Tempo Lush #7: I Hate David Samson
It’s rare that I’m a fan of an artist going from gorgeous, colorful detail to stick figures and sloppiness, but Richy manages to make it all right. Again, all by itself it might be annoying, but as part of this ten issue whole it’s just perfect. This is, as you can probably tell from the title, an angry diatribe against David Samson, who I can only assume is a fictional character. He delivers mail in the office, but Richy (I’m just going to call the unnamed lead character Richy to avoid confusion) is convinced that David is after his job. There’s his evil extension number, the coded messages in his greetings, how he delivers mail with errors and yet it’s somehow not his fault (like a misspelled or folded letter), and all the horrors in the world for which David is clearly responsible. And that’s all the stuff on the front page, the back deals with all the ways that Richy has innocently tried to get back at David and how David ruins good music just by listening to it. This comic is a great example of how pettiness takes over in a hurry in the workplace, and really, what’s so bad about pushing a guy down the stairs in good fun? Funny stuff, and I should point that it’s not like the whole comic is in stick figures, Richy just uses a looser style than usual to depict the mildly crazy rantings of the narrator. If you’re eagle-eyed enough to see unrelated writing in the sample, that what it’s all about. It’s $16.50 for the set, and I’m still waiting to find the weak link in this box o’ comics.
