Pyromania #2
I’ll admit it, I am occasionally won over by the cover to a mini alone. It doesn’t necessarily save a crappy book, but it’s usually enough to save a book where I’m wavering. This is a collection of odds and ends but it’s all new to me, and that’s all that matters for these rambles. First up is a short silent piece about a curious young man (John?) wandering around outside and looking at the stars. Yes, I do in fact always miss some of the subtleties of the silent pieces. Next up is a great piece about John trying to find his way in California, where the kids were divided up between skaters and surfers (John was neither). He goes through plenty of other phases, trying to make his own way in the world, until eventually he goes to college in Ohio and finds that people are back to asking him if he’s a skater or a surfer because he is, after all, from California. It turns out (spoiler alert!) that he’s still a work in progress, as are we all. John goes on to tell the story of how he almost burned down the school making special order sweatshirts, as one of them got caught up in dryer and it was too far in to get out. He built up a nice sense of impending doom, even if the story did start out with you already knowing what happened. Next up is a shortie about the process of making t-shirts put to lyrics and, even though I’m not generally a fan of this type of story, this is how it should be done, with the main action taking place and the lyrics complimenting the action. Finally there are a few one page stories called “Susie the Potato Theif” and seriously, if you’re going to take the time to make a recurring character, PLEASE take that extra step to make sure the damned thing is spelled correctly. Curmudgeonly reviewers like me tend to get seriously annoyed at such an easily corrected mistake. The stories themselves are fun, as they detail the mayhem causes while stealing potatoes, and who can’t get behind that? It’s still a pretty good comic even with that stupid mistake, and this is from 2005 so it stands to reason that the man has only gotten better since this. That website linked above has plenty of comical goodness and also links to his other websites, so if you’re at all curious about the guy you have plenty of places to go. $2
