Comic Critique Loves Pood #1!

Louis Vitela has a glowing review of Pood #1 up at Comic Critique.com. He gives the paper 5 out of 5 stars! He had this to say about Rammy & Soupy in Dreams of Flight:

“Rammy and Soupy in Dreams of Flight” by Joe Infurnari (with characters created by Joe Infurnari and Cecil Castellucci) is a hobo tale that is by turns gut-wrenching, poignant, and hopeful. Clearly it was an attempt to unman me, to elicit public sobs of understanding and empathy while I Pood on the bus. But it failed; I went somewhere private to sob.

Thanks Louis!

Comic Critique Reviews The Act-i-vate Primer!

Adam McGovern has written yet another astute and discerning review over at ComicCritique.com! This time he doles out the praise in his usual eloquent reportage. Here's a quote:

Peering into the faux-yellowed, off-register murk of Infurnari’s ULTRA-lad! we find a forgotten pulp potboiler concealing a serious graphic novel – concerning an amoral Captain Marvel-esque eternal child-hero inside a series of unworthy adult personalities – that flies toward the scary tension of superlatives without ideals.

That's all he devotes to my story, but what a grand prose it is! Adam is truly a reviewer without peer and he is by far one of the most intelligent readers of comics I know. He closes his piece with this:

The range of interests, level of storytelling and sheer wealth of style are staggering. I haven’t been this anxious to curl up with a colorful collection of the medium’s possibilities since The Great Comic Book Heroes in nineteen-seventy-never-mind. The golden age of comics gets its restart here.

Comic Critique scores the Primer a 4.5 out of 5! To read the rest of this review, click here.

ComicCritique.com Gives a Nod to The Act-i-vate Primer!

Louis from ComicCritique.com, who I met at Baltimore Comic Con, had this delightful little blog post to report on The Act-i-vate Primer! Thanks, Louis!

Here it is in its entirety:

The ACT-I-VATE Primer is now available from IDW Publishing in a beautiful, densely-packed hardbound volume. The Primer is an anthology of never-before-read comics by the creators who can be found at act-i-vate.com, the “webcomix collective.” IDW’s online preview of the book is easy to read and shows the vast diversity contained in the pages. I was explicitly told that while these same strips and characters have a presence online, the stories in the book cannot be found in 1s and 0s, only on paper. I’ll be getting this one added to my pull list, but if you’re interested you can find it online or ask your preferred bookseller.

The Transmigration of ULTRA-lad! Best Webcomic of 2008!

[singlepic id=422 w=500 h= rel="lightbox" float="center"]My Act-i-vate webcomic, The Transmigration of ULTRA-lad! has just been dealt a significant honor by being named Comic Critique's Best Webcomic of 2008! Thank you so much, Adam McGovern and thank you Comic Critique! This is not something I expected seeing how this project is still very young but it's a welcome affirmation of my hard work.

Here's what Adam has to say,

2008 Eisner nominee Infurnari is standing at a celestial height from which the award’s namesake, the architects of early MAD, C.C. Beck, Chris Ware and Honoré Daumier can be seen clearly and their unlikely connections traced. ULTRA-Lad is faux-antiqued on simulated decomposing yellow paper in the most elegant of high-tech media, but “retro” doesn’t begin to describe this multi-directional ricochet from print-pop prehistory to the horizons of storytelling and up and down through the many layers of what it could be and never was. This is happy-warrior hero fiction better than what you remember, and dark Manichean meta-adventure with more indomitable charm than anyone else has realized is possible. Infurnari weaves a hallucinatory spell and enfolds the reader in immersive atmospheres with the lushest of stark ink and the most sparing of edible color. ULTRA-Lad is stream-of-consciousness storytelling from deep fairytale forests and the basements of mad geniuses far below utopian skyscraper kingdoms that never came. It seems random because the ideas fire so fast and assuredly that there’s no time for the artist to need overthinking or the reader to second-guess the cortical level at which the agile wordplay, dizzying humor, turbulent emotional shadings and acrobatic line enter present consciousness and comic history. It’s coming through to our continuum one page a week, completely free and pricelessly promising.

Thanks, everybody! I sincerely appreciate your loyalty, support and readership.

the Process: Comic Critique Webcomic of the Year!

Adam McGovern of Comic Critique has this to say in his "Extended Flashback: 2007 in Review":

Best Webcomic: the Process by Joe Infurnari From the magic-mirror landing page to the meaningful creative-process background notes to writer/artist Infurnari’s fluid, free-associative storytelling, this is everything that inventive online art and mind-opening comics are meant to be.

Wow! What a nice surprise and a real honor. It's very nice to have my work validated yet again. Thanks Adam and thank you Comic Critique! I have to go and put a salve on my swollen head!