April 23, 2010
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Skyscrapers of the Midwest #4
It’s saying something in a series as fantastical as this when my favorite parts end up being the quiet moments. This issue deals with two young boys and the rich fantasy lives they dream up to cope with living in a profoundly dull town. One boy dreams or his lost toy dinosaur and his team of friends fighting big fights while the other dreams himself to be a fake comic book hero, Nova Stealth. Joshua pulls out all the stops for that particular parody with a wonderfully accurate old Marvel style cover, even putting in an ad for a Nova Stealth video game that is really a polemic against video game cheats. There’s significantly more quiet moments that you’d think in such a book, and it’s rare that you get equal parts goodness of the chaotic bits and the more introspective moments. Not sure if this is a continuing story (as I missed #3 somehow) but if every issue is as good as this what difference does it make? Great stuff, well worth hunting down. $5
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Skyscrapers of the Midwest #1
Where did this guy come from? Did I miss more hype? This book is fantastic. I love the endings, mostly because they’re so totally random in almost every case, but that’s a hard thing to talk about without giving stuff away. In here you have a boy pretending to be a robot, the end of the world, Granma dropping some pies, and a robot family with an angry father. Throw in a “cowboy” answering some fake letters and you have a solid book all around. I love it when you throw in little things like that to go with the art. Why have blank pages? The book looks great (that includes the art and the packaging), it’s $2, and Joshua looks to me like somebody people should support. Here’s an e-mail address, I have no idea what else he has available but I’d be interested to see it…
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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The Soap Lady
Well, I always said that sooner or later I’d get around to reviewing this, and it turned out to be much, much later. And even then it was mostly only because Top Shelf sold it for so very cheap. Oh well, at least now I get to see how Renee does with a children’s book. All I’d seen was the book above, which didn’t seem like it would be the kind of thing that children should be reading at all, so I had my doubts… which were crushed completely after reading this. It’s done as a children’s book, like I said, with one panel per page and the text beneath the illustration. It’s the story of a lady made of soap who comes up out of the lake and befriends a young boy who’s trying to win a bet with his mother by staying clean for a week. She cleans him up and then gets to work cleaning up the whole forest, but people have a tendency to fear things they don’t understand, and, children’s book or not, I don’t want to give away the ending or anything. Oh, and I also don’t usually mention the blurbs on the back of the book, but this one is notable because they’re from Penn Jillette and Arthur Penn (director of Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man), not your usual quotable for a comic. Great stuff, I wouldn’t hesitate at all in reading this to a child. it’s $19.95 at cover price, but I’ll bet you could find it for cheaper if you did some digging. Oh, and here’s her website!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Marbles in my Underpants
I’ll post a full review of this later, as it is possibly the single most disturbing collection of comics that I’ve ever seen. With an introduction by Jim Woodring (who is probably my single favorite living artist today), this thing starts off bizarre and just gets weirder. Buy it, you absolutely, positively won’t regret it. Note from 3/1/02: I may or may not review this at any point in the near future, as I’m still recovering from the last time I read this, so here’s what “to stew in one’s one juice” means, from A Hog on Ice and Other Curious Expressions: To suffer the consequences of one’s own act. This, or its variant, ” to fry in one’s own grease'”, is very old. In the latter form it appears in a thirteenth-century tale of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and there is a French equivalent, cuire dans son jus, It is presumable that the older expression, at least, was originally literal; one fried in his own grease when, having committed some act punishable by such means, was burned at the stake.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Micrographica
Only Renee French could take a story about a ball of crap, a dead guy, a
sandwich and some tiny rodents and make it into a thing of beauty.
