Hill, Dan – The Fifty Flip Experiment #21

Website

The Fifty Flip Experiment

Now that is one old timey website. Granted, given my lack of skills is designing (or even maintaining) a website, I shouldn’t be making comments, but there’s some real Geocities-like flashing graphics on that link above. Click it and see! Anyway, it’s been a few years since I’ve seen a comic from Dan, and each time I review an issue I come away from it feeling like I’ve failed to convey just how unique and bizarre it was. Maybe I’m referring to the man, but I’m definitely referring to the experience of reading the comics, complete with the introduction this time around. He mentions in his intro that he put the it in the front of the comic because it was more important to him that the words be on the first page “so that the book looks like a comic book… I take it on faith that things that look like comic books will, given enough time, more or less actually become comic books.” Welcome to the world according to Dan Hill! If you’re alarmed by that #21 on the cover and feel like you’ll never catch up on the story, don’t fret, this issue stands all by itself. Dan explains the real story in his intro, but on a surface level this is the story of a time traveler in a spacesuit who wreaks havoc and death on what appears to be a peaceful alien race who play Jenga as a mating ritual. His sidekick only communicates by little lines of paper that come out of her head and, as there’s rarely time to read them in the heat of battle, he usually reads them while putting together the mission in his head, trying to figure out where the comments belong and what they refer to. Naturally there’s also a final battle with a big boss and something ends up getting thrown into the sun. Once again I feel like I failed to give an accurate summation of this comic, but maybe it’s just impossible. Reading a Dan Hill comic is a singular experience, and everybody should try it at least once. If you’re cheap he has a lot of samples up on his website, possibly even full comics. $5