Review: The Clock Maker

Heyo readers, Cody here with a Quick review on a comic called "The Clock Maker" written by Jim Kruger and art by Matt smith, Zach Howard, Michael Halbleib, Brett Weldele, and Guy Davis. Holy crap, that's a lot of people for one comic book. Oh wait, there are more people that didn't matter enough to make the cover so I won't bother with the rest.



The first thing I'll point out is how freaking amazed I was when I pulled this comic from its plastic sleeve. It looks like a rather thick comic and if you flip the comic over it says on the back "The clock maker #2" meaning this is a double issue. Alright, so I opening and Whoa, wait, what the hell? The comic unfolds into a huge comic book and is read more like a newspaper. Also to my surprise is that the duel issue is only a single issue. So why put "The Clock Maker #2" on the backside? I don't know. I guess it was just a really bad add.

Ok, so "The Clock Maker" is about a old man and his son that work on a giant clock hidden within a hollow mountain in Switzerland. But when something goes wrong and the clock (or something) lets a demon break free from hell, it hunts down dear old dad and murders both father and son.

The story picks up with his daughter, a late teens girl that was forced to live in America for most of her life due to her father and mother shipping her to her foster parents for some reason. Well she has to go back to Switzerland and bury her brother and father while confronting her mother who happens to be senile.

Once arrived in her homeland she is taken to the hidden clockwork in the mountain's. She is stunned to learn that she has become the new owner of this badass cog system of mass portal-opening-demon-releasing-clock.

With the story out of the way I must say, what the fuck went wrong? It's like Krueger just said to his group of artists, "Hey um, guys? I kinda ran out of toilet paper in the bathroom and all I had with me was the script for the book. So, your going to have to work around the brown stuff. Oh and we are missing page 4."

This may sound sorta dumb and harsh but if you read this comic you'd know what I'm saying. It seems like while he was writing he just said "Screw it" to all writing skills and just played Pac-Man instead. There are a number of times where the people are talking and then just go stupid for a sentence. Like here is a exact speech bubble for when she gets off the plane and sees her mom and some guy taking care of her. "I do not approve of your... what I'm saying is that your... is not appropriate for..." and then he walks away. At one point I thought to myself oh well maybe the writer was from Germany or was trying to go for a Swedish accent on the characters. But a little reading on wiki showed me that this was a Image comic written and inked in America.

Now, the comic can be understood and can be read through just fine, after you read it twice, but who wants to do that? Also the death of the father and son are just out of place. Like one second his father and him are running from the demon and then the father says go on without me and then teases the demon to get him to chase him instead of his son. But in the next panel the son runs and then finds puddles of blood leading to his dad, Um what? His father ran off in the other direction, but I guess it don't matter up is down and down is up. The son dies after he finds his dad, just in case you wanted to know.

Art:

The art in the comic is sorta like the Hellboy style, sort of a chalking inking with faded colors making it light on the eyes and good for setting a dark mood but this comic fails to grab you in any style convincing ways and just falls short, the only the that I liked about the art was the comic itself, and I don't mean the ink I am talking about the shape of the comic (as described at the start of the review).

Writing:

The writing is poor due to it being slight hard to understand whats being said why people talk in stupid ways at times and fail really hard on telling us who everyone is. I don't have any idea who the guy helping her out and showing her the clock even is. Just confusing.

Story:

The story makes barely any logic at all and tosses names of people out into the air left and right yet are never spoken of again. Just like Lost we get a ton of questions and barely any answers.

See now I wanted to like this comic a ton, I loved how it flips open into a newspaper style and is like a giant comic book, though it did make it hard to hold and hard to flip pages without the staples overlapping and creasing the pages slightly. I wanted to recommend it so bad but I can't this comic was ruined from the start, it is interesting and I would like to finish the series but due to how strange it was and the newspaper style the comic failed to sell to the normally comic book fans and doomed the comic before the final third issue was finished and put out, so even if you bought it and enjoyed it, you'll never get the ending you want to see. Like Lost.

I give The Clock Maker a sad 2 out 5

Cody~Out.

CRASHED/HAUNT comic review.

Heyo fellow readers! Cody here with three(ish) comic book reviews and some information on why my Christmas animation "Coup's Christmas" will never be appearing upon your frail flickering pc monitors.