Apparently these images were done first in an online strip and in a much
tinier format, so if you’re looking for her usual gorgeous level of
detail, you’re going to be disappointed. Still, I don’t know about you,
but I go to Renee French for her writing much more than her drawing,
because the mind on that woman is unmatched by anybody I’ve ever known
or read. The story begins with Preston finding a tiny ball of crap, who
shows it to his friend Moe, who immediately takes credit for it. They
leave the crapball with Aldo, an even tinier rodent who seems obsessed
with the thing, as they go off exploring. This leads them to what
appears to be a dead body (or at least I hope it was dead as Moe was
crawling around in its eyeball), while Aldo finally cracks the crapball
open and we get to see what’s inside. I can go through the whole story
here, but why bother? Chances are you know already if Renee is somebody
whose work you like, and if she is I can’t imagine this description
would lead you away from checking this out. She also has a crap gallery
in the back, featuring crap drawing from such luminaries as Jim
Woodring, Dylan Williams and Penn Jillette. There’s also a nice blurb
from Jenna Fischer from The Office (NBC version), and it always makes me
happy when vaguely famous people push work like this, as this is the
sort of thing that should be read by humans everywhere. $10
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Edison Steelhead Now Available! $9
With Renee, most people already have their minds made up. If I say that this book is a series of drawings of deformed girls and rabbits, accompanied by a brief description of the subject and the circumstances where the drawing took place, you’re probably either intrigued or just think she’s being “weird” again and you have no interest. To which I say, well, more for us I guess, although you should really think about expanding your horizons just a bit. This is a fairly simple concept, as I described above, but I found myself eventually being drawn into the sad life of the fictional sketch artist, Edison Steelhead, and his sad, lonely life, told only in the briefest of descriptive sentences. Add to that the sight of a lineup of deformed rabbits and little girls and it’s hard not to be the slightest bit moved by the whole spectacle. All told, it’s another unique and indispensable comic from Renee, like everything else I’ve seen from her.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Detached #1
In case you were wondering about the concept of this comic, one morning a man wakes up to find that his body has detached itself from his head. Like the name, get it? DO YOU? Ahem. Anyway, the body has to go through a normal day at work, trying to get a girl to like him, and drinking out at the bars. This is a lot funnier than I thought it was going to be, frankly. It’s silly, obviously, but never really crosses that line into being stupid silly. OK, maybe it does, but it does it in an engaging enough way to make the book a fun read. Incredibly thin line, you have been successfully navigated! Wackiness ensues throughout the day, the funniest part being that nobody seems to notice that this guy is walking around without a head. I don’t know if this concept would hold up for a regular series (or even if that’s something that Jim has in mind, although the whole “number one” thing would indicate that there’s more), but I’d be curious to see it in action, and Jim has won me over enough with this issue to make me trust him for a little while. Worth a look, maybe there’s more samples on the website if you need more convincing. $2.95
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Slam Bang #1 Volume 3 Now Available! $9.95
Somehow this massive book has been available in the store here for almost a year and I’ve somehow missed talking about it. I blame the elections and the loss of my appendix last year; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Want some details? As the cover says, there are over 50 contributors, this massive thing is over 200 pages, the cover art is gorgeous (even though the girl on the cover doesn’t actually appear in any of the stories) and keeping something this packed to under $10 is an impressive achievement. As for contributors, there are way too many to list them all, so I’ll just stick with the ones who have pages up here at the old Sloth for reference: Dan Taylor, Brad Foster, Tim Corrigan, John Lustig, Stan Yan, Dean LeCrone, Matt Levin, and Jim Siergey. That leaves all sorts of new cartoonists for you to discover in here, doesn’t it? As a whole, well, it’s an anthology, so some parts are stronger than others, but there’s more than enough in here to make it worth your while. Highlights include Ethan Wenberg and Stan Yan’s tale of the poo-flinging reporter (which makes this the most political book I’ve seen all year, sadly enough), the brief Kevin Hanna puppet theater story explaining to kids how the fast food is made, Ron LeBrasseur’s vampire love story, Dean