Current status / schedule Hiatus | Launch date April 2002 | |
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Similar A Lesson Is Learned but the D, Scary Go Round, Sam and Fuzzy, Dresden Codak, Octopus Pie | ||
Copper is a 2002 webcomic by Kazu Kibuishi. Consisting of a series of short stories, Copper has had a very irregular schedule and new pages are posted rarely. Kibuishi's webcomic was nominated for an Eisner Award in, and the work was compiled into a print volume in 2010.
Contents
- Daredevil comics silver bronze and copper age
- Development
- Short stories
- Print compilation
- Reception
- References
Daredevil comics silver bronze and copper age
Development
Copper began in April 2002. The pages of Kibuishi's webcomic makes use of a large, square format, rather than usingtraditional comic book dimensions. Aside from the first page, all of the Copper pages are presented in color. The schedule of Copper is slow, new updates appearing once a month. Each page of Copper tells a self-contained story, though there are a few recurring characters.
In May 2005 all of the 25 web strips that had been published to date were published as a series of 13" square archival prints by Nucleus, together with some other prints of Kibuishi's artwork. In July 2006, Kibuishi put the webcomic on hiatus again due to work on his graphic novel Amulet, among other projects, and it returned in September 2007. A single page was posted in mid-2009, after which Copper saw no further updates until December 2016, a period of nearly seven years.
Short stories
The comic theme anthology Flight Volume One, edited by Kibuishi (ISBN 978-1-58240-381-6, 2004) contains two short Copper stories: the 18-page "Maiden Voyage", and the 4-page "Picnic". Along with: Mushroom Crossing in Flight Explorer:Volume One. All of these stories have also appeared on the website.
In each self-contained story the boy Copper and his talking dog Fred journey through a detailed but economically drawn landscape - sometimes beautiful, sometimes bleak, sometimes surreal. Fred usually has some concise and forcefully expressive comment to make on their circumstances, while Copper is generally more cheerfully optimistic. The first three strips suggest that their adventures are dreams. After that the question is usually left open.
Copper is haunted by three mysterious girls: a redhead who appears to be trapped inside a purple bubble that always floats just out of Copper's reach; a dark-haired girl with amber sunglasses who always taunts him from a distance, and a blond girl wearing a red shirt with a P on it. Fred also suffers girl trouble when, to his horror, he falls in love with a female dog owned by another girl.
The 18-page story Maiden Voyage sees Copper building an airplane from parts purchased at the local Plane*Mart supermarket, while Fred constantly frets that the plane might crash. In the end his fears turn out to be justified. In the 4-page Picnic Copper and Fred take an aerial picnic in an airship, which Fred manages to sleep through. In Mushroom Crossing Copper and Fred cross a bridge but Fred ends up falling off and finding himself with talking mushrooms who let him back up on the bridge after yelling at him.
Print compilation
January 2010 saw the publication of Copper in book form, containing all of the existing pages as well Kibuishi's short stories for Flight and a step-by-step examination of Kibuishi's creation process.
Reception
Copper was named one of the best webcomics of 2004 by The Webcomics Examiner, Joe Zabel describing it as "one of the most impressive achievements in webcomics" despite its low number of pages. The webcomic was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic 2006.