Serenade #10 by Barbara Coney-Jenkins
Indie Comics are the future of the comic book medium. Indie Comics is where evolution happens. As the environment changes, adaptation to changing markets, readers, and world-view needs to occur so that visual/contextual storytelling can stick around, in a recognizable, comic book form. Indie Comics is where new and interesting bounds are formed, making the medium more interesting, exciting and worth sticking around.
I’m always happy to find new and interesting Indie Comics that are doing something for the medium. I’m especially happy when I find a new voice, one that is unrecognizable in a world of similar, often synonymous voices. Barbara Coney-Jenkins definitely adds to the sometimes poetic, introspective monologue driven sub-genre of comics where Serenade falls. Coney-Jenkins starts with a female character that is at times sexy but more times than not, she is focused and obsessed by her goals. Her character is strong and driven, something I often wish I was more like. Coney-Jenkins definitely reinforces a piece of Indie Comics that has room to grow.
Of course, there are downfalls to Indie Comics – we don’t always have big-budgets to allow for editors and assistance. Serenade certainly falls into this trap. The cover and several other images in the digital copy of this book that I received was in a much lower resolution than other pieces and it to some degree took away from the overall experience. I would have also liked to have seen more color in the book. At times, it had pieces of color to emphasize actions but it was not enough and often not as good as the rest of the book.
In the world of Indie Comics, this is where we all need to come together to help each other. I know that everyone wants paid for their work but sometimes, it only needs to be compensation, not actually money. Coney-Jenkins could for instance provide some images or edited to another artist as compensation for that artist coloring her book. I’m not saying that we should all be part of some big hippie commune, I would not want to scar anyone with a mention of socialism but I do think know that there are just as many, if not more people making Indie Comics or who want to make comics as there are in both of the Big Two combined.
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2 Comments
great post
Thank you for the review, but there a few things about this particular issue that must be cleared up.
1) the starkness of color here is intentional, the lack of color represents the emptiness of Serena, and as she comes closer to completing her goal of revenge, there the color comes into play. For those who know the Serenade storyline, this book in a metaphor of images where one has look beyond the obvious.
2) More than likely some of the images of the digital copy may have been corrupted during transmission, the print version of Serenade “Restless Spirit” came out perfect with the same images no loss whatsoever.
Barbara Coney-Jenkins is a creator who is not shy to mix up ideas or styles to convey the whirlwind that makes up Serenade’s mind. We classify Serenade as a psychological thriller as the messages in each and every panel. Readers of this series must be willing to look though the looking glass to see the real message that lay underneath.