Gennis, Emi – Spaz #1

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Spaz! #1

I’d like to start this review with something utterly irrelevant to the comic.  As I know a good chunk of you read this at work when you should be doing other things (and hey, if it wasn’t for my work blocking me from accessing this site at work I’d probably be writing it there), try saying Emi’s name out loud.  Go ahead, your coworkers already think you’re crazy, especially if you’ve ever brought a comic in.  That’s just a fun name.  Luckily she also makes a pretty great comic.  There are a variety of stories in here, mostly to do with her time working at a restaurant, some not so much.  There’s her getting hit on over by the phone (in an incredibly creepy fashion) by a guy ordering wings, waking up on a bad hair day and having very few options for what to do about it, losing patience with profoundly stupid questions at work and a gallery of the many creatures living at her apartment.  There’s also the heart of the comic, a story about a guy who comes into her restaurant on a regular basis, something he’s apparently been doing for decades.  It does a nice job of going into how hard it is NOT to speculate about the personal life of anybody who is a bit odd and how unlikely that speculation is to be anywhere near the truth.  Personally, I’m also going with the theory of a tiny alien controlling his human body, but I guess we’ll never know.  She also has regular updates to her website, a four panel strip twice a week that’s half comedy and half therapy, but she explains it far better than I could.  I also happened to check out her site right when she mentioned that she found “an atrocious error” in the second issue, which she was also nice enough to send along, so it’ll be fun trying to find that next time around.  As for this, it’s funny, the art is fantastic (especially if this is her first issue of anything), and there aren’t enough minis like this around out there these days.  Send her some money to reward good behavior!  $2