May 15, 2013
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Black Rose #1
It’s not even remotely fair to bring this up during my reviews of the first issues of ongoing series, but at this point I want to see more before I get too sucked in. Don’t get me wrong, this issue did just about everything you need to do to get me interested in a series. There’s the opening, set two weeks before the start of the story that’s told throughout the rest of the book, which already promises a bad end for our hero. We get to see a negotiation between a large army and a terrified smaller town, in which we learn plenty about the motivations of both. There’s a long conversation between members of this army in some quiet time between battles, which is essential to get to know these people and what they’re trying to do. There are also tantalizing hints of the enemy, as well as the fact that we’re still not sure which side is the “bad guys.” And no misspellings that I could see, which shouldn’t be so rare as to warrant praise, but it is what it is. So yeah, every aspect of this makes up a successful and compelling first issue, but I just have to be the cynic who wonders if we’ll ever see the last issue of this six issue series. It’s not fair, it assigns blame to this crew for mistakes that countless other comics creators/publishers have made in the past, and I’m going to stop going on about it right now and will instead just hope that I see a couple more issues of this available by SPACE 2014. If you’re looking for an intriguing fantasy series, this is definitely worth a look. It’s made clear in the afterword that this has been planned out for years, and I just looked at their website and saw that the whole series is already available, so forget everything I just said. Sure, I could delete it and start over, but I prefer to be caught in the act of being too cynical for my own damned good. Now that I know the whole thing is already out there I’m really curious to see what happens next… $3
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Posted by Kevin
May 14, 2013
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Xoc: The Journey of a Great White
Maybe you were one of the people who bought this delightful series when it was coming out in mini comic form, or maybe you stopped halfway through like me (for no reason other than the fact that I constantly lose track of series because I’m always buried under mini comics in this “job”). Even if you did get the whole series, I have two excellent reasons for you to pick this collected edition up: 1. hardcover fancy pants edition and 2. full color. This was a series that always screamed out for color, as the creatures Matt was drawing were sometimes some of the most colorful creatures on the planet, and Oni Press fixed that beautifully with this edition. But I suppose some of you haven’t read any of this series, and you maybe want to know what I’m babbling about already. OK! This is the story of Xoc, a great white shark who travels roughly 2,300 miles from California to Hawaii, and the adventures the shark gets into along the way. It picks up a turtle traveling companion more or less by accident, hunts various creatures to stay fed, sees more than one horror of the industrialized world, examines a shark tank with two people in it, gets two lampreys stuck to itself without any reasonable method to remove them, and gets attacked a few times by killer whales. Matt did his homework in a big way, as I learned plenty both through the comic itself and the footnotes after the fact (did you know that great white sharks could lose more than 1,000 teeth during its lifetime? Terrifying in so many ways). There’s a strong environmental message here, so if you hate such things… well, get your head out of your ass, it’s not like we have all the time in the world to fix this. And if you hate environmental stuff so much that you think it’s OK to catch sharks, cut off their fins and then dump them back into the water where they will drown because they have no damned fins, I’d rather not ever have a conversation with you, thanks all the same. Anyway! This is a gorgeous book and a compelling adventure story, and Matt stays true to life in acknowledging that most nature stories like this do not have happy endings. It’s still a fantastic story, and something that should be read by anybody with a pulse and/or conscience. $20
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Posted by Kevin
May 14, 2013
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Blue Sunday
Oh jam comics, don’t ever change. In case you’ve only read three comics in your life and none of them were a jam comic, this is a thing that a bunch of cartoonists do together, either in person or through the mail/internet, usually under the influence of booze at the very least. As such, reviewing a jam comic like a traditional comic is a waste of time, as it was never meant to have a coherent story. This particular comic is the “dirty” bits from the regular Sunday jams that a bunch of Columbus artists do when they meet up on a weekly basis, and it is all over the map. But, oddly, usually either offensive or funny. And often both! Each of these strips are one page long, passed over to the next person in line from panel to panel, with none of the panels being signed by the artist, making this a fun/excruciating guessing game. Your best bet to know whether or not you’re going to like this is by looking at that list of tags and seeing if your favorite Columbus artist is included in that list, but I’ll try to summarize at least a few of the strips for you. Stories include the bleeped out clown and monkey love, “The Family Cirque Du Soleil” (with a fantastic last panel), the adventures of a pile of broken glass and a dead dude, William Shatner’s soap, how the Smurfs were wiped out, the end of the world, various types of tongues, cat piss vs. meatloaf, raccoon vice, a devil and a cockroach in love, and creepy Superman. That’s most of the first half, which leaves the whole second half a delightful surprise. Try a jam comic, you’ll be glad you did! Unless you’re easily offended, in which case you should maybe look at any other “Sunday” book. $3
