Lackluster World #6
Where do I start? There’s the fact that it’s only through sheer force of will that I confined myself to two samples of this comic (the pages with the surprise appearance of two hilariously fictional characters), even though I’ve been sticking to the formula of one sample per comic for years. There’s also the fact that we finally get an issue focused slightly on Celsius, although really it’s more about getting her brothers in their proper places for the finale in the next issue. And hey, finale! That’s a damned shame, even though I do approve of a finite series. OK, I’m reining it in now, otherwise I’ll just randomly gush for a while and call it a day. I’m assuming that everybody reading this is caught up on the events of the first five issues of this series, and if you’re not, you’re only hurting yourselves. This time around Fahrenheit has been exposed as the graffiti artist, Kelvin has beaten a man to death with his bible and been locked in a loony bin, and Celsius is left with no clue of what to do with herself. Those early pages where she fights off blind panic with trivialities was a thing of beauty. Fahrenheit is kind of just killing time this issue, but that only leaves more room for Kelvin and his delightful delusions. My choice of two samples of that probably gives away my opinion, but I honestly could have sampled that entire sequence if I thought it was remotely legal or fair to the creator. There’s insight into Kelvin’s origin story (i.e. “why he went nuts”), Celsius taking a halting step or two towards independence, and all kinds of serious mayhem. Eric has even managed to end things on just about the perfect cliffhanger, made even more perfect by the fact that the next issue will be the last in the series. I may have had quibbles here and there with Lackluster World when it started, but this issue was, top to bottom, a flawless comic. Facial expressions, dialogue, sly background gags, pacing, everything worked as well as humanly possible this time around, enough so that I have to repeat my warning: if you’re not keeping up with this series, you’re depriving yourself of something that comes along in this business only rarely. I’m not sure what he has planned next, if anything, but here’s hoping Eric builds off this and the finale of the series and keeps it up with the comics. Issues like this prove that he has it in him to become one of the big names of the industry, as long as the long odds of actually making a living at this sort of thing doesn’t scare him away. And ordinarily I would complain about that steep $6 cover price, but it is absolutely worth it. $6
