zine review:
The Last Minute: A 24 Hour Comic
The Last Minute is Karen H. Brown’s 2009effort for 24Hour Comic Day, an annual event wherein indie artists scramble to produce 24pages of comics in as many hours. The influences present in this slim tome are fairly overt–Brown’s graphic fragment is a science fiction tale garnished with distinct cyberpunkian traces. Its protagonist, June Carter, is a brash mercenary-cum-vigilante with that old sci-fi hallmark–the cyborg eye-implant–and the story follows her attempts to complete a mission under an oppressively tight deadline (see the parallels here?). The artwork itself is remarkably polished given the prohibitive deadline– admittedly, Brown finished the inking and toning at a later date–and I actually found the story quite tense and provocative despite its only spanning a couple dozen 8.5″ x 5.5″ pages. Nothing about The Last Minute breaks convention, but nevertheless Brown has produced a solid homage to a genre whose boundaries have been carved for quite some time. (Michael Tau)
Comic Zine, Karen H. Brown, http://karen-hannah-blog.blogspot.com