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| The core concept of Savage Paradise: hot babes using rock & roll instruments to control robot dinosaurs |
My buddy Steve Curcuru is a genius.
Why, you ask?
Two reasons.
One, he is an amazing illustrator who can tell comic stories with his art like none other. Steve's work has always reminded me of the great Alex Toth, and as Steve continues to refine his style, his work gets simpler and more powerful every time I look at it.
The other reason Steve is a genius is because he has noticed something floating around in the public collective conscious that NO ONE ELSE has. Steve figured out that not a single person has realized you could combine hot babes, robot dinosaurs, the basic concept behind games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and wrap it all around a storyline about a nerdy teenage science whiz named Jasper Quan. So Steve did just that, and turned it into his hit online web comic Savage Paradise.
I don't think it's possible to squeeze any more coolness into the seed concept than Steve already has.
Savage Paradise is an amazing amalgam of some of the best all time post-apocalyptic and dinosaur story lines ever written. It combines Thundarr the Barbarian, Y: The Last Man, Jack Kirby's Devil Dinosaur, and even the "lost boy" story running through Jack Kirby's Kamandi. The lead character Jasper Quan is a hipper version of the archetypical boy-scientist we all know and love (think Will Robinson from Lost in Space as played by Billy Mumy, or a very young Ron Howard in the role of town genius in the cult-camp classic Village of the Giants).
The story's protagonist Jasper Quan is the classic egghead, too smart for his own good. Now that Jasper is in college, he is free to develop crazy science experiments involving cutting edge nanotechnology. Jasper has designed and built his own microscopic robots called "nano-meks" that can repair damage inside a body on a molecular level. These 'meks may also have the capability to create eternal youth or super strength in the subjects who are injected.
Like any crazy-smart, overly confident science genius, Jasper has injected nano-meks into his own body in order to test them. To make things worse, when he locks himself in a containment tank while the nano-meks go to work on the cells of his body, he ends up sleeping far, far longer than the four days he intended...
When Jasper wakes up, he finds himself in a savage world populated solely by beautiful women.
And robot dinosaurs.
The only problem? Most of the women are mean as hell, and the robot dinosaurs are even meaner.
What will Jasper do? How will he get back home? And what are those crazy nano-meks doing to his body?
You can find out every Monday and Thursday on Steve's blog, savageparadisecomic.com, where he posts new panels of Savage Paradise twice a week.
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| Dynomeks fighting |
One of the things I thoroughly enjoy about the art style of Savage Paradise is that it combines a retro, pulp-paper four-color vibe with a distinctly modern sensibility.
Steve creates all of the art digitally, and yet you will swear that in some panels, you are looking at scans of yellowing newsprint comics. I can practically smell the wood pulp when I look at them.
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| Welcome to the Land o' Babes: Steve Curcuru's Savage Paradise |
Steve also gives a lot of love to his drawings of believable, differentiated people. Not a single character in the story looks like a stamped-out generically idealized super hero. Each one is a unique individual, with their own body language, facial expressions, and mannerisms. These subtle touches are the hallmarks of an experienced illustrator and Steve has them down cold.
Stop by savageparadisecomic.com and start reading! You won't be able to stop.
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| Jasper Quan: the archetypical nerdy science whiz who can't get a date |
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