Hooray for one of these Graham Annable books being cheap! By cheap I mean $6.95, but still, a much lower price is better for people who are willing to try new people, and there’s not much better out there to try than this. Stickleback is the story of a man named George (who makes figures out of toilet paper in socially conscious poses), his cat Patty (who likes to tear apart said figures), his friend Yanni (who is depressed about his fingernail and his finger becoming one long, disgusting thing), and three ass-heads at the cafe. It’s almost impossible to pick any one sample page to show you what you’re getting into, as Graham is so deliberate that most of the gags are either set up pages in advance or are just reaction shots to things that have been building for a long time. Or I could just sample the punchline, spoiling it for anybody going in blind and ruining the joke. This is one of those rare books you could give to anybody on the planet and they’d have a hard time not finding it funny, even if maybe it didn’t convince them that comics were the next step in great literature in the world. Of course, this is also the planet that I prefer to live on that I’m talking about, and that planet seems to diverge wildly from this actual planet at times. Click on the title for ordering info or contact info for Alternative Comics is up there too…
