Thanks to Slave Labor for sending over review copies of their new digital-only comics. Whistles #1 by Andrew Hussie is currently available in CBZ or PDF format, while Byron #1 by Karl Christian Krumpholz is due shortly.

Whistles is described as “dark-and-funny” and “appeal[ing] to fans of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac”, so I suspected going in that it wasn’t for me. That impression was reinforced by my physical setup: I use a laptop, and the comic opens with blocks of (attractively) hand-lettered text blocks. I couldn’t both see the full page and read the narration at the same time.

The pages are dense with cartooning, and I was surprised to see that a digital comic was still in black-and-white. Seems to me that a story about clowns would be better suited by color. It might help distinguish the page elements more easily, too.

(Update: The publisher passes along the following information about the color question: “we’re going to be collecting Whistles into a trade eventually, and we won’t be able to do that in color, so we thought it best not to ask the artist to redo the art he already had finished in color. There would be the matter of him doing a lot of extra work, as well as the potential for people getting annoyed because the material in the trade is different from the digital issues.” That makes sense to me.)

Whistles Links:

• Preview
• Andrew Hussie’s website
• Press release

Byron is sparser, as suits its darker mood. It’s trying hard to be weird, but it’s less forcedly wacky. There are still various goth touchstones, though, like vampires and Siamese twins in a jar. It’s billed as a “sub-culture satire”. Here’s more PR description:

Byron is living the unfortunate life of a poseur. But lurking in the night are real dark creatures, monsters who don’t care who is club royalty and who is a poseur. They give Byron a great deal of attention, but it’s not exactly the kind he’s been wanting. When he’s confronted with drugs, vampires, conspiracy, unnamed horrors, a three-eyed toad, and a two-headed pickled punk named “H.P.,” will Byron run in terror or will he embrace the monsters as he has always claimed to embrace what is dark and frightening?

Byron: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, the new SLG Publishing comics series by Karl Christian Krumpholz, tells a story of growing up, discovering who you are, and learning just how foolish it is to glamorize dark things that very well might be real. “I wanted to do a story where you take this sort of self-obsessed character, put him through the ringer, and see how he comes out,” said Krumpholz. “He discovers that nothing is what it seems and that new rules apply. I wanted Byron to grow up and accept responsibility for his actions and the world around him.”

The description sounded better to me than the execution, but I liked the character designs. Judge for yourself: you can read sample pages here.

Additional Byron Links:

• Preview
• Press release