LeCrone’s tale of an old lady trapped in a hot car by her dog, Tyler Sticka’s fly fight over some poo, Dan Taylor’s story about a successful weight loss clinic, Dan Lauer’s Iron Chef Funnies, Anton Bogaty’s tale of a space crew trying to defeat an unstoppable alien, and John Lustig’s always amusing Last Kiss comics, which are scattered throughout. The heart of the book though (figuratively and literally) is the Tim Corrigan Mighty Guy piece about the slave driver that is Allen Freeman and the methods he uses to keep all his cartoonists happy. Mighty Guy has been around for decades (although if I remember correctly it was always self-published) and I’ve always thought it was vastly underrated. What fan of cartoons ever wouldn’t appreciate Mighty Guy being shoved into a tin can (when trying to take over “Marvelous” comics) by the “Bulk”? All told, this is a pretty solid bunch of comics. A few stinkers, naturally, but more than enough good stuff in here to make up for it. $9.95
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Double Cross #15
It’s like I’m out of Tony’s comics all over again, as this is the last one I have to ramble about on this website. For those of you reading this site in the future and wondering what the order of the reviews is on this page… forget about it. Chronologically speaking they’re all over the place, so focus on the art instead, OK? This is the second part of his More Or Less story, which is reprinted in a collection above, but since I haven’t looked at that in years I’m going to go ahead and assume that it didn’t reprint this entire issue, and thus it’s OK for me to bring it up again. Hey, even if it did reprint the whole thing the world (the tiny part of it that reads this website, anyway) needs to be periodically reminded of Tony’s work. This is the story of a night in the life of Tony, as he has to attend a family dinner for his grandma’s birthday. He relates trying to work out to get her with his mother, when he should show up for dinner (and when he actually shows up), dealing with his brother when he tries to pass Oasis off as “just like the Beatles”, and shows a very frank and human family dinner. To top it all off he gets home earlier than his roommate expected, and I won’t even try to describe what he finds there. Tony is probably the only comic creator around who can misspell words like crazy (OK, he only misses a few) and not have it bug me, and that is probably due entirely to his reaction to a Dave Sim speech at SPACE in Ohio 5 or 6 years ago. It’s a funny story but I don’t want to post it here (unless I already did somewhere, and in that case “oops”), so ask me about it sometime. Lucky for you Tony has a fair chunk of his work in print in collections, or close enough to being in print that you could find it with a little persistence and help from the Google. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. $2
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Envy
This says in the inside front cover that it’s an “attempt” at a 24 hour comic. Wonder how close it was? For one thing, it’s significantly less sloppy than your average 24 hour comic, which leads me to believe that he came up with idea and then redrew it later to make a decent mini out of it. Why aren’t I talking more about the comic? Oh, come on, you know I like Tony’s stuff. Is there some mystery to what I’m going to say about it? OK, fine. It’s about a man who has a twin brother who’s a superhero, but the other twin is stuck with an unbearably ordinary life. So the ordinary twin decides to kidnap his superhero brother, steal his costume and reap the rewards of fame and fortune himself. Along the way he finds out that he might have some superpowers after all… but the only way to get them is to do good deeds. Great stuff and, like I said, this sure doesn’t look like your average 24 hour comic. $2 maybe? I don’t know, that’s a pretty sweet cover, it might be $3. Ah, just check his website, it’s all over this page and I’m sure there’s info there.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Slam Bang #3 Volume 2 Now Available! $4
It’s time to go back to another forgotten issue in my constantly growing online store, and three cheers for it being another good one. There’s only one mildly weak piece in this anthology, and on further review I might have even misread that one. This starts off with a story from Allen’s childhood (drawn by Christine Wald), where he tries to keep up with a friend on a much better bike through a raised dirt trail with disastrous results. Next is Moose of Terror by Mark Monlux, in which two moose (meese?) wander into a small town, followed by a small gang of wild turkeys. Eric Weems then has what is essentially an ad for the comic in which a variety of celebrity spokespeople are chosen and then discarded, and I confess to being mildly baffled by the punchline. Anton Bogaty is up next with The Short Biography of an Unknown Artist, the “weak” piece I mentioned, but looking again at that title I