Webcomic Weekly: ‘Toros’ By Brahm Revel – Exploring Space And Needing Caffeine
by Richard Bruton
Welcome one and all to the (sometimes) Webcomic Weekly, this week featuring Brahm Revel’s Toros…
Webcomic Weekly is our regular look at the world of comics online, not just what you’d traditionally think of as webcomics but also short Twitter strips, previews up online for free, and anything else that exists as great comics for you, for free, online right now. As for the weekly part of Webcomic Weekly, well, that slips sometimes…
This week, Toros by Brahm Revel… a space story from the creator of Guerillas series from Oni Press. He’s worked on TMNT, Marvel Knights: X-Men, and storyboarded for The Venture Bros but is now heading back to a first love, making his own independent comics, including more working in shorter forms.
Toros was originally written as a radio play (which he also directed) for the Tales from Beyond the Pale Podcast. You can listen to the original radio play on the TFBP website and other pod platforms. But we’re here to talk about the great job Brahm’s done in turning Toros into comic form… so we will.
It’s only 23 pages complete at the moment, but in that there’s so much promise of a great story to be told. Revel’s got an easy-going dialoguing style happening and artwork that’s just a lovely thing to see. There’s great line work, always clear but it has a loose, easy look to it that I’m always partial to. And then there’s the colours he’s using, that limited palette that looks so damn good.
In Toros, we meet a lone spaceship, The Last Refuge, its one-man crew, Pike, and a slightly annoying onboard computer called Al that insists on ruining the pilot’s day by telling him, yet again, that there’s very little worth salvaging out here well beyond the Kuiper Belt…
Worse than that, they’re out of coffee…
And they’ve got something like three days of reserves left…
They’ve been out here for too long, tracking asteroids in the vain hopes of salvaging anything they can from them…
We end with Pike getting a little bit of a lead from another ship, a 50-year-old distress signal on the edge of the system.
And that’s where this very promising bit of sci-fi comics delight finishes – for now at least.
But like Brahm says:
“If you want to see more, show your love, and it will basically force me to keep working on it. The whole thing is written, it just needs to be drawn. Unfortunately, that’s usually the long part.”
Having read those 23 pages, I think it’s definitely something that’s got the legs and he needs to keep going with it. After all… I want to know what happens next and I’m sure you will as well!
You can find Toros at his Patreon and on Facebook (parts 1, 2, 3). And all his links are here.
