and I'm thrilled to get it. I do want to respond to the criticisms - not to defend against them, but just because acknowledging them in more detail will help solidify some of the lessons I learned from writing KAM - but this post is already long enough, so I'll do that later.

And finally (for now), the Great and Powerful Cal at the Canadian Cave of Cool wrote a fantastic review that proves he and I were separated at birth by praising the things I'm most proud of about the story. He loves the art too of course, but it thrills my heart to read his appreciation of the world-building, the mystery, and how the story doesn't explain every single thing.

While it's not technically a review, SF Signal was nice enough to mention the Kill All Monsters Kickstarter in their Crowd Funding Roundup and call KAM a "kickass webcomic." Ken also wrote another wonderful post about the Kickstarter for That F'ing Monkey.

As I'm writing this, the current Kickstarter total is a little over $5500, due to folks helping to spread the word like that. I'm in shock, to be perfectly honest. Thank you again so much to all of you who've shown support either through pledges or just by telling people. Jason and I are amazed and humbled.

And thank you to all the folks above who reviewed the book. I know of at least a couple of more reviews that will be going up this week, so I'll keep doing these roundup posts as long as people are willing to write about the book.

One last bit of KAM-related information: I noticed that the UK comics retailer Forbidden Planet has Kill All Monsters available for online order. I have no idea what that means exactly for our order numbers, but it's a great sign.

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