July 3, 2010
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Piecemeal
I’ve been hoping to catch something else from Nate now that Brainfag is dead and gone, and the man was nice enough to send along a copy of his latest. If you’re not a regular reader of the site I highly recommend going back and reading my reviews for his various Brainfag books. Not that I said anything particularly penetrating or insightful, but that collected edition is something every comic fan with any taste should own. So how about this one? Was his talent connected only to the title of his last comic? Um, no, of course not. What a stupid thing to think. There are two stories this time around, the first dealing with all sorts of embarrassing moments from early puberty. There’s the formerly complicated setup and take down process involved with watching porn back in the day (kids, us old folk often tell you to appreciate things that we didn’t have growing up, but internet porn would have led to an entirely different generation), a drunken party filled with kids in high school, his recent ex and the fact that every guy in town seemingly wanted to get with her now that she was single, and a delightfully awkward depiction of some “hot” sex with his ex. The second part of the comic is the wordless tale of a dream, half-dream, or possibly just the weirdest night of Nate’s life. He climbs up a gigantic tree, but as he goes too high a branch cracks and he’s lucky to land on his little makeshift treehouse instead of what looks like at least 50 feet down to the ground. He then proceeds to cautiously go down his rope ladder, but it hasn’t been secured properly and this also collapses on his, leading to a lengthy and painful crash to the ground. Here’s where things shift a little, as he stumbles into a dark house and is desperately trying to get away from a shadowy creature. Then a white bear shows up… on second thought, you can interpret all this for yourself. I have my own theories, but I’ve also been known to take things too literally and that’s clearly not what he’s going for with this story. Overall it’s a solid mini with a healthy balance of past humiliation combined with a widely open to interpretation silent piece. $4
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Posted by Kevin
July 2, 2010
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Lackluster World #6
Where do I start? There’s the fact that it’s only through sheer force of will that I confined myself to two samples of this comic (the pages with the surprise appearance of two hilariously fictional characters), even though I’ve been sticking to the formula of one sample per comic for years. There’s also the fact that we finally get an issue focused slightly on Celsius, although really it’s more about getting her brothers in their proper places for the finale in the next issue. And hey, finale! That’s a damned shame, even though I do approve of a finite series. OK, I’m reining it in now, otherwise I’ll just randomly gush for a while and call it a day. I’m assuming that everybody reading this is caught up on the events of the first five issues of this series, and if you’re not, you’re only hurting yourselves. This time around Fahrenheit has been exposed as the graffiti artist, Kelvin has beaten a man to death with his bible and been locked in a loony bin, and Celsius is left with no clue of what to do with herself. Those early pages where she fights off blind panic with trivialities was a thing of beauty. Fahrenheit is kind of just killing time this issue, but that only leaves more room for Kelvin and his delightful delusions. My choice of two samples of that probably gives away my opinion, but I honestly could have sampled that entire sequence if I thought it was remotely legal or fair to the creator. There’s insight into Kelvin’s origin story (i.e. “why he went nuts”), Celsius taking a halting step or two towards independence, and all kinds of serious mayhem. Eric has even managed to end things on just about the perfect cliffhanger, made even more perfect by the fact that the next issue will be the last in the series. I may have had quibbles here and there with Lackluster World when it started, but this issue was, top to bottom, a flawless comic. Facial expressions, dialogue, sly background gags, pacing, everything worked as well as humanly possible this time around, enough so that I have to repeat my warning: if you’re not keeping up with this series, you’re depriving yourself of something that comes along in this business only rarely. I’m not sure what he has planned next, if anything, but here’s hoping Eric builds off this and the finale of the series and keeps it up with the comics. Issues like this prove that he has it in him to become one of the big names of the industry, as long as the long odds of actually making a living at this sort of thing doesn’t scare him away. And ordinarily I would complain about that steep $6 cover price, but it is absolutely worth it. $6
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Posted by Kevin
July 1, 2010
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Worms #6
