Pugh, Eric – Broke

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Broke

A typo on the first page? Look, I bitch about poor spelling a lot when it’s called for, which to me is whenever somebody has over three or four misspelled words (the number varies depending on the size of the mini, but you get the idea). The reason is simple: it’s never been easier to check a word to see if you spelled it correctly. Back in olden times, if you were writing a comic that you were then going to distribute through your mailing list, fine, maybe you didn’t have time to trek across town and find a smart person to help you out. Now, though, if you have a question, type the word into Google. If you’re not sure about a word (when to use “where” instead of “were”), there are also sites that can help you out with that. It just never ceases to blow my mind that somebody can spend hours drawing a page, making sure that it’s just right to convey their message, and they then blow through the dialogue as quickly as possible. This isn’t meant to pick on Eric specifically, as he’s far from alone in this category, but it’s just so damned easy to check for the right word. OK, now that I’ve shat all over this book, this is the part where I point out that I didn’t hate it. This comic is about a woman who investigates insurance claims and makes her living selling “insurance investigator insurance” to the people that she’s investigating. She’s in a world of hurt financially, so she takes a bat to her car to try and get some insurance money for it. She is suspected of foul play, naturally, which leads to a confrontation with that bat and her own insurance investigator, then some crazy shit happens and the comics stops making sense. But hey, it was a fun ride up to that point. Eric has a genuinely unique perspective on character positioning and what he wants to highlight in any given frame. Sometimes these choices seemed to interfere with the story, but considering how it all ended that wasn’t as big of a deal as I first thought. It’s intriguing as a whole and I think there’s enough good to outweigh the bad. It’s $9, mostly because it’s a graphic novel. Didn’t I mention that?