The Fifty Flip Experiment #1
It seems like only yesterday (because it was) when I was wishing for a complete collection of John Porcellino’s early, long since out-of-print issues of King Cat. Today I grabbed the first issue of a series I’ve really come to enjoy to see what it was like in the early days, and man, it’s not pretty. It looks like he pulled every halfway funny piece out of his sketchbook, no matter how old it was, and threw in a few strips where he seems to have drastically improved his drawing skills, with the end result being a mish mash of nonsense. He still managed to put together a few funny strips, and I loved his little asides during the strips about how he wasted space on certain strips, but overall this was a timely reminder that it’s often best to go with the later work when trying to form an opinion about something. If this was the only issue of this series I’d have a significantly more negative reaction to it than I do knowing he got a lot better as he went on, but it would take a real fan of this series/artist to get a whole lot out of this issue. Stories in here include an astronaut with his co-pilot/blow-up doll, poor table manners, being tortured by sasquatch, a few tales of spoons for hands man (with varying degrees of artistic proficiency, as I think one of these was drawn with magic marker), an awful care package, I Miss Shel Silverstein, pick which contestant has scorpions under his skin, bat erections, new stilts, action hero Jesus, fat man trying to get back in shape, and a number of things that don’t make even a tiny bit of sense but are still somehow at least mildly amusing. That’s the one thing that keeps this from being a total stinker: the fact that it’s so strange that it’s usually at least a little bit funny. Still, I’d go with one of the later issues if you just wanted to check out his stuff. Just sayin’… $1
