April 23, 2010
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I’ve Been Forced To Get To Know You
Nobody, but nobody captures the awkwardness of dating as well as Kelly does. She manages to make it hilarious and insightful while not being afraid to show to throw in any awkward truths about herself. This is an older mini, and it’s clear that her technical abilities have grown by leaps and bounds since this came out. Still, it’s impossible not to love this little thing. Kelly, after a long time being single, watches a lot of tv and ends up identifying with Drew Carey and hopes to find a boyfriend in that mold. She briefly meets a guy on New Year’s Eve, has what she thinks is a “moment” with him, but he ends up leaving with his friends before midnight. She admirably decides not to let it go and puts one of those “