Grandpa’s Lap #5
What a mess. I shouldn’t be too hard on this, I guess. This is what I was expecting all along with anthologies and should probably consider myself lucky that this is the first one I’ve seen in a while that just doesn’t have much going for it. It’s an anthology out of Carbondale, IL and it does have a wide variety of stories, as long as “wide variety” means that they all have the same themes: Sex, drugs and demons. If you think I’m going to go on some religious rant here, you don’t know me very well. I have no problem with any of those things in stories as long as they’re done well. This is sloppy for about half of the issue, in desperate need of an editor, and therapy might be advisable for Mike Hackett, unless he really does just have random women come to his place to do drugs with him and have crazy sex. If that’s true, hey, more power to him. If it’s not, his stories verge on pathetic. You also have your anime girls with giant breasts (Succubus Party by Matt Speroni), the page I sampled from Scott Powers that I actually liked, one mess of a story called Cartoon Hell by Nathan Stiffler (the mess here is only the writing, art, and lettering), and some other stuff so random that it’s barely worth mentioning. I did like pretty much all of the Scott Powers stuff, including his Random Samurai Story, but everything else was forgettable unless you’re 15 and easily amused by gore and boobs. If so, send them $3 (it is a pretty big anthology at 44 pages, I’ll give them that much) at: Scott Powers 1736 Old West Main Carbondale, IL 62901. Or just e-mail them to see what they have available, as several issues of this have been printed.