And the spinning wheel of Brian John Mitchell comics lands on… Worms! Regular readers of this site and/or Brian’s comics know that the guy has a half dozen series (at least) that he’s working on at any given moment, usually with a few more that come out less frequently. “Less frequently”, in his case, still means more often than most comics that are the ONLY comic put out by other creators. He has an impressively prolific record, that’s what I’m trying to say. In this issue of Worms our heroine wakes up after having been eaten by a giant worm (not to be confused with the smaller worms that have been in past issues). She seems to have developed a rapport with the creature, so she leads it along with three other worms to attack the complex that has been holding her captive. Some serious mayhem, and it’s almost adorable on these tiny pages. There’s one thing that’s clear to me after reading all the issues (except #1) of this series: I still only have the vaguest idea of where this is all headed. I know that Lost Kisses is going to be self-contained stories of his lost loves, Just A Man is going to keep going until the hero learns what happened and gets his revenge/gets killed, but this one is so surreal that it feels like it could have ended a couple of times already, or it could just go on forever. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just something I’ve noticed and haven’t been able to talk about due to my “no spoilers” policy. Anyway, as always this is worth a look, unless you haven’t read the other issues in this series, in which case it won’t make a lot of sense (but at least Brian is smart enough to put series recaps at the start of his comics). $.75
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Posted by Kevin
June 30, 2010
New reviews for Same Old Story “Vintage Shorts” by Nathan Wiedemer & Steven Mangold and Billy the Demon Slayer #2 by Hayden Fryer. See, I told you I’d get some extra reviews up this week, and there are possibly still more to come. Oh, and I also figured out that you can see the prices for the comics in the store if you highlight the area near “price”, which isn’t an ideal way to shop, but at least you can see the prices that way. And hey, I am offering original artwork from all sorts of people this week, with you being able to have a say as to which one I send you. I’ve also been told that it’s an easy fix to get the prices to show up again, so maybe it’ll be fixed soon. What I’m trying to say here is that the rewards for ordering comics this week are still greater than the hassle, so why not order some stuff?
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Posted by Kevin
June 30, 2010
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Billy the Demon Slayer #2
I’m torn on this one. On the one hand I would love to give a pass to the constantly wrong usage of “you’re” and “your”, “too” and “to”, but on the other hand that would make me a bit of a hypocrite. Ah well, so I’ll be a hypocrite. After all, the series is over with (this came out in 2006 and Hayden sent along the whole second series), so any advice I give about such things would be rather pointless. OK, how about this: Hayden, if you’re planning another series, please pass it too an English major or two to make sure that all the easy errors are fixed. There, problem solved! I still wish there was some kind of detailed series recap so I would know exactly what happened in the first series, but I’m hoping this will catch me up as I go along. Anyway, in this issue two mysterious figures are terrorizing the students, Billy gets in trouble at school, Billy meets up with Deadus (I’m very curious about their history, and if you were wondering, contrary to appearances on that cover, he does NOT give Deadus a noogie that I could see), Billy punches his evil twin, another student seems to be making this get all evil, and things end on a confusing cliffhanger. It’s a little odd that both issues so far have needed an afterword to explain what happened to people in the comic, as that sort of thing should make sense in the context of the comic itself. So far it seems like this series has problems, but the humor is infectious and I’m increasingly curious to see if this ends up making any sense. Worth a look, I think, but so far it’s mostly my love for bizarre humor and apocalyptic plots that are making me say that. $3.50
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Posted by Kevin
June 30, 2010
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Same Old Story “Vintage Shorts”
I’m always mildly baffled by the people who clearly have a history of using the same characters over a period of time but don’t seem to grasp the importance of any sort of origin story. In this comic it’s not the end of the world, as the story seems to be about a group of friends (two boys and one girl) who hang out with each other through childhood and into their adult (?) lives. Not like you’re missing how Spider-man got his powers or anything. Still, after reading this I was curious what had come before, and the website offered no help (nor did it offer any comics for sale, another baffling oversight). This might have all rolled off my back, but in the back of the comic there’s a section of older drawings and strips from the two of them, things that would have meaning to a fan of the series but that didn’t mean much to me. Reading them talk about the development of the characters over the years was interesting, but again, I don’t know who these characters are. OK, now that you know that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, what I was able