In this issue, a young woman desperately tries to save her friend from falling into a volcano. Welp, that’s it for this review, what’s going on with y’all? Oh, I kid. Ha! Ha. If you’ve been reading Dan’s comics, either for a long time or a short time, you know what a ridiculously incomplete synopsis that is for one of his pages, let alone an entire comic. If you are new and can’t make up your mind about trying out an issue, consider this: are you frustrated with the limitations of language, or even the combination of visual and written language, to convey the ideas that you’d like to express? Well, read a few of his comics, and you’ll quickly see that anything can be expressed through comics, and comics are even better if they have to percolate in your brain a bit before they settle. Got it? OK, for everybody else who already knows his stuff, I wasn’t lying in my earlier synopsis, that is indeed how things start off. See? I even used the first page as a sample to prove it. And so I wouldn’t have to type out that splendiferous title. Jennifer is trying to save her friend, but both of their arms are slippery after their successful battle against the eye monster (battle, sadly, not shown). Naturally, endurance and muscles play a big part of a thing like this, but that can’t do everything. So she reflects on her cult training (I’ll let you discover that part for yourselves), and manages to send out a distress signal. Naturally, this call goes to a larval child, who passes the signal along to bears. But these bears have to pass the message along to the cult, who are very busy with a series of interpretive dances. Sure, but do we meet each of these dancers? You bet! And we also get the names of several dances. But wait, what about the lava? Yeah, I’ll leave that for you to discover too. Also, once again, his intros and outros (although it’s kind of the same thing this time around) are worth the price of admission alone, and will give you a lot of insight into Dan in case you ever find yourself asking “who would make a comic like this?”, whether in a reverent or negative tone. These are always a treat to me, so you can guess where I’m heading: give it a shot. Get a few of them, is my advice, so you can get a real sense of what’s happening here. $5 ($7 with shipping)
