Originally posted on Irish Comic News (5/Sept/2017)
Written by Dave Hendrick.
Line art by Pete Marry.
Colour art by Dee Cunniffe.For those of you unfamiliar with the Fortnight Comics Project (shame on you!), the concept is to release a ‘done in one’ comic every fortnight. The comic is posted on Twitter and the Fortnight Comics Project website for anyone with an internet connection to read for free.
The Fortnight crew recently released the first collection of comics at Dublin Comic Con. A comic that the team were kind enough to send a copy of to yours truly. As the comics are ongoing on the internet it’s always tricky to know at what point to do a review but the release of a collection makes it a no-brainer.
Generally when people are making a start on comic making, be it writing or drawing, a common suggestion is to do a four page comic to get you started. It shows you can finish something and that you can tell a story.
Hendrick, Marry and Cunniffe seem to like things a bit more challenging and have opted for a series of single page comics. That’s right, single pages. Then you’ve the additional challenge of not getting repetitive due to the nature of comic being produced.
The writing in the collection is lean, as it needs to be since Hendrick is writing one-page comics. The comics vary in dialogue/captions from the wordier comics like ‘Support’, ‘Taste’ and ‘The Fill In’ to the minimal text comics like ‘Jonny’s Last Laugh’. The comics all tell a complete story in a single page and almost none of them end how you’d expect based on the opening panel. One of the best examples of this is ‘To Serve & Perfect’. It’s a really creative one-pager in terms of story and panel layouts.
Just like the writing, the art needs to be on point to make a one-pager work. Marry makes some great choices with layouts such as the already mentioned ‘To Serve & Perfect’. The comics have a range of genres such as horror, sci-fi and comedy. It doesn’t matter if it’s regular folks, ghosts, ghouls, aliens or monsters, Marry is able to handle them all. He delivers exactly what each story calls for. And the art itself has a great standard that is delivered consistently across the one-pagers.
With the variety of stories contained in the collection, the project needs someone that knows what they’re about on colours. Completing the Fortnight trio is Cunniffe, who much like Marry makes some really nice artistic choices over the series. I particularly liked the juxtaposition of ‘Those Who Can’t’ (with a red colour palette) and ‘…’ (which uses only blue) which sit opposite each other in the collection. The two comics stand out due to the other having a contrasting colour scheme. Equally, there’s great colour work in ‘Trolled’ where you can see the light from the computer screen reflecting onto the main character.
The Fortnight Comics Project is a series of really high standard one-page comics released every fortnight available to read read for free online. That it is so readily available to everyone means there really is no excuse to not be reading this series. Click the links and get to reading already!
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