I'll get the bad taste out of my mouth now. So the day before my deadline on the animation, I had stopped to take a rest from the animation, I had just finished 11 shots and rendered 5 shots. I was more than half way done while I was updating my information about this to a new Gofio post. Then a pop up flew on to my screen alerting me I had a virus, another came up and before I knew it my virus detector fell for a trap and let a virus right into my pc cutting my animation into a untellable story and my pc into pure trash.

"Coup's Christmas" was all lost in the crash 'cept a mere 5 shots I have rendered on my Mac and a bad voice over of me telling the story. Who knows maybe I'll go all out next year and do what I really wanted to do, make a bundle of render shots and print them into gloss paper and make a hard cover children's book for my family. Maybe I could get it published as well. Funny thought to me.

Now the Comic I'll be reviewing today is called "HAUNT" by Robert Kirkman and Todd McFARLANE

Now I'll be perfectly honest with ya, first thing I thought of when I saw this cover was two things 1: Venom? and 2: Cookies and milk candy bar. You might not get that same feeling from looking at the picture I'm posting with this for a simple reason, the copy I own is a third printing but the one you see is a special edition, though both are black and white, the one I own has shadows on it that give it a, blending kinda look.

Ok on with the review!

Is it just me, or have most new comics been trying to juggle to many characters and story lines at once? So in the first pages we join Kurt, speaking to a priest in a confessions booth about how he killed people due to it being his job as a special forces officer. we see him break into a compound and try to rescue a scientist and his subject so that he may help find a cure for a strange mutation. When Kurt and the scientist find his mutated living subjects, Kurt pops a bullet into the scientist's skull, then proceeds to help free/save the infected people. I'm am unsure of why he killed the scientist, I assume he was making the people worse? Okay so we fellow Kurt as he leaves the booth and has a conversation with his younger, wait no, older, uh, well his brother who looks younger but seems to be older, shit I'm confused.

He has a conversation with his brother(Daniel) who happens to be the priest who takes the confessions of murder from Kurt. He tells Kurt to go speak with his mother and that she misses him. Kurt leaves the church and goes for a walk, he stops at a near by crosswalk where he lets out a deep breath and reaches for his gun, for no apparent reason, but is cut short by a woman who injects him with a knock out drug and is then transported to a holding cell to get a beating of a life time so he will confess about the scientists research.

Suddenly from there we are now following his younger/older brother Daniel. we see him talking to Kurt in the back of a limo about a girl named Amanda, Daniel hates her and would like to avoid her, then he, demands, that Kurt vanish, 'cuz he is dead. Um, okay so I guess Kurt was killed and now Daniel see's him as a figment of his imagination.

Daniel is then visited by Amanda where she tells him that she is a pill junkie and has trouble sleeping, so she pops a pill to sleep but she can't wake up without someones help. So he sleeps on his couch and she takes the bed. Kurt shows up again to help warn Daniel that two men are breaking in. They open fire on Daniel but as the bullet zings towards his face, Kurt leaps toward Daniel and becomes one with each other causing a milky white substance to halt the bullet in front of his face(Not joking, milky white liquid that spews from his mouth.) and Daniel transforms into Venom a monster that looks like venom and rips the heads off of the two intruders(FBI agents?. End of Issue #1.

I feel like I wasted $3.00 on this comic. The art is good, lots of color and well placed panels, but all the guys look the same, and made it hard to tell who I was reading about. the story juggles too many things at once bringing many holes to the plot and no real reason to enjoy the story. I felt like Kirkman and McFARLANE got together and said, if we toss a half naked girl into the start, lots of gore, mutants, dual personality's and a pill popper into one comic, we might have a hit.

Now the first issue of a comic is made to give a taste of what the line of comics will prove to give us, and with that being said I am rather unsure about reading another one. I feel like this comic has promise, but only if the story line becomes more solid. I want to know why Kurt is a ghost/figment following Daniel. Why does Daniel suddenly have powers? Why should I care about Daniels pill junkie ex-girlfriend?

I do think I will pick up the next issue soon and give it a chance, but I suggest if you are interested in reading this one that you buy #1 and 2 or all 3 at once, #4 will be out soon.

Okay so on a scale of 1-5 of this comic I'd rate it a 2 and a half. Art style and paneling was nice to look at but lost points in being uncreative with the design of our brothers and hero. He looks like a Oreo remix of Venom (O_o) . the comic loses mad points on the fact that it juggles more than it can handle for a first issue. The writing in the comic flows alright but every now and then it gets confusing with how they would be saying something to the other person.