Star Pilot #5
I’ll sometimes warn you reader folks not to judge a book by its cover. Obvious advice, I know, and not exactly insightful, but people sometimes ignore it anyway. Take, for example, this cover. There’s so much going on here (zombie shadow? man on a motorcycle riding to the rescue? barbed wire? bullseye?) that I was genuinely curious to see what happened inside, but I can see some people maybe passing this by if they saw it in a store. One look at that sample below should change your mind. Granted, this is a bit late in the story and it’s possible that I shouldn’t give away who was really in that special agent suit, but it’s so thoroughly ridiculous that I just couldn’t help it. And no, I am not laughing AT this. I think it may just be brilliant, but even if it isn’t Frank still gets serious points for originality. The story may wander just a bit, or maybe that’s just because I haven’t read the previous issues and don’t know the whole story. This is about a team of a monkey and a rhino who are trying to deliver medicine to some sick baby possums. Really, I could stop right there, but this kind of analysis is why you guys pay the big (imaginary) bucks, right? While this is going on there’s a scientist with a crisis of conscience who is trying to smuggle some designs for a delightfully vague doomsday device out of the country before they can be used. From there we get the backstory of this scientist and how he came to be the hero and we see the monkey and the rhino trying to save the possums. I don’t want to say much more, but I will say that “Use my back as a ramp! It’s the only way!” was a thing of beauty. The art is maybe a bit dicey at times, but kudos to Frank for getting to #5 in his series, not to mention the complete lack of spelling errors. That’s more rare than you might think, but it’s always welcome. You can get a copy of this for $1 and, if that’s too rich for your blood, you can always check some samples at his site first. $1
