Saturday Night Showcase: Silver and the Periodic Elements

Tonight I bring you the first non-video edition of SNS, because they’re easy and match the “show only the good stuff that’s online” mission of my Saturday post. What we have in this installment is a web comic that you can also order offline. It’s a fun concept, and hopefully a good influence on my future endeavors. So let’s take a look at Make Like a Tree Comic’s Silver and the Periodic Elements #1.

click to read the comic yourself

"Here I come to save the daaaaaaay"

Silver and the Periodic Elements (which I’ll shorten to Silver to save my keyboard some work) is the tale of the last survivor of planet Monoawari, devastated by the Cadre Catastrophe. To what ends? Who knows. Jerzy Drozd and Sara Turner based their series on Saturday Morning cartoons of ye olden days, when all you needed were the heroes and the bad guys. Yet, they add the “Periodic Elements”, living embodiments of their namesake, which Silver can summon with his magic glove. These Elemental Warriors then back up Silver in his battles with the Cadre members, led by the brain-like Birgil. Silver is the usual “alien out of his element (no pun intended) on planet Earth” type hero. Apparent from the intros is his silvery skin is the result of the source of his other powers, since he has green skin at first.

OK, technically, it's more like a May-August romance, but still...

Joining Silver on his mission to protect Earth (and possibly avenge his kinsmen) is the Earth Protection Force, one of those “sprung up to battle the new threat” type of groups that don’t appear to answer to any one country. His attache of sorts is Maggie, a young member who has a habit of ignoring the rules in order to save the day, which can often get her into trouble, and not just with the brass that keeps demoting her. She maintains a friendship with Lao, one of the trainers. There is also a few romatical stirrings between the two, sort of a kid-friendly version of the tension between Fox and Mulder in The X-Files. I’m a little creeped out by that, since if Lao was one of Maggie’s trainers, he must be more than a bit older than she is.

Did I say Fox and Mulder? More like Sam and Diane. Only this time the guy is Diane.

However, the two do demonstrate two extremes; the by-the-book Lao and the I’m-waiting-for-the-movie Maggie. This is a concept that has one way to work right (as it does here) and two ways to fail miserably. The right way demonstrates that rules exist for a reason, but being to strictly tied to them can do more harm than good. The first wrong way is when the rules-follower is always right, and the “hotshot” is always wrong. This tends to come off like the Buddy Bears of the Garfield and Friends cartoon. Rules are important, but sometimes the rulebook can’t account for certain situations that requires thinking outside the box. On the other hand, you have the character who is always ignoring the rules and is always right because the writer wants to make him the big bad ass on the block and probably gives his own “salute” to any rules. That’s my biggest issue with Simon Furman’s Grimlock in the Transformers comics. No matter how often he screws up, eventually he’s always right and gets rewarded for doing the wrong thing.

Silver needs to talk to his elements about sexual harassment in the workplace.

I appear to be thinking too much into this story, but that’s what a review, and Saturday Night Showcase in particular (when I’m not tired while writing it), does. There’s not a lot of “fleshing out” of the characters, but there doesn’t have to be. It’s just meant to be a fun story, and there is a sense of continuity between issues 1 and 2. The bad guy in issue #1 is a former barkeeper who got tired of his job so he decided to join the big bads in smashing stuff. However, the Periodic Element characters in Silver are given a lot more character for a bunch of summoned sidekicks. The elements used in issue 1, Osmium, Molybdenum, and Nitrogen, are each given genders and personalities, much like DC’s Metal Men, but the latter are regular characters. The Elements are (thus far, as there are only two issues produced) one-shoters, but are still full characters in their own right. Not being much of a science geek, I’m not going to sit here and debate the characterizations (especially of two elements I hadn’t heard of prior to this comic–I didn’t study my periodic table as a kid), but if the science is close enough to right, this might actually work as a network cartoon, as the networks (or the third-parties responsible for Saturday Morning programming now that the networks themselves have otherwise flaked out) have been pressured to make kid shows “educational”. The fun of the cartoons of my youth (rose-colored glasses notwithstanding) seem to be sacrificed, but here is a blueprint for properly combining both into a worthwhile series, and you can still fit in your “moral lesson of the day” if you really need to.

They're not as good now that they use that "new math" recipe.

If I were to have any complaint about the series, it’s in one piece of presentation. I have no problem with the Saturday Morning influence–love it, in fact–and the fake ads (and a couple real ones in issue #2) aren’t bad, either. However, what is with the commercial bumpers? Sure they look like something out of a syndicated cartoon (remember those?), but this is a comic book (and not just a virtual one, as these are available from their web store), and commercial bumpers break the flow. Personally, and I’m not telling Drozd or Tuner how to make their own comic, since I do like it, I would have gone more towards looking like an adaptation or spin-off of the cartoon, like the comic version of  Batman: The Brave and the Bold. (Note that DC and Marvel’s “animated” comics have a nasty habit of playing it too close to the mainline universe, but the art in a DC “Adventures” title does go for the visual likeness to match the cartoon.) Keep the ads, but save the bumper art for a pin-up at the end or something. Also, I’m curious how the intro works with the printed version of the comic, since the online version of both issues has the intro coming just before the cover.

Mother Brain's cousin has her own career.

As a bonus touch to the cartoon feel, Elliot Drozd (I don’t know how he’s related to Jerzy, but Drozd isn’t exactly a common name, so I assume family ties somewhere) actually made a theme song for the series. I like it, and I can hear a narrator reading the intro over it.

On a final note, Jerzy Drozd and his other partner in crime, Mark Rudolph, host their own podcast called Art and Story, with a live version done on Monday nights along with fellow artist Krishna Sadasivam. I plan to give more lip service to it in a future Internet Spotlight when time allows. (I still have a bunch of episodes to catch up on.) For any comic writer/artist, new or old, it’s an interesting look at making comics today, and I highly recommend it.

Actually, we got cancelled mid-episode so the Care Bear Cousins can have their own series. 😦