Furiku Buredu
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Some say Torozawa Jei is the fairest samurai alive. The last avatar of an age of values now fading away. Once, he was one of the three legendary samurais serving and protecting wise lord Misumi, wielder of the thousand-year-old Freakblade. But lord Misumi is now dead. It has been two years since shogun Gokuma seized power over the country. In a new era of blood-soaked peace, warriors are left to their traumas and samurais to wander on roads too narrow for their purpose. Neither are needed anymore. Not all of them anyway. Only the best are still coveted for petty countryside skirmishes. Now a wandering ronin addicted to the poisonous sweat of a world going mad – or maybe going mad himself, Torozawa Jei drifts among the ghosts of a way of life that still means everything to him. And as his path leads him back to the glorious and peaceful valleys where he once knew the joys of righteousness and duty - now dismantled into two rival hans, he is once again looking for a new master to serve. One worth the purest application of the bushido. One worth the skills, wisdom, honour and loyalty of Torozawa Jei. But is there such a master?
Mince, j'avais raté la publication !
En tout cas chapeau les mecs, entre l'ambiance, les couleurs, et les dessins c'est vraiment superbe !
Et j'aime beaucoup le texte aussi, c'est très méditatif, ça me plaît !
Very nicely done. There is a nice hook to the larger story here, a feel of the best of manga series, yet its own distinct flavor as well. The art is beautiful and the drug induced images especially are just fantastic. Some of the action sequences were a little confusing, but could be figured out. Overall, another excellent strip.
Thanks a lot.
You were a worthy opponent.
Now, as agreed early on, the FURIKU BUREDU team has to commit the Murashomi Seppuku of Eternity, a dreadfully painful yet boring ritual of death, in which we will infinitely slowly open our own abdomen with a blade of pure solidified dishonor.
With an everlasting smile on our face.
Jim, your interview was a standout on Zudafan : D
It's been a pleasure being showcased on Zuda this month along with you and Fredgri and hob!! keep on creating, your work's très magnifique!
go go gadgeto contrat
Interview is up at zudafan.blogspot.com
Dear Zuda Competitors/Creators,
I recently started a Zuda fan blog, and I would love to interview all of this month’s creators. If you would be willing to answer 5-10 questions, to be posted on the Zudafan blog, please contact me at: zudafan@gmail.com.
Feel free to check out the blog: zudafan.blogspot.com
Thanks!
Hey. Tang !
Thank you, man.
Hope we'll manage to work together on something pretty soon.
Hi, everybody! just wanted to say a big "bravo" for Jim Dedieu, Hob & Fredgri. I love your work, guys. It's very original and fun. Hope to see the next very soon...
Hob, j'adore. Ma préférence va vraiment à le séquence "psycho" (il ne manquait qu'un lézard à la Jim Morrison). Vote posé!
Now for our americans friends :
Hob, I love it. The psycho sequence is really my favorite(i just miss a Jim Morrisson's lizard). Vote done!
it's my birthday , vote for us ;)
Merci beaucoup benoît
Bonne fin de vacance :)))
Jolie BD. Bon courage pour la suite. A+. Benoit
In a way, it is indeed.
Hey, a late congrats for getting into the contest again. It's certainly more challenging the second time around.
So Samurai frog-lickers is a genre? I must have missed out! What do you mean, not original? Also, why does a story have to be totally original to be good? It's not just what story you're telling, but how you tell the story.
Okay, who put an "originalideas'R'us" sign on our front lawn? I'm not laughing. Who did this?
I don't get it. He licks a toad, goes on an acid trip and kills a thug. I don't quite see an original idea here.
Come on.
We can't unleash the full power of FLICKBREAD just by ourselves.
We need your tiny electron swords.
thanks guy ^^
I LOVE it!
~Taj
II know you can do it, i know it will be epic and weird... I like it so much and i want more (i've already heard that in my life too)
great stuffffffffff guys!!!
i want more than 8 pages!!! gogogo, hurryhurryhurry !!!
Oh, I'm confused.com.
yes you're the best Jeaph :)
Samurais! Toads!! Butterflies!!!
I have no choice but to vote for you!
Bless you, RKB.
Now let’s see what I can do for you.
But maybe, considering all previous comments, I should first point out clearly what FB is about.
It’s about flow. Of art, action, words and consciousness.
Initially, the project was born of both my love of chanbara and(okay, not sure everybody will bear with me here, but here I go:) the Milligan/McCarthy golden age of psychedelic comics.