think this story works well as a one-pager that ends abruptly. Revenge of the Booth Babe by John Lustig (who should be on this page much more than he is, as I always get a kick out of his Last Kiss series) has an abused model of comic conventions turning the tables on the middle-aged fat guys who always make her dress up in degrading outfits. Finally there’s one of the better stories of pure mayhem that I’ve ever seen, Power Struggle by Dean LeCrone. There’s a young boy, you see, who wants a cookie. His father does not want him to spoil his dinner and so refuses said cookie. What follows is ten pages of constantly escalating violence including power tools, crapping on the carpet, stuffed animals and flesh-eating ladybugs, and that only covers the first few pages. Seriously, if the rest of the comic sucked I’d be recommending it for this story alone, and the rest of the comic is already pretty good. If you’re a fan of mayhem, this is required reading. If you prefer the quiet stories, there are plenty of those on this website too, you big baby. $4
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Esoterica #2
One of these days I’ll learn that trying to keep track of a story when I only see a new issue once a year is an iffy proposition at best. Maybe if I had any kind of order to my comic piles I’d be able to grab back issues… but I digress, as I usually do. If you read the review for #1, you’ll see that I thought this had a lot of potential, so has that been realized here? Well, sort of, but this is obviously a long story, and it’s one of those cases where I’m not going to be sure about that until it’s over. In this one most of the characters from the last issue find themselves in an alien universe, with a handy-dandy guide to let them know a lot of the important facts about the place. There’s an alien on the planet who needs to sacrifice them to his god in order to save his people, and (not to give anything away), I’m REALLY intrigued by the god, who we do get to see. Other than that, the art is solid, the writing is fine (although some of the dialogue isn’t great), and I’m still cautiously optimistic as to where this whole thing is heading. Contact info is up there, this one’s $3!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Slam Bang Volume 2 #6
Kudos to Christina Wald for that cover, there’s plenty to unpack before you even open the book. In case you can’t read the fine print (which is a shame, as there are jokes all over the cover) this is the advertising issue, basically an excuse for the people involved to take the “random fake ads” gag and have some real fun with it. Edward Pun (which can’t possibly be his real name) shows a bad day that ends in a clever ad for a massage chair, Brad Foster has a “rehabilitated” quack doctor, Ryan Estrada shows off the civic conscience of the actual Big Boy, Roger Langridge has the inspired idea of selling “mother in a jar” (just in case you’re too independent), Dean LeCrone & Allen Freeman have a time machine for sale, Tyler Sticka plays with celebrities in his bit (and hopes to get sued to “land a major distribution deal”), John Lustig again steals the show with his bit about the biological clock and where to place the blame after a bad break-up, and Jim Siergey has some games for children to help them find their place in life (as automatons). That’s leaving out plenty of stuff, as this thing is packed with ads that are only 1/2 or 1/3 of a page long by all sorts of folks. Big laughs, big issue, all kinds of stuff to pick through, what more do you want? $4
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Slam Bang #1 Volume 2
Note to comics people who parody those old ads in the back of comics: it’s hopeless. Chris Ware did it however many years ago in Acme Novelty Library, and he did it brilliantly. Anything after that is just a waste of time. In my opinion anyway, and I’m just some schmuck with a website. A couple of the parodies were funny, most of them just sort of meh, but I still think that particular form of parody has been done about as well as it ever could be. Oh yeah, and there was a comic somewhere here too, wasn’t there? The first story, by Anton Bogaty, is about a monster self-help group that helps them deal with life after they’re no longer scary. Pretty funny, and three cheers for all the unmentioned cameos. Next up is a little illustrated poem/song called Darby O’Spudnuts by Mark Martin, a so-so shortie with a great title. Then you have a couple of shorties by Christina Wald called Slacker A.C., about a teenager who’s supposed to be the antichrist but who is too consumed by video games and girls to care about this true calling. My favorite of the bunch, this one could be seriously funny as a regular mini… or it could fizzle out and get old quick. Hard to say, but I think it’s worth a shot. Kevin Hanna has a couple of newspaper sized strips with some really stupid punchlines. Maybe he has better stuff on his website, but I didn’t see anything here to impress me. Next is a story by Sygnin called Spanky the Ouija Monkey, about a frantically violent monkey who desperately wants to be spanked. Finally you have a short sample of Last Kiss by John Lustig, where he takes old romance comics and inserts his old dialogue. This one left me mostly indifferent, but I have more from the guy that I’ll be getting to soon, as it’s a great idea and I want to see more before I pass judgment. Oh, and this is the first issue in 13 years, which probably isn’t the best sign in the world. Here’s an e-mail address, this one is $3!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Tragic Relief