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Posted by Kevin
May 6, 2013
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Arubadingle
I’ll confess: I went into this a little leery, as I was afraid that this would be cutesy beyond words or that I wouldn’t be able to say anything bad about it because then I would be the monster who criticized the first comic by a kid who’s only 4. On the contrary; if anything this comic has convinced me that EVERYBODY who writes comics should be four years old. Things start off with four robots running away from something. Suddenly one of them stops and asks the group why they are running away from their grandma. The response? “That’s not grandma! Grandma doesn’t have a goatee!” This is followed by a shout of terror, renewed running, and we’re off. It only gets crazier from there, and only in the best possible ways. There’s the panel of a tied-up grandma, idly hoping that a robot eating shape shifting monster doesn’t impersonate her to try and eat her grandkids. There’s the good witch baby Ruby, who helps them out magically when it suits him, but is easily distracted because, you know, he’s a baby. And finally there’s Scott the evil wizard lawyer, who refuses to serve the group ice cream and sets bees after them. I do wonder who named the robots, as I don’t think all that many four year olds know what a “vajayjay” is. But hey, maybe she just picked it because it sounded funny, which it certainly does. This is a delight from start to finish, and I should at least mention that K. Sekelsky does a great job of illustrating the action. I think this should become a tv series immediately, or there should at least be a few more of these comics showing the further adventures of the Arubadingles.
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Posted by Kevin
May 6, 2013
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The Mayans Were Right
Katherine sells this comic short a little bit by just calling it a sketchbook. For the new readers, my opinion on selling sketchbooks as comics is that it’s generally a bit of a cheat for conventions, a “look, I do too have a new book out this year!” kind of thing where you don’t have to put a lot of work into it because hey, you already keep a sketchbook. What actually appears in a sketchbook comic varies wildly from person to person, as this one shows clearly. There are some sketches towards the end of the book, sure, but even a good chunk of those have a story to them. Her review of the Avengers movie, for example, is pure personal pain from something unrelated to the movie. The bulk of this book is her travel diary from her trip to the Stumptown comics convention last year, at a time when her father was really sick and the family was getting the impression that the doctors weren’t telling them everything. Her father died during the course of this sketchbook, and the pain and general resentment at the universe for letting such a thing happen is clear on the page (or I’m projecting; I have no special insights into her brain). The convention was a bit of a bust for her (and a slow year in general from the sounds of it), but her observations on her trip and at the show itself elevate this far above the level of your average sketchbook comic. If you are like me and have a tendency to turn your nose up at sketchbook comics, don’t let this one pass you by, that’s all I’m saying. I picked this up mostly because it was the only new book she had at SPACE and I wanted to see what she had spent her time working on after thoroughly enjoying Nervenkrank #1 last year. Also, if she ever puts “No One Is Safe” out in a comics form, I can’t recommend that you get it highly enough. Her father was at the Kent State massacre in 1970 and this is the story of that event, although I must admit that I didn’t read the whole thing. Why? Because right now it exists as basically a large poster, and I felt like a weirdo standing there reading the whole thing at her table. Yes, even though she had it displayed like that to make it easier for people to read it standing at her table. But yeah, buy this sketchbook. If she keeps up on her current path she’s definitely going to “make it big” in this comics business, whatever that means these days. And if she doesn’t keep it up in comics, she’s still going to be a literary star. $2
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Posted by Kevin
May 3, 2013
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As Eavesdropped #4
This time around I decided to try and figure out where Suzanne was when she overheard these conversations, because there are some real doozies. Oh hi, if you’ve never read this series, Suzanne overhears conversations that are utterly ridiculous/offensive/hilarious and then draws them for our/her amusement. I think maybe she also takes conversations that other people overhear, but I’m not positive about that. Anyway, I know it would ruin what she’s trying to do here if she put herself in these stories, but I kept picturing her with a sketchpad under a bridge here, sitting at a movie theater there, or overhearing a weird conversation in her neighborhood in another spot. Utterly irrelevant to the content, sure, but once I started thinking about it I just couldn’t stop. Topics in this volume include (and if you haven’t already been won over by that cover I don’t know how to convince you to give this a shot) taking a picture of your own home, theft and misuse of a garbage bin, a bar and a funny hat, keeping your eyebrows groomed, misunderstanding support from your wife for an actual funny joke, kicking some guy in the face, the time sequence of personal injuries, getting a padded bra, upholstery, a sighting at a gay bar, being too intimidated to go into a bar wearing a t-shirt, a fantastic conversation on a bridge, reading cartoons, an Armenian discount and a sword fight. Again, these are stories that Suzanne overheard, not stories that have anything to do with her. It’s funny as usual and her art is still fantastic, so what’s the argument against checking this out again? $2
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Posted by Kevin
May 3, 2013
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The Cornelia Collection
Let’s say that you’ve seen Kel’s comics over the years (and the man has been doing this for at least the last 10 years), but maybe you picked up a mini of his that wasn’t 100% funny to you. Or maybe his vast selection of minis intimidated you, you big baby you. Well, you’re officially out of excuses to give the guy a shot, as this collection clearly only has the best of his material in it, and you’re damned near guaranteed to laugh at least once during each of the stories. And there are lots of stories! For you new readers, Cornelia is a short woman in her mid 20’s who can’t handle her booze, has shallow friends and not much in the way of personal ambition. And she’s considered ugly by the rest of the characters, which becomes more important as you go. Stories in here range from several pages to one page strips, with short pieces about Ed Thud (another of Kel’s characters) sprinkled throughout just in case all that estrogen starts to get to you. Which is a little jarring, as this is listed as a Cornelia collection, but hey, minor quibble. Stories about Cornelia include a series of three of her dreams (of increasing insanity/self-loathing, and he sets a high bar for the rest of the book right away), going to the wrong rave, fighting for disco, trying to fit into the busy schedule of a friend, Cornelia’s dad getting tired of the fact that all corners of society that used to be just for men are now for women too and his quest to win a beauty contest, trying to find the last group of beings that you can still make fun of without getting in trouble, joining a protest group with ADHD and not reading the fine print, trying to win a radio contest by revealing the cure for AIDS, having to stand as the sole representative of her age group, her 15 minutes of fame, trying to get a DVD collection of her cancelled favorite show, the dangers of studies showing that certain types of alcohol are good for your health, the schemes of her friend to get Cornelia her job back while Cornelia is stuck in a lobby reading magazines from the 80’s for hours, indulging in a pint of ice cream with her friend (who has recently been broken up with) and misreading an ad for applying to the Vagina Monologues. The Ed Thud stories include the recurring problem of his head falling off, the superhero who helps him get his CD open (which makes me wish that Kel had included publication strips for some of these strips), the new Hitler youth organization going door to door with an entirely new perspective, the offer he gets for his used car, and his awkward realization that he’s on a reality show. Whatever you think happens in those stories based on my description, chances are that Kel takes it in an entirely different direction. Give it a shot, it’s funny! $9
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Posted by Kevin
May 2, 2013
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Wild Women of the Kitty-Kat Galaxy!
Full disclosure time: if I had my druthers Rafer would be chained to his drawing desk and unable to leave it (except for short periods of time to maintain his sanity) until Plastic Farm was finished. That being said, if he’s going to put that on hiatus to branch out into other projects for a bit, I couldn’t be happier that he chose to do a sequel (of sorts) to Dope Fiends of the Zombie Cafe. Dr. Gravely and Billy are back, and Dr. Gravely still can’t remember Billy’s name. Things start off when our heroes (who, hilariously, really can’t stand each other) accidentally create a “nick” in space while they’re working on another experiment. They naturally decide to go through this nick to see what loot they can take from the other side, only to discover a lair of cat women! As you may have guessed from that title/cover. The cat women put them in a dungeon after an ill-advised punch by the doctor, and that giant spider plays a pretty big role before it’s all over. I’m not saying much about the plot, because if you can resist a cover like that then there’s not much I can say to convince you. The sheer joy in the writing of this story by Sean shines through, the art is on par with the best work that Rafer has ever done (and he’s been improving consistently over the years), and that coloring job by Wendi is ridiculously good, perfectly capturing the “B” movie vibe that permeates this book. My only minor complaint (and I’m still not sure that it really is a complaint) is that they did chapter breaks in the overwrought style of pulp comics, with dramatic images of what happens in the chapter to come. The problem is that this book isn’t big enough to support that many chapters, so the chapters ended up being pretty short and those splash pages could be a bit jarring. On the other hand, they were universally awesome, so it’s impossible to come down too hard on them. Clearly, the only solution is to make the next set of these into a mini series where those chapter bumps are more appropriate, FAR IN THE FUTURE WHEN PLASTIC FARM IS DONE. Or, you know, more one-shots like this would also be fine. Or I could acknowledge that I’m not the boss of him and that I’ll just be happy when more issues of Plastic Farm come out. But hey, buy this one in the meantime, as you’d have a hard time not loving it.
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Posted by Kevin
May 2, 2013
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Sovereign State #1
No doubt about it, this is how you do the first issue of a series. My only complaint was his handwriting, as it veered right up against being unreadable at times, but I interpret handwriting for a living working at the Board of Elections (be honest, how many of you have been extremely careful to make your voter registration forms legible?). This one starts off in an obviously post-apocalyptic world, where a man in the woods notices something crashing down from the sky. He sets off to either find out what it was or loot it (it’s not entirely clear even by the end of the book), and along the way we get a series of flashbacks that start to show how this man and this world have gotten to this position. He was one of those paranoid survivalist types who was pleasantly surprised when the world looked like it wasn’t going as badly as he had feared. He had a family and was trying to settle into his normal life. A female president had gone about solving world hunger, and there was even a plausible plan in place to turn back the effects of global warming. That’s where things took a turn for the worse, although the exact details of that are still to come, along with what exactly was in that thing that crashed down from the sky. I love the anime action lines that pop up here and there, and I’ve always been fine with the idea of having the plot doled out bits at a time. The only, constant problem with series like this is follow-through, and Carlos has been fine on that in the past, so I’ll choose to be optimistic on this one. It’s an intriguing start to the series. And hey, it could still turn out to be terrible, sure, but go back and read “Carl is the Awesome” again and tell me that you think that’ll happen. $1.50
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Posted by Kevin
April 30, 2013
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Rude Awakening #1
Damn my personal ban on not posting any spoilers! I still haven’t figured out how to review a four page comic without mentioning the ending, and it’s even more difficult in this case. Ah, screw it. If you have this book in your pile from SPACE, or if you have purchased it from Ed, or just hate knowing anything before you might have had a chance to read it, just know that I liked this book BECAUSE of the last page, which damned near made me stand up and cheer. For the rest of you, this is a simple tale of a guy and a robot sitting at a bus stop (in the dream of this man). The robot asks the guy how he feels, the man misinterprets the meaning and gives a long sob story on the sorry state of his life. The robot finally explains that he meant to ask literally what it is to feel, tells the man to stop being such a whiny baby (in so many words) and the very brief afterword makes it clear that only you can change your shitty life, so stop complaining and do something about it. As I’ve read countless comics that are nothing but bitching about the state of the life of the artist (often very well done and artistic!), seeing that piece of advice at the end was damned near perfect. I have no idea why this is listed as “#1,” as it needs no follow-up, but this is definitely worth a look for anybody who feels the need for a change.
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Posted by Kevin
April 30, 2013
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Moab
So I finally got a chance to have a long conversation with Pam at SPACE (2013), and it’s official: there’s no need for me to keep putting “Kekionga #___” in the title. Our long national nightmare is over! Oh right, nobody ever thinks about such things besides me. Well, it is at least a little bit useful to point out that this is #38, mostly because most other creators never make it even close to that number in their comics series, but it’s not relevant in a continuity sense. Anyway, this time around we have the werewolf lady, Mr. Swann and Ms. Ginsberg (she also said she’d think about putting a character guide in her comics, as it is quite a cast of characters to keep track of) opening a strange door with a skeleton key. Why? For an adventure, of course! They use the tracking skills of the wolf lady to get to the center of the hedge maze that was behind the door, and it’s there that they find the skeleton of a moab. As luck would have it they stumbled across a saddle earlier that looked like it just might fit that skeleton, and that’s when the crazy stuff starts happening. There’s a cowboy, and way too much sunlight, and no sunglasses for the moab, and too much for me to get into here without spoiling the whole thing. It’s another fun little comic, and the level of detail that she puts into these things is still impressive for the amount of them that she’s able to produce. $1
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Posted by Kevin
April 29, 2013
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The Infinite Wait
Sometimes as a thought experiment I try to imagine a comics creator I thoroughly enjoy (like (spoiler alert!) Julia) and what complaints other people who don’t like her may have. With Julia, I have to confess to drawing an utter blank. Do people not like her because she’s too prolific? Because her comics seem to be effortlessly funny from panel to panel in a way that damned near everybody else could only dream of? Because she’s open and frank about damned near every aspect of her life but manages to do it in a way that makes it impossible not to sympathize with her? Or maybe nobody has a problem with her, which would be the way the world should work, so I’ll shut down this thought exercise right now. Anyway, if by some chance you haven’t read her work before now, or were intimidated by the fact that you missed a few issues of “Fart Party” and didn’t want to jump on in the middle, this is a new, self-contained work, and it’s the best thing she’s ever done. That I’ve seen, anyway, and I haven’t seen everything. But this one is so good that I still don’t even know where to start praising it. The intro is probably the place to start, as she describes how she’s had this idea for a comic for years (how she learned that she had lupus) but that nobody was willing to publish it. This kind of thing drives me crazy, but I don’t control the publishing houses of the world, so I’ll let it go. Then she mentions that the title is an inside joke but that she loves the idea of somebody picking this up at a bookstore, thinking it’s the “next big thing” because of that title and being very shocked and offended at the content, and it’s impossible not to appreciate that. And I haven’t even gotten to the comics! This is broken up into three short stories, and they serve the purpose of basically telling the story of her life so far. And if you’re annoyed that you miss a month or two here and there, she’s even nice enough to mention which volume of the collected “Fart Party” you would have to read to plug in those holes. The first story tells the story of the various jobs she’s held over the years, from selling rocks to a neighbor as a small child all the way up to her present career making comics. She has held a ton of shitty jobs over the years, which obviously sucked at the time, but at least it left her loaded with great stories. And just in case I didn’t already respect her as much as was humanly possible, she also tells the story of how her comic almost got picked up for a tv series but that she killed it because she was essentially selling her life’s story with no input needed from her, and she wanted to be sure that if it ever did get made into a series that she would have a chance to make sure it was done right. It’s not easy to turn down a pile of money for the sake of your artistic integrity, but she did it. The next section deals with her learning that she has lupus, all of the various health problems associated with it and how lupus led directly to her discovering comics and eventually making her own. I don’t think most humans could make lupus this funny, but Julia is more than up to the challenge. Finally there’s a section on her love of libraries over the years, from the book sales to the smell of a really old book to finding lots of graphic novels. This last one is the shortest of the bunch, but it’s heartfelt as all hell and will make you want to go back to the library right away if you haven’t been to one for awhile. You’ll notice that I don’t go into much detail at all, which is odd for a 200+ page book that probably took me over three hours to read. That’s mostly because everybody who already knows her work probably read as far as “new, self-contained work” before they stopped and ordered a copy for themselves, and the rest of you should know as little as possible about this woman before reading this, because it’s all laid out here. I don’t think there’s a single funnier human working in comics today, and you all know that I read a LOT of comics. So buy a copy of this, why don’t you? I’m not big on guarantees, what with individual tastes being different all over, but if you buy a copy of this and somehow hate it I’ll buy it off you (this offer is valid until somebody decides to be a smart ass and buy 50 copies). That way I could pass a copy along to somebody who would appreciate it, WHICH IS EVERYBODY ELSE. Enjoy! $15
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Posted by Kevin
April 29, 2013
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Cyanide Milkshake #4
You don’t see many mini comics like this any more, or at least I don’t. This is a pile of stories, some as short as a panel or two and some several pages long, and all about a ridiculously wide range of subjects. Liz starts off with a “note from the editor” that’s a rambling rant about whether or not you can stay “punk” after you hit 30 and have a full time job, kids, a mortgage or any combination of all that. Her answer: yes, mostly, but DO something if you’re at all able to keep yourself engaged. That’s simplifying what she said in a big way, but as somebody who’s creeping closer and closer towards 40, it’s hard to argue with her. The stories are all over the place, like I said, but I’ll try my usual trick of summing them all up without giving anything away. There’s her absolutely perfect reaction to getting hassled on the subway, an ad for a literal “Spice” channel, being too hairy for sex (and the reason for all that hair), the life’s journey of an orange, Hulk and his need for pizza, how things are different when a lady has her fly open and nobody tells her, two dogs and their adventures with the law, office supplies and sex, four panels summing up every X-Men comic ever, and the story of a zombie wasteland where the law is somehow still intact. This last one was the longest (it’s even “to be continued”), and it may be going somewhere interesting or it may just be an excuse for violence against zombies and cops. Fun either way! Old folks like me, check it out and remember when minis packed in as many stories as they could possibly fit. Kids, read it and see how it’s meant to be done! Unless you’d rather have one story per comic, in which case I can’t help you. $2
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Posted by Kevin
