Steiner, Steve – Odd Clods #8

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Odd Clods #8

Well, this is embarrassing. A review with no pictures? For a comic, which is the most visual of all mediums? Well, when I reviewed #7 of this series I had to grab pictures from Steve’s website, and this one is so new that it isn’t ON his website yet. And the book is too large for me to scan, so any pictures I’d put up would be unconnected snippets of much larger images, so basically worthless. Look, I’ll keep checking his website, and if he updates with images of this book I’ll, um, borrow them again and post them here. In the meantime, Steve has really outdone himself visually with this one, which makes it even worse that all I have to convey that for now is my words. Last time around I was impressed because Steve presented several larger stories in the comic, with my theory being that his style was evolving. Which was a ridiculous thing to think, because this one is almost entirely ad parodies, which by nature are rarely even a full page… and I’d still call this one a step up from his previous issue. Which I loved! Anyway, the framing device here is that an unemployed dude spends the day hanging out at home and reading the newspaper which, as is the case of the few remaining newspapers that have survived into 2025, mostly ads. To be clear, I would have liked this just fine if the book was all ad parodies, because Steve is a genuinely funny writer and several of these got a chuckle out of me. But no, he goes much farther than that. The ads are increasingly encroached upon by other ads as you go on. First there’s the acidic teeth cleaner that drips down onto the lady who’s trying to feed her cat a vegan diet, then the roided-up dude literally breaking the wall into an ad for drugged chocolate bars, or the job deletion robot’s laser beam bouncing off a protected brain in one ad an onto a real estate ad, and on and on it goes. The whole book (outside of wrapping up the framing device story in the end) is an engaging puzzle to read how the ads effect each other, which order you should be reading these (some are easy to follow the chain of chaos, others you as the reader could go a few ways), and the few ads that manage to stay walled off from the increasing madness. There’s also a reason for it all in the end, which I’m not going to get into here, but I thought it was nicely handled. This isn’t on his website as of mid November 2025, but I can’t imagine that’ll stay the case much longer, so check it out why don’t you? Don’t let the price tag scare you, you’ll be getting quite a lot of comic for that price. $15

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