Panzer Gospel
Panzer Gospel is a story about... um... there's like this kid, and his friends who are rebels, and they're like competing with these evil military guys to find these ancient mechanized war machines called Panzers, and... then some stuff happens, and... there's like an explosion and... you know... it sort of goes on from there.As you can probably tell, I wasn't following PG very closely. Nevertheless, I ducked in to pinch-hit on this one at the last moment, when a scheduling foulup left nobody in line to do the next part. This coincided with a computer meltdown that forced me to do the whole thing by hand (the only computer assist involved was putting the borders on the panels, and making the title page.) So the circumstances were strange, but still, towards the end it gets almost not bad.
Panzer Gospel at Impromanga - 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102
Panzer Gospel's biggest problem is/was a lack of setting or overarching theme. Lots of stuff was happening, but it was hard to say what the significance of any of it was. So, in my part I focused hard on adding background and sort of welding a plot onto everything that had been going on. I explained who the evil military guys were (a faction secretly planning a military coup), why they were acting so strangely (they had to keep their scheme concealed from the government and the more loyal officers), and what their goal was (collecting the Panzers, applying cybernetic mind control and using them to ensure their coup succeeded.)
There's good and bad here. Good is the focus on character motivations, and the introduction of General Chen (as MST3K would put it, "Could it be? A black African person of color, in an Impromanga?") Bad is the dialogue, which is so clunky and pretentious it hurts me to read it. Still, at least there's cool machinery and backgrounds on almost every page. Karman's cybernetic hand looks great, and that's a a truly boss airship on page 100. I wonder how long it'll take for some triggerhappy artist to blast it out of the sky like happened to all my other airships.
Note that Gwen strikes a blow for oppressed Canadians everywhere by being the only Impro character who wears a touk.