I’m starting to wonder if we’re ever going to catch up to that robot giraffe. And if you’re coming into this review blind, reading the previous comics and/or reviews for this series would help with that one. This time around we’re back with Wayne traveling along in Murray’s semi. We get a flashback again, this time a flashback within a flashback for some extra oomph. Wayne thinks back to a strange musician mystic type who he was never sure actually existed. He tried avoiding her after the weirdness got to be too much for him, but she finally cornered him and gave him a vision of a traumatic piece of business in his childhood. It involved cops, flamethrowers and the disappearance or death of his mentor (I’ve read too many comics to assume a death without a body, so forgive my skepticism of his death), and it’s something Wayne had managed to put out of his mind for a lot of years. From there we learn about how that led directly to Wayne leaving town and his quest to try to find meaning, which lead in a roundabout way to being asked to help track down the robot giraffe and his “chance” meeting of Murray. Yep, we finally get some clarity on that aspect of things too, as Murray fesses up about a few things. Oh, and we briefly even see Wayne and Toast in the same panel, even if it’s not exactly a pleasant interaction and it only happens in a flashback. There are the usual notes about specifics in the afterward section, which was especially helpful this time around in identifying exactly what the cops were doing. He also includes a few older comics from various zines at the time (1995ish), so we can see some very early iterations of some of these characters. I’m still hooked on the story, even if I am starting to doubt that we’ll ever catch up to that robot. But hey, now that a few mysteries have been solved, I might be completely wrong about that guess. Check in next week to find out, I suppose. Once again I’m not sure how much it costs to buy the physical copies, but the whole issue is available online at the link.
