Coelacanth and Friends (Kekionga Mini Works #16)
In case you can’t read that blurb on the cover, this is a 25 hour mini comic. I’m not sure how that’s much different than a 24 hour mini comic (other than the obvious), but in this case I can say that the extra hour helped immensely with the artwork. 24 hour books often look at least a little bit rushed, this one is gorgeous. The time constraints didn’t slow her down a bit. Pam started this off from a “story seed”, using a disembodied brain, an ugly fish trophy and a plane about to crash. Things start off with the plane, well, crashing, but as we pull back we see that it’s a toy plane with an apparently sentient doll at the helm. A group of entirely too adorable children were playing with the plane, and they take it to a salvage yard in an attempt to fix it up. In this shop we meet the ugly fish trophy (the coelacanth, obviously) and the disembodied brain, two beings who would much rather be in the main part of the store instead of shoved in a storeroom, as they imagine the view would be better. There’s a hefty cast of characters for a fairly simple story: 6 children, the shop owner, his dog and a stockboy. I previously thought (after reading #19 of this series) that these minis all used the same cast of characters, after reading this I have to confess that I have no idea if that’s true. Here’s hoping I was smart enough to get more than one mini from Pam at this SPACE. Anyway, this was a pretty good mini. Decent story, odd cast of characters, and artwork that was way too impressive for the time allowed. Worth a look, and maybe one of these years I’ll just buy a whole pile of these. $1
