Recently Pepper & Carrot caught my attention on Kickstarter. I saw the project and absolutely loved the look of the story so I bookmarked it. I came back several days later and found that it was taken down due to a copyright claim. Which is strange. I did some digging and found out all about Pepper & Carrot which is an open source comic book. Now… I’ve never read an open source comic book before, nor do I think many of any other creators have courage to do it. For that, I applaud creator David Revoy. The Kickstarter the lead to me discovering Pepper & Carrot is also the reason for this review. Revoy actually has no problem with people printing his work as long as they follow the law behind international open source copyright, which the Kickstarter didn’t. In fact, I thought the person running the Kickstarter was the creator due to the phrasing and that was entirely not cool. Because of all that Revoy put out a free collection for people to download. You see, Revoy releases the webseries for free and is only funded via Patreon.
All that said, how was the book you ask?
Pretty damn great actually.
Pepper is a witch in training and we start off slowly with her and Carrot her pet cat. Revoy eases us into the world and the overall story that Pepper is a part of. Overall, the stories are all cute and tend to have an uplifting message or outcome. One such story involved Pepper winning a potion contest after chasing away bird that was horribly effected by the other three contestant’s potions.
Revoy has a talent for silent stories. My favorite was the winter special in which Pepper and Carrot play in the snow and then using magic we see how they got to a snowy climate when they’re world seems to be void of snow. It was extremely successful and was really just a heartwarming and cute story.
The artwork is something that needs to be praised to high heaven. Obviously there’s a Studio Ghibli influence to it, but it still has a very French style as well. David Revoy is from and lives in France in case you were wondering. The book is very bright and colorful. Overall it’s a vibrant looking book and the coloring compliments the fantastic art style. In particular, the coloring when the story is at night caught my attention. It uses a lot of purples and blues and reminded me of stories I read as a child, none that I could name, but it was a weird flash of Deja vu while reading it.
There’s definitely a story that’s building of sorts, but even if the series just continues to be one and done stories following our two title characters, it will be great comic. Reading it recharged my comic battery because here’s a creator that’s doing this just for the love and producing pages that are ten times better than what’s being published weekly in the American market. Even better, I could hand this to a kid to read. I could hand it to anyone really and I think that they would enjoy it and possibly want to check out comic books as a result.
Revoy is of course giving this collection out for free. He has plans to do an actual print of the book, to which he’ll be donating the proceeds to the open source software companies he uses to make the series, but this was a reward of sorts for those that were fooled by the phony Kickstarter. Check it out yourself by heading over to Revoy’s Patreon and consider supporting a true comic creator.
Score: 5/5
Pepper & Carrot – Episodes 1 to 13 Creator: David Revoy Translation: Amireeti, Alex Gryson Format: Webcomics Patreon