But this is not a movie, and I’m no Peter Milligan, and Hob is no Brendan McCarthy (though I should state here, for the record, that there is no words in which I could fairly express how much I love both his and Fredgri’s art and how proud I am to have worked with them – they really are amazing artists, although our collaboration seemed to kind of brindle Hob’s natural awesomeness. Anyway. Make with with the clickety-click : http://morpheusmutant.blogspot.com/ and http://fredgrigri.blogspot.com/ ).
What I was trying to say is that this project ended up being all about sequence. We tried to produce the best sequential art bit we could. That is: not the best plot, not the best characters (though both this aspects were both richly crafted as you will see, hopefully, if the story can unfold as intended), but just the best possible drawings, with the best possible colors and words, worked into the best possible panels, connected in the most beautiful way I could thing of. The thing is supposed to make you feel things. If you don’t understand everything, please remain calm: you’re not supposed to understand anything. If you actually felt a few things looking at this first 8 pages, then I guess we met our goal.
While I’m at it (generalities, I mean – and the secret origins of FB), I should also be honest and state that this 60-pages romp was only conceived as the first chapter of a much larger work. This should be, in fact, the first FB story revolving around Torozawa Jei. (FB was conceived as an epic revolving around five major characters, and Jei is just one of them).
Okay. RKB. You and me, amigo.
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SCREENS 1 & 2 : The blank butterfly, obviously, symbolizes Jei’s addiction. (To psychotropes, I mean. He has plenty more.)
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SCREENS 3 & 4 : Boo-yah!
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SCREEN 5 : I was going for a lot of things here. Psychosis. Flow of time. Character development. Sequential thingie. (Most of the panels on this screen already appeared/will appear later on in this story, as cut-out details.)
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SCREEN 6 : I didn’t realize this last panel could be unclear. The speed blur is not Jei’s : it’s just his sword’s, as it’s thrown into the ground by the villain.
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SCREEN 7 : Here’s what’s happening here : the vilain is staring at Jei, Jei is staring at his sword. The fist bit of action then happens in the gutter between panels 3 and 4 : Jei stood up, went for his sword, cut the vilain’s ear clean off and went past him. He then turns back, and chops the ear in mid-air. Result seen on last panel of page 8.
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SCREEN 8 : The goons are not fighting, just running away.
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Funny you should mention the "rape"/"eat" thing. I went back and forth between the two, you know, finally chosing the culinary option. (Ain’t cannibalism a sufficiently strong sexual act, after all?)
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Jei is not the wielder of the Freakblade yet. Should he have been, we would obviously have tackled the thing in this first 8 pages.
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Thanks for your interest and all the nice things you said.
This goes for you too, people. You all soflty kick tight, gold-plated ass.
Now, on to the future!
first congrats Jim Dedieu on getting back in the contest.
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screens 1 and 2 -I get you want to set things up, but only 8 screens total is a short number for some floating story telling. Will you have a butterfly 'recurring symbol' throughout the story, it doesn't quite compare to smiley faces and doomsday clocks (a'la watchmen) but I'll go with it.
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Screen 3 and 4 -a toad licking full page shot and Torozawa Jei's (for those who don't read the synopsis that's the name of the character, i think -more on this later) getting high.
BEST PART OF THE COMIC, no doubts it did kind of come out of no where, but was hinted at in the synopsis (which was very well written by the way), I liked the way you handled TJ getting high. Screen 4 looked like your artist hob was channeling barry windsor smith for that screen, which is a good thing. I know there's been a samurai looking to regain his lost honor/ place in the world a thousand times before, and there's probably been the drug fiend spin put on that type of character before -but I've never read that I can remember a story where the samurai get's high before so it was a very new very intriguing twist for me. That also got you 4/5 stars by the way.
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Let's talk about screen 5 shall we??? 14 panels on a screen/ new record for Zuda. Let me tell you what i think you were going for when you wrote it, then tell you how I chose to read it -bare with me. You showed in the first few screens (before he got high) TJ 'contemplating the if's' letting his mind wander around at a decompressed pace. then he licks a toad and we get 14 panels. I think you wrote it that way with all the panels to show the passage of time in the story he's in his own world thinking about all of this things in his head (taking stock of himself one thing after another slowly and surely) and the minutes/hours are ticking off the clock. He has a lot to think about so time passes. I thing that's what you were going for, but i could be wrong. The way I chose to read it was high as a kite all these thought's kept flickering through his mind at a rapid pace and that distorted what he saw around him. I don't think he should be all Zen like all the time so i read into it. It helped your score with me, but what were you going for with screen 5???
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Screen 6 -what was up with the Flash (super speed he's a blur!) effect on the last panel with TJ -I think I can guess more on this later too.