In case anybody out there still had doubts that the Center for Cartoon Studies had a great program, capable of teaching the aspiring cartoonist all sorts of useful things, here’s one more piece of evidence in their favor. There’s already a pile of stuff accumulating, granted, but it seems to be getting more impressive by the week. This is Colleen’s first graphic novel, but she’s still putting out issues of the Tragic Relief comic on a regular basis (as least judging by her website). This is the silent tale of a young man who’s living with his mother and his tendency to find love in the oddest of places. A mermaid, a genie and a harpy (I may be completely off base on that last one) all play a part, as does the profoundly overprotective mother. One of the many impressive feats of this book is that I’m still not sure whether the mother was malicious or just cluelessly “lucky”, although that won’t make a bit of sense to anybody who hasn’t already read this. As for the art, few people have done so much with so little. There are no backgrounds to speak of, many of the images are deceptively simple, and yet damned near every one of them moves the story along, often with the subtlest of glances or shrugs. It’s obvious, after looking at the work coming out of graduates from the comic college, that the future for comics is brighter than it’s been in years. At least, it is in terms of the quality of the work being put out. Whether or not any of these poor kids are ever going to make a living at this remains to be seen. I should also point out that this hefty thing is a measly $7, as it’s on recycled paper.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Nibble #2
Crap, it looks like I’m reviewing a comic about Valentine’s Day after all. What can I say, Tom sent me a fresh pile of comics and this one was on top. There’s a simple premise here. A young man (apparently named “Baby”) made his mom a giant valentine. On his walk home, he’s startled by a cat, sending said valentine up into a tree. After attempting to get the valentine and failing, Baby is left wondering what he’s going to do… until he gets an offer he can’t refuse. For me this might just cross that line of being too damned cute for words, but different people have different lines for that sort of thing. Either way it’s still only $.25 and goes nicely in my pile of other Nibbles.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Tempo Lush #5: My Half Term Holiday
Richy has managed to keep his perfect record intact (in terms of this set of ten minis) with this mini, and that officially makes half the set. I also feel compelled to point out that full color minis are rare enough, putting together a set of them (with the exception of #4 so far) should kill any lingering doubts about the cost of this set. This mini is told from the perspective of a small child turning in a school project about what she did on her holiday. “Jodie” says that it’s boring to start, so she decides to make a spaceship and go to the moon. The whole comic is told with asides from the teacher, grading this as she goes and making little suggestions to the child, and it’s at this point that the teacher worries that this is going to be “another of your silly stories”. Indeed, it does seem to be heading that way, especially after Jodie’s father comes to see his daughter with a spaceship of his own and they go off on an adventure. The teacher is in for a bit of a shock when Jodie throws in a panel about seeing her teacher “giving a special hug” to the headmaster, and I have to stop with that or give the whole thing away. Let’s just say it’s wonderfully awkward and Richy manages to nail both the naivety of the small child doing a mostly innocent report along and a teacher becoming increasing alarmed with the tone of said report. He also does a nice job of making the art childlike but not awful, as it’s a fine line to walk. I’m clearly biased as can be in favor of this set of minis (which is $16.50 and comes in an adorable teddy bear case), but hey, I am usually biased towards funny and imaginative comics, as I’m just old-fashioned that way.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Woman King
Here’s another excellent graphic novel from Colleen, and it’s further evidence (as if any were needed) that the Center for Cartoon Studies is doing some excellent work with its students. This is the story of the uprising of the bears against society, as one bear in particular (the one on the cover missing an eye) smells some fish being cooked, wanders innocently into a camp to eat them, and it attacked for his troubles. He vows then and there to take back the forest, and soon runs into a little girl (age 3) who isn’t afraid of him. Taking this for a sign, he gives her armor and puts her in charge of the first attack against the humans. Obviously she doesn’t know a thing about fighting, but the bears prevail and decide that they need to take back all the forests in the world, which brings us to the rest of the book. It details her growing up with the bears, killing all the humans that they find, and it shows her general ambivalence… until she sees up close how humans live. I’ve said more than enough already, but this book really is remarkable. It somehow manages to be, at the same time, a story about growing up, about myth and animal society, about right and wrong, the use of force and when fighting for the sake of fighting leaves all rationality behind. Colleen deftly displays these contradictions by showing a good human who only wants to paint the quiet scenes between battles (and is killed for his troubles), a stag who only wants her to learn and a young boy who, if this were a Disney movie, would be an obvious love interest. She does an excellent job with the “love interest” by keeping the story going firmly where it should go, so kudos to her for that. It’s such a damned near perfect book that I feel compelled to at least complain about one thing: the missing eye of the lead bear. Not to get all technical on you, but if a character in your story loses an eye, the same eye should be missing for the whole story. The lead bear has his missing eye drift back and forth from the left side of his head to the right and back over and over again, to the point where it was an unnecessary distraction to the rest of the story. Not enough to ruin it, or even seriously damage it, just enough to get me to wonder how such an obvious mistake could have gotten through. Eh, after two excellent books I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was going for the old timey cartoon look, where things like that would happen all the time. This graphic novel is also only $7, is still on recycled paper, and is still a real bargain.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Tempo Lush #7: I Hate David Samson
It’s rare that I’m a fan of an artist going from gorgeous, colorful detail to stick figures and sloppiness, but Richy manages to make it all right. Again, all by itself it might be annoying, but as part of this ten issue whole it’s just perfect. This is, as you can probably tell from the title, an angry diatribe against David Samson, who I can only assume is a fictional character. He delivers mail in the office, but Richy (I’m just going to call the unnamed lead character Richy to avoid confusion) is convinced that David is after his job. There’s his evil extension number, the coded messages in his greetings, how he delivers mail with errors and yet it’s somehow not his fault (like a misspelled or folded letter), and all the horrors in the world for which David is clearly responsible. And that’s all the stuff on the front page, the back deals with all the ways that Richy has innocently tried to get back at David and how David ruins good music just by listening to it. This comic is a great example of how pettiness takes over in a hurry in the workplace, and really, what’s so bad about pushing a guy down the stairs in good fun? Funny stuff, and I should point that it’s not like the whole comic is in stick figures, Richy just uses a looser style than usual to depict the mildly crazy rantings of the narrator. If you’re eagle-eyed enough to see unrelated writing in the sample, that what it’s all about. It’s $16.50 for the set, and I’m still waiting to find the weak link in this box o’ comics.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Tempo Lush #3: Govinda the Meditating Rabbit
Well, this one certainly wins the truth in advertising award, if there were such an award for small press comic titles. While events change around the rabbit, he is a constant in his position, which goes to show you how great he is at this meditation thing. There’s not much of a linear story here (and I already told you about the title, so how much of a story did you think you’d be seeing?), but events in here include other students playing a practical joke with a tree, Govinda practicing several different methods of meditation, and his utter nonchalance at being interrupted by a featureless green blob. It’s cute, it’s funny, and it’s tiny. And it even has the benefit of ending the same way all of my serious attempts at meditation have ended, and if that’s a mystery to you then you have clearly not seriously attempted meditation. As mentioned before, this is one of many minis, and the set goes for $16.50.
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Posted by Kevin
