Good Minnesotan #3
These people just keep improving the design scheme of these anthologies. This one can go right on your bookshelf, what with the spine and all. If they keep this up #4 is going to have one of those gold-embossed covers that the big companies were using for a few years back when I cared about such things. How about the contents? I’d say this is their strongest issue yet, or at least certainly their most consistent. Not a bad story in the bunch. I should note that all these stories have brief bios of the creators before the stories as well as contact info and your best place to get all that is either through their website or by buying the book, as I’m far too lazy to list all that stuff here. Noah Harmon has a piece about a squid trying to communicate an idea, Toby Jones details his ethical and practical struggle with mice, Madeline Queripel sums up a courtship in one page, Meghan Hogan has the start of a graphic novel about great horned owls (and she might want to avoid dark text against a dark background, but other than that it was fascinating), Justin Skarhus & Raighne Hogan tell the tale of a day of vari0us inescapable sexcapades, Ed Moorman details a year of firsts in one night, Abigail Mullen wants a small house, Anna Bonguivanni eats a baby (and wins the prize for the most gorgeous artwork in the book), Reynold Kissling helps demonstrate why even starting a relationship is so difficult, and Danno Klonowski has a stream of true nonsense from the local crazy person. I left two stories out, mostly because they could have been comics in their own right. John & Luke Holden spell out an utterly directionless life just about as well as I’ve ever seen, as a total lump of a man loses his last job and wanders around trying to barely not be homeless, and Nicholas Breutzman shows us the ongoing war between desperate meth addicts and people who live in secluded homes. This is the best work yet from pretty much everybody listed (that I’ve seen anyway, as a few of them have some pretty extensive credits listed before this book) and it does an excellent job of keeping the reader engaged for its 100+ pages. Send them some money and/or start thinking about beginning one of these anthologies in your own neck of the woods, why don’t you? $12