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Screen 7 deadpool (dshide) was right screen 7 is unclear. TJ went for the sword superfast, panel 5 I'm guessing that is a spray of blood (it's an old trick for when you don't want to show the sword biting into someone, or want to show how fast someone is -like static speedlines), but then in panel 6 you see TJ with that Flash-esque blur effect. shouldn't the two panels have been switched in order it would have made it easier to understand. Panel 7 the reaction was okay, but too understated IMO.
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Screen 8 panel 1 was a WTF (if you get what I mean :hello mod: ) moment for me. It looked like the two goons were fighting each other -but why??? They both wanted to eat there now dead friend??? They didn't look like they were running away so what were you going for???
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Those goon's talking about how they wanted to eat him, set them up as right evil bastards from the get go. The only way you could have made them more evil bastards is if they wanted to rape him first then eat him. Hardcore villains in a comic with butterfly motif's and toad licking samurai, I liked everything coming together.
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My BIGGEST PROBLEM with the story is the name 'Furiku Buredu' and how that relates to what we saw in the 8 screens. It doesn't. That's the problem. I'm guessing it means freak blade, if i hadn't read the synopsis i would have thought it was the samurai's name, and that isn't a good thing. I'm all for using the synopsis to fill in the picture for a reader (and I always read them), but something as important as: the samurai being named Torozawa jei, and his sword being called the freak blade, also being the namesake of the comic, we should have at least read something about this in the comic.
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You didn't have to tell us the guy's name in the actual 8 screens but mention freak blade and why it's so legendary??? Reading into it yet again i'm guessing that's what Torozawa's moving like the Flash was all about, but more exposition in the story please. I think we should have seen a couple more panels filling in the readers on the sword in the story.
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other thought's in no order from my random mind:
The letter's were fine very readable and that's more than half the battle (reminded me -font-wise- of what was done on Rune or X-O man of war or marvel comics presents), and the color's also fit the story well, GREAT JOB there!!!
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Could you please if you win keep coming back to 'the one who drifts' "one hell of a drift" language, I really thing that was written and done very well by you Jim. i think it's a theme and if it's not it should be one.
The first I heard of toad licking was when Rush Limbaugh (I know folks, bare with me) had some really funny things to say about it on his radio show and in his book. Apparently this was a urban legend about a welfare high for kids in the swamps in FL. I LMAO when I saw screen 3 really a great surprise there well handled by all the creators.
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Hope you don't think i was too harsh, 4/5 stars from me and a fav.
Excellent ! Bonne chance !
Bravo, pour ces superbes couleurs, il faut continuer ...
Indeed. Thanks for taking the time, one and all.
thanks for your comments ;)
Very cool.The colors and the story was very exciting.
I like the organic look, like how his hair almost melds to the ground like tree roots when he's licking the toad. But I feel some disconnect between the dialog and the art. Besides that, really nice.
Ah, enfin, un commentaire en français !!!! merci monsieur.
beau boulot
No. But they both watched Shaolin Voodoo and loved it.
Is Rasta Samurai a cousin of Afro Ninja? ;)
Jeremy --> Thx for your vote
Mpd57 --> your translator works marvellous lol
Excellent artwork, intriguing story. This has my vote.
My first review of the month is up over at: http://www.mpd57.blogspot.com
If nothing else you can see how good the English/French translator works!!!
All right who wants to draw the Jamaican Sailor Moon pic? I'm sure It'd be hilarious.
sailor moon have dreadlocks lol
It's jamaican Sailor moon :)
Why does he have sailor moon hair?
Nice colors, I prefer my samurai less decrepit looking... but that's just me.
nice art! and now i'm not alone- my english isn't really goo too...
Thanks for your comments and advices
Sorry, my englis isn't really good but i'll try to made some answer ;)
Ptimony --> you're wrong, lick a toad is fun lol
I'm happy that you loved this scene, it's my fav too
For the story, this 8 pages are just an introduction.
Jim wanted a particulary ambiance
fred( and his fantastic colors ) and me made our job to become more pronounced this point .
I can understand that it can be disturbing but it's also the originality of this story ( i hope lol )
Thanks and keep posting your comments, it's always a pleasure for us
Many Thanks, Dash, a great project for both of us
Very nice and smooth looking if a bit unclear on the 7th page.
4/5 stars and a fav. Never thought I'd see a samurai tripping on a toad by the way.
fred, I like your color choices--the blue/green really sets the mood. and hob, I can see why you chose the toad as your avatar--that thing is awesome!
It's pretty, but... I don't know. It's sort of like The Invisibles as Samurai. King Mob does Bushido.
Great art, colors and storytelling!