Webcast Beacon Network Review of I’m Famous! Volume 1

Comic Review: “I’m Famous” by Michael Balistreri & Alex Siquig

I’m Famous!
by Michael Balistreri & Alex Siquig

“An Insane super hero’s egotistical journey from protector of Detroit to Hollywood silver screen immortality.”

In the world of comics, trying to come up with an accurate, yet brief, elevator pitch is the one of the most important things a creator must do. And this comic’s tagline is perfect.

But we’ll get to the content in just a bit. First let us look at the cover and book itself. This is a perfect bound, softcover book with about a hundred comic pages. This is supposed to be a spin-off comic and character from another series called Black Snow (which will also be reviewed); though this comicbook was published first.

The cover is a white bordered, red-gradient field, with the main character making some sort of gesture; disembodied heads of other characters from the comic surround him. No they arn’t decaptiated. I mean I see what they were going for on this cover, but I don’t think it was well executed.

The art is… well its not terrible, but still needs a lot of work. It mostly looks “off” in some form, but its functional enough. Inside the book, however, the art is all over the place. Well, through the whole book, the art certainly gets better and better, but the consistency in the characters’ design or style, along with proportions, is just not there. On the same page, a character’s face may change shape dramatically. Defining lines coming and going. And sometimes bodily proportions are just way off.

I can’t accept that this is a “style” so much as the artist is still learning. I would definitely recommend practicing drawing more consistently and proportionately. Light sketch things and sit back from what you drew, to make sure it looks right before you start inking.

I know I’ve drawn really bad proportions with being very narrow focused while drawing. Maybe that’s what’s what happening? Also, maybe try a few different sized pens, or try a brush pen to get some line weight variation.

Still, the art does get better as the comic progresses, and rightly so. This comic book looks to be a year’s worth of comics. Likely as a webcomic, since each comic page is dated at the bottom. The art isn’t great, but all the main characters are well defined and different from each other, and the art isn’t stiff either.

So how does the story stand up?

Well, true to tagline, we get a very egotistical super hero, The Lone Wolf, to which we start questioning if he even is a real super hero. We soon come to learn that he either has ADHD or just insane. Actually, I am pretty sure he has some sort of aggressive schizophrenia.

Basically our super hero, whom’s costume is a tight, all-black suit, just released a sort of auto-biographical book that made top seller. Now a Hollywood studio wants the rights to make a movie.

From here we are introduced to several other characters, which are all sort of quickly developed, but only leaving us with more questions. I’m sure some of them are intentional, and since this is a spin-off comic, they are hopefully more established in the other canon.

Well, all-in-all, the story really isn’t that bad. Like the main character, the story is very caotic. You are basically just watching a train wreak happening the whole time…. actually, you are watching a cascading train wreck; you can’t possibly think it could crash again, but it does anyway!

Anyone who likes solid or complex story telling should probably stay away from this comic, and if my description of the comic has any appeal to you, you’ll probably get some enjoyment out of this one.

As I was saying with the train wreck analogy, I still have a desire to just “see where the hell this is going”, which is why the end of the comic just annoys me.

… It just ends.

There is no wrap up. There is no sense that its going to be continued. If this is “book one”, it doesn’t feel like it. It kinda feels like we went to a commercial break, and when you came back, the show was over.

So that’s all I really have to say about this one. You can find more about this comic and its creators at BlackSnowComics.com