to tell was that this story was about two boys (Nick and Nate) and a girl (Gwen). Nick has a crush on Gwen, but as they’re ten years old for the bulk of this comic it doesn’t go anywhere. Gwen apparently has a crush on Nate, although I didn’t see much evidence of it in this comic, I just picked it up from the “crush chart” at their website, so it probably refers to something that happens later in the chronology. That crush chart showed all kinds of people who aren’t listed here, which again makes me wonder what is going on in this series. The first story here deals with a camping trip taken by the kids, with Nick and Gwen spending some time alone (and Gwen seems utterly oblivious to the crush) and Nate trying to be the perfect child because he is apparently the only reason his parents are staying together. There are some cute bits, as it was interesting to watch them kinda sorta take steps towards becoming mature, but only half-heartedly. Other stories include Nick’s last night before being sent off to military school (they are at least 4 years older in this story) and an neat juxtaposition between them watching The Neverending Story as kids and then revisiting it as adults. Or at least I think they were adults; again it was hard to tell for sure. The art looked like it could have come from a Disney studio (and I’ll leave it to your personal preference as to whether or not that’s a good thing), which made the half dozen or so spelling errors stand out even more. Finally the comic ends with older strips which, again, didn’t do a whole lot for me, as I have no clue of the history here and seem to have no way to find that out. So: it’s a mildly amusing coming-of-age tale which could very well make a whole lot more sense if I had seen any other issues of the series. $4
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Posted by Kevin
June 29, 2010
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Uh, Love Story
What a… charming story? I’m not entirely sure how to respond to this one. It’s the story of a man who is in love with a retarded girl. Yes, there are more politically correct ways to put that, and if this comic had the slightest interest in such things I’d reflect them here. Things begin with our “hero” chatting with this retarded woman at her bedroom window. She seems to only be able to respond with images inside word balloons,such as a cat, teddy bear, a monster truck, kermit the frog and a turtle. No, these images did not seem to correspond in any way to what was happening around her. Her father sees this man talking to her at her bedroom window and throws him off the property. The sister of the retarded girl sees the guy laying in the gutter and lets him know about a dance her sister will be attending later that night, but there’s a catch: it’s a special dance only for retarded people. Our “hero” decides that he can pretend with the best of them and gets into the dance, at which point the two of them (and the girl does seem to like the guy) happily get together. The only problem is that the father sees this guy at the dance and things get a little hairy, but why spoil that heartwarming ending? I varied between being mildly creeped out and somehow touched by this odd love story, and am still not sure exactly where I landed. I did like the vast dark spaces in the comic, between being beaten unconscious and his very brief struggle with his conscience. On a technical level I thought it was fantastic. On another level there’s a point where things quickly go from laughing with something to laughing at it, and that line veers all over the place in this issue. Still, if you don’t mind the occasional uncomfortable laugh, or if maybe you didn’t spend your formative years working at a home for special needs adults and might be a little overly sensitive because of that fact, this is worth a look. No price, but with that color cover and all I’d say $3.
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Posted by Kevin
June 28, 2010
New review for Veggie Dog Saturn #4 by Jason Young, and I will be taking the time at some point during the week to make up for the lost reviews over the weekend. Not sure exactly which day it will be yet, because I am currently buffing up the comics store in preparation for the comics rentals. Yes, they are coming, and yes, I’m sure you’re getting sick of me talking about it. As for the store, I increased the size of the sample images (although I’m still toying with finding the perfect size) and am adding at least one sample image per comic, like it was back in the old days. The trouble is that with all the tinkering I’m not entirely sure that everything is working properly, so all this week anybody who orders comics from me gets a prize. Original art from small press people (which I often get on the envelopes they send or with their pile of comics), maybe an mini comic oddity or two, the point is that EVERYBODY who orders from now until next Monday gets extra goodies with their comics. Yes, this is a rather shameless ploy for comic orders, but I’m also testing out the new system. Needless to say, if you order something and don’t hear back from me, let me know and I’ll fix the “broken” system. At the moment I think it’s running fine though, hence the need for the test. So order some comics, help me out and get random obscure stuff. Who couldn’t love such a deal?
