Much coolness: thanks to Fleen, I just discovered the webphotocomic a softer world. This is a media type that I’ve been kicking around the back of my head for a while now, actually, as something I might want to try at some point. We’ve seen different degrees of photography-in-comics in the past, including the hyperstylized work of Dave McKean, In the Shadow of Edgar Allen Poe from Vertigo and Brian Michael Bendis’ early stuff like Torso, but as The Comics Reporter commented in their review of In the Shadow:

Comics that choose photographs over cartoon art as the primary visual component tend to have all sorts of interesting problems, not the least of which is a readership that may slip into flashbacks featuring the publication that scarred forever a generation of children and lonely teens, the Marvel Fumetti Book. With improvements in comic book printing and the rise of digital art through the proliferation of programs like Photoshop, problems for photo-driven comics have begun to move out of the unfortunate comparison neighborhood to more common, and more considerable, artistic problems. Complicating matters there are still so few comics that feature this kind of art that the repository of standard solutions that exist for drawn art are still being cobbled together. Photo driven works are as a result almost always wildly uneven, a few exciting panels squeezed between outright jarring and even ugly sequences.

I tend to agree. Some of the photocomics I’ve read suffer from unreadability, something that McKean managed to avoid in Mr. Punch but slipped a little on in the earlier Arkham Asylum (of course, Arkham Asylum was designed to send its readers staggering into madness, so its blend of hyperdark photo-realistic materials and paintings and lettering and catscratch fonts, while difficult, certainly accomplishes the mood it sets out to achieve). A Softer World, however, couples photos with very simple text that is by turns poetic and psychotic, kind of like Paul Madonna’s All Over Coffee on crack. One way or the other, A Softer World just made my daily clicks list.