The Fifty Flip Experiment #6
Here’s a note for aspiring cartoonists everywhere: if the character on your cover can touch the inside of his wrist with his index finger, you might still need a little work drawing hands. I’m crapping on this to start the review because there’s plenty here to like, so why not get the bad stuff out of the way first? Dan is doing a bimonthly comic (he’s up to #9), is engaging the local comics community of Champaign-Urbana Illinois to help out with various panels and gags, and has an excellent sense of humor. The trouble is that it’s absurdist humor, and that sort of thing takes some work before a person is going to get it down. He lists Tim & Eric as an influence and they’re damned near brilliant, so that’s a good place to start, but this issue is uneven at best. Future issues look more coherent (he samples 2/3 of every issue on his website), which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective. I tend to subscribe to the Picasso theory of comics: learn everything there is to learn, then feel free to fuck around with the concepts. So, by that theory, if later issues are more coherent, once he gets the hang of that he’ll have a better grasp of the absurd. So what’s in the actual comic? There’s the man on the cover getting into a philosophical discussion with a hobo, an anime joke (I think) that is lost on me, a hilarious bit with snakes getting their own parachutes, how to interpret a sneeze, the inspired mundaneness of Yelena, a philosophical discussion in an asylum, dead Zorro, the memory of elephants, clown sex, air guitar and a hill of beans. Some of the pages are sideways (these are the ones that always seem to be “too busy” and look fainter than the others for some reason) and some of the jokes go nowhere at all, but the funny bits still make this worthwhile for a buck, and for the sake of supporting someone who seems committed to sticking to a schedule. Good behavior like that should be rewarded. Oh, and an early contender for the non-existent “title of the year” category would have to go to “Slice of Life Strips are Very Lazy”. $1