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Posted by Kevin
June 28, 2010
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Veggie Dog Saturn #4
I made a conscious decision ages ago not to show wraparound covers (although I’m sure you could find examples of me breaking that “rule”), mostly because it’s a nice reward for the people who actually buy the comic. Covers like this make that decision seem stupid, as the marching band following that leader is a wonder to behold. Well, like I said, if you buy it then you get to experience it too! The last issue of Veggie Dog Saturn was a travelogue/retelling of a crisis, this time around Jason is back to a bunch of shorter pieces. Either way is fine with me as long as the stories are entertaining, informative or at least embarrassing, and Jason wins on all counts here. Stories include getting hit with a rock in the head as a kid (and the excessive amount of blood compared to the severity of the wound that followed), a childhood lesson in using rare spacemen toys as currency and how the market collapsed when his brother got a paper route, a friend he knew as a very small child but lost touch with very early on (possibly due to a racist bank/doll in his house, something that his mother kept around not even knowing it was racist), pooping in the bathtub, and his first experience with a swimsuit magazine. Oh, and there’s the sampled strip, which I can only hope is completely true. Jason is also starting up a podcast, because what other medium would such a talented visual artist want to go with? I’m sure it’s lovely and I’ll check it out soon, but get back to work on the comics! Issues like this are a vivid reminder of what a talented artist the guy is, and also a reminder that when I rule the world I’ll be chaining such people to their drawing desks. So I guess it’s best that he get this podcast business out of the way now… $2
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Posted by Kevin
June 25, 2010
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Blaster Al Ackerman’s Tales of the Ling Master #1
I’m going with the full title here, mostly because I think the fact that these comics are based on the stories of Al Ackerman should be prominently featured. E.J. got permission from Blaster to adapt the Ling Master stories as comics, and the result is this utterly unique collection of stories. Well, this and the following two issues, but I’ll get to them in good time. I reviewed The Bread Doll Fancier a few years back when it was a preview issue, but if memory serves (which it often doesn’t), then this is first description of what exactly a Ling Master is, both from the origin of the phrase from Ackerman (inadvertently snipping a logo the wrong way and coming up with “Ling Tales”) and the definition of a Ling Master. The first story of the book deals with exactly this, as it describes a man who puts a pillowcase with one eyehole cut out of it on his face at midnight every day, so he’s ready for “mystic Ling action”. His brother had been kidnapped by Vug-Randolphs (large, sentient black beetles) , and his mother had signed up with the “dreaded Araby society” when he was 8. Our hero also varies all his activities to avoid being tracked, and it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that maybe he’s just completely crazy. Next up is The Bread Doll Fancier, a profoundly creepy tale in which the Ling Master either ends up being a hero or ends up feeding the delusions of a man who was already pretty crazed. Finally there’s Ask Ling, as the Ling Master answers questions from his fans in the mail (as long as they remember to send the five dollars), this time focusing on the malady of sneezing every time they had a mouthful of carrots. The story then goes to the case of a young boy who was expelled from the dinner table because of this habit but soon learned to associate even mildly salacious programming on television with uncontrollable sneezing, leading him to a very sad end. I would still love to see the source material for some of this, but these are undeniably inventive and completely original stories. I love the ambiguity of the Ling Master himself and the fact that he’s unquestionably held out to the world as an expert on everything. It’s definitely worth a look, and if the next two issues are as good as this one (something I have no reason to doubt), then I’d say this whole series is worth picking up. $3
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Posted by Kevin
June 24, 2010
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Window #2
What’s your general behavior towards bums? Or is “homeless people” the preferred term? Drifters? Vagrants? Whatever the word is, anybody who has spent any amount of time working or living in a big city has developed some sort of strategy by now. Do you give them your spare change? Stare straight ahead and ignore them completely, no matter what they say or do? Take them on a case by case basis, so that you end up only giving money to the most needy/most accomplished con artists? I was always a sucker for them when I worked in downtown Columbus, or at least often a sucker. I’m bringing all this up because the first story in this installment of Window is a detailed account of a time that Dave was accosted on the street by a homeless man. He had some warning, as he could hear and see the guy yelling at other people as they passed him, but Dave hoped to scoot past him. No such luck, and the man is soon following Dave on his way to work, yelling and cursing the whole way, but all while telling a story that makes him at least a little sympathetic. Dave finally decides to give him $5 (as by this point the guy has already had his arm around Dave a few times and Dave is getting a little freaked out by the whole thing), but the guy still doesn’t get the hint and ends up following Dave all the way to the train station. He even gives Dave his number and asks Dave to call him sometime, which saves Dave the embarrassment of having to come up with a fake name and address of his own. The other story in this deals with Dave trying to get the names of a couple of new students down and being unable to understand what one of the small kids is getting at when she just has to go to the bathroom. Don’t worry, I didn’t spoil the whole thing, there are still plenty of nuggets in here for you to uncover when you rent it from my comic rental store in the future, or if you manage to find it for sale somewhere. As always it’s well worth a look, and he does seem to have a knack for excellent closing panels…
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Posted by Kevin
June 23, 2010
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Crass Sophisticate #7
Well, it may not be the first issue of the series, but it still goes a long way to seeing what this series was like in the early days. One obvious change? It’s just Josh with the writing and the art this time around, with his later partner Justin Rosenberg contributing only a one page strip at the end about the poor timing of Death arriving. It’s funny but it looks like crap. For anyone who’s looking for a pull quote, no smartass, I do not mean that for the whole series or even this issue, just that last little strip at the end. This issue, as you can probably tell from the cover, has some celebrity “guest stars”. Wait, what is it that you call it when a creative team uses the likenesses of celebrities without their permission? Satire? OK, we’ll go with that. The issue starts off with a group of friends leaving a showing of the Jennifer Aniston movie Derailed (2005, so you can place the release date of the comic a little bit too), remarking that they enjoyed the movie. One of them makes the point that it’s obvious that Jennifer was lousy at giving head (based on her being unable to convincingly portray it in the movie), and that this probably had something to do with Brad Pitt leaving her for Angelina Jolie. Hey, I just realized: are all these celebrity names going to drive insane amounts of traffic to this site? Pamela Anderson Cindy Margolis Halle Berry! OK, now that I’ve crashed the site, the comic continues with the group of friends going to a crappy trendy Chicago eatery, at which point Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston walk in for dinner. Vince comes across as more than a little bit of a douchebag here, with his constant declarations that he IS Chicago, and things continue on in this vein until he points out that she’s clearly lousy at giving head. She takes him up on the challenge but he needs to visualize a Chicago hot dog with all the fixings to get aroused, and she ruins the whole thing by bringing up the concept of ketchup on a hot dog. This is forbidden for some reason in Chicago, she leaves the bar and eventually ends up in a confrontation with Jolie. Meanwhile Richard Roeper shows up to get an interview with them but ends up showing that he is the one with the real BJ skills, and things get a little gory from there. Clearly Josh already had a good idea of what kind of stories he wanted to tell early on, and frankly this looks pretty much like the more recent issues do. There’s generally a stronger story in the more recent stuff, but this is a pretty funny comic is you (like I) really can’t stand any of the three celebrities involved. Check it out why don’t you? $1.50
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Posted by Kevin
June 22, 2010
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Days
Was James Kochalka the first person to do a really dedicated and serious diary strip? In my hazy memory there were others who tried it, but they never seemed to stick with it for very long, and so James is credited as the inspiration for all these other people doing their own diary strips. I’ve sort of soured on the piles of sweetness in the Kochalka diary strips over the years, but the man is still something of a pioneer. Add Simon M. to the list of people who tried this diary strip thing for a while and then tossed it aside, which is a shame, as at least Simon came at this from a different perspective. There wasn’t a single four panel diary strip in here; stylistically they were all over the map. As it should be! It’s fine for James Kochalka to be the inspiration for all these diary strips, but once those strips are started the artists should veer off into their own directions, and Simon did an admirable job of that here. He only tried this for a few months and these are his picks from that pile. Topics in here include his tiny chile plant, watching the birds, finding humor on his deodorant can, listening to tragedy while getting ready to watch bands, quiet days, hangovers, moving, taking a walk on a nice day, drawing a potato while lacking real inspiration for the day, pigeons in a puddle, keeping it simple, drunken wisdom, dressing up as Sarah Palin for Halloween, finding a white hair in his beard, and even posting a crossword he’s been stuck on (if you’re still stuck Simon, I could help you out with that). So in terms of subject matter it didn’t revolutionize the field or anything, but I very much appreciated his efforts to make each day look unique, and his genuine appreciation with the little things in life. Check it out, maybe if he gets swamped with requests for this book he’ll pick up his diary strips. No price, but let’s say $3, as this a fairly hefty book.
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Posted by Kevin
