The Turk

Permit me to shill for some family:

I just found out that Jill's cousin, Jane Irwin, has a webcomic! I knew that she had been publishing a series called Vogelein, about a clockwork faerie, in book form, but I didn't know about her most recent foray. Vogelein was actually a painted comic, which is cool enough in its own right. Here's the official story synopsis of Vogelein:

When Jakob, Vögelein's Guardian of fifty years, dies quietly in his sleep one night, her life is thrown into utter turmoil. Left without someone to wind her, the tiny clockwork faerie has less than five hours to live - unless she can find someone to trust. Unable to reach the keyhole in her back, she continues to wind down until she stops - and then her memories of the past three hundred years will quickly slip away, leaving her a simple automaton unable to speak or move on her own. In her search for a new Guardian, Vogelein must grapple with her own past, her current daily survival and a true Faerie who has taken an instant disliking to her, all so that she will not lose her memories - and her self.

The new, online graphic novel, oddly enough, has a thematic tie-in. It's called Clockwork Game: The Illustrious Career of a Chess-playing Automaton. It's a true story of a colossal hoax perpetrated upon the aristocracy of 18th century Europe. Jane actually switched from painting her panels to employing a dense, cross-hatched pencil and graphite presentation. She makes painstaking efforts to get the history right, and most pages come with some sort of commentary on the scenes as they pertain to the record of events.

Jane's husband, Paul, is also a comic artist, and he's started a web project called BPM (beats per minute). It's about a young DJ named Roxy who's trying to raise her craft to the breakthrough level. Paul does some interesting stuff with merging his amazing drawings with elements from photographs to set scenes. The story follows a familiar arc, so far, but neither Jane's nor Paul's webcomics have gotten very far, yet.