The FenReview
Fabricari: Ad Hoc
(21 Jul 2008)
This is a good book to own because not only is it a decent read, but Adam White wrote in the introduction about his experience in writing for the story.
Apparently Fabricari has some history before the book, where-in Steven Harrison made several attempts at comicking before. Finally, he started what you see in this book as a webcomic released one panel at a time. And when it looked like he might keep going for a while, White started pitching in, writing one panel at a time one day before it was due. And they finished the story that way!
I think Harrison has his roots in comic books, which is probably why he opted to publish this collection as a book. It doesn't take much to get a comic author to bind his work, but Harrison apparently didn't just use Lulu.com and let people order it. From what I can tell, he published it under the business name Studio Fabricari. In fact, the project is old enough that it has already been reviewed and critiqued at least by a couple others. It was just this last year that, while moving on to his new projects, Harrison got rid of the last few copies of Ad Hoc (I got one more for myself). I don't know if White has any more, because I'm not following his blog, but chances are that if you want one of these books you'll have to get it used.
On the other hand, you can read it all online still, starting here:
http://www.fabricari.com/comics/fabricari-ad-hoc/
You just won't get the authors' comments with it that way. But I suppose you could subscribe to Harrison's blog! He's got some good stuff going on there (it's on the home page for fabricari.com).
But, oh wait! You can order it from Lulu.com:
http://www.lulu.com/browse/preview.php?fCID=676521
Seriously. It's just $10. For a trade paperback of that thickness, that's a steal. (If you buy that with, say, the whole Harmless Free Radicals collection, or even better, all the other books I'm reviewing, you could really save on shipping too.)
At 3/8ths of an inch thick, you can read the book in one sitting but you won't be doomed to, there's enough there for you to keep coming back to it. It sits well on the bookshelf and you can recognize the spine from a reasonable distance. I really like the coloring on the cover art. It even got a credit. Cat Garza did it. He deserves the recognition. (Harrison says Cat is a fantastic webcomic author who's work can be found at http://www.magicinkwell.com/)
And like pretty much all of the other comics I'm critiquing, this is one of those books where the artwork improves over the course of it. While it's the sure sign of an amateur production, in a way, it is also one of the most fun and interesting aspects of self-published comics. It is a record of an artist's improvement, and proof that he can keep learning new tricks! And rough art in the beginning isn't always bad. Often times it has more life and energy than comics produced by most professional teams. I'd argue that this is the case with Fabricari. I still enjoy flipping through the book after nearly a year of owning it.
The lettering is also worth studying, because it looks good both in print and on-line, something that not all webcomic author's have dialed in yet.
The top, bottom and outside margins of the pages are beautiful, but if there is one important criticism I might have for the construction of the book, it would be the inside gutter. The artwork disappears into the spine of the book, and it clearly wasn't meant to. So, if it gets reprinted, that should be fixed.
I do think that some of the story telling and pacing in the beginning does suffer a bit because of the way the comic was produced and written. There are a couple of spots that I had to read twice to understand just what happened, but once I got past those, it flowed very quickly. I had planned to read it in chunks, coming back to it the next day, but it didn't happen that way and my legs fell asleep because of where I was sitting while reading it. This is not a bad thing, in my opinion.
I really like the characters and the setting. And the story's form seems to follow them, rather than the other way around, which maybe helps to make the fantastic setting seem incidental. It doesn't really need to be explained in the beginning, as the action takes you from the first page through all the explanation you'll need by the end. And, as a reader, I'd like to visit these characters again some day. But it looks like Harrison and White have moved on to many other things (which is also good).
For something that was put together on the fly, Fabricari: Ad Hoc is rather complete!
Anyway, the story is about a guy that can make things, and the kind of trouble that gets him into. If you enjoy settings like Battle Angel Alita, Car Wars or other dark futures, you'll probably have a soft spot in your heart for this story like I do. And if you're into self publishing, you should give it a good solid glance, as you can learn just a bit more from it.
And again, Harrison's blog archives have some insightful remarks on the whole project. He also plays banjo!
All in all, a solid book. I look forward to the future works of Harrison and White respectively.
www.fabricari.com
Posted by Fenmere
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