Magical Madness #1
Truth in advertising time: I blew up the cover and the sample to twice their normal size. Why? Because I figured it would be almost impossible to make anything out otherwise, and it’s relevant to the criticisms I have about the book. This is a story of two people and a wise-cracking dummy who apparently go around fixing odd problems. In this issue they try and retrieve a woman’s uncle who has been hypnotized by Dracula. Naturally, the whole Dracula story has been rehashed here with our heroes in place of the literary characters. It’s also tremendously abbreviated, of course. There are a few funny parts, but there are also some groaners when it comes to the one-liners. Not sure how you could avoid that with a wise-cracking dummy, but there you go. What was wrong with it? Well, Anthony needs to work a bit on keeping the characters looking the same throughout the book. The size of that dummy’s nose varied wildly. The other faces were better, mostly. He also needs to throw a few backgrounds in. The first few pages had plenty of them, then it was almost all straight lines of crosshatching. It’s a tiny, tiny book, so I’m not sure how much it would have added, but it probably would have helped. Overall it was a good first book. Work needs to be done, but there’s definitely some promise here. There are two websites listed on the back of the book, here and here. Check them both out, I don’t see a price on this but it can’t be more than a dollar.
