California #4
Anybody who starts with the fourth issue of a series is kind of stupid anyway, but I can’t help but think of at least one poor soul out there who picked this one up without seeing the rest of this series. Maybe they just liked California? Anyway, this poor person would have opened up the comic and seen (on the very first page!) a giant tentacled monster with one eye hovering over a house, a disembodied head bouncing around trying to stay away from the monster, a surprisingly calm family sitting down at a table while the monster smashed the table around them, and the disembodied head bashing into one of people at the table. If this poor soul didn’t spontaneously combust and they made it to the next few panels they would see the head bashing into a few more people at the table and those people vanishing after being struck. At this point I would only hope that they’d stop and go back to read the rest of the series, but hypothetical people can be stubborn. Oh hi, those were spoilers, kind of, for the rest of this series. But they were mostly from the first page of this issue so it’s OK to talk about them. This issues concludes the California saga, and after this one I’d say it’s safe to call it a “saga.” Once again I wish we lived in a world where something like this could be collected and released to wide acclaim, making Rob a wealthy man. But we’re stuck with this world for now, so you should maybe go back and get past issues for this series if you haven’t already. The rest of this issue deals with the horrible monster getting loose in the real world, the missing 200 townspeople, the key to defeating this monster, and the strategies of fighting an invisible monster. It’s a pretty damned great conclusion, all things considered. I loved the creepy teeth in that creature and how they seemed to go on forever, and life continuing to go on as usual so quickly after things wrapped up was nicely done as well. It seems like I’d already declared an older series of Rob’s as my all-time favorite of his (which makes me feel especially stupid for not remembering the name of that series, but it dealt with amusement parts (or my brain has just completely shut down on this topic)), but this one would have to be a close second or third. If you just read the first issue you’d have no idea that things would end this strangely, and that’s exactly how such comics should be done. Check it out and enjoy, and if we all wish hard enough maybe this could magically become a big summer blockbuster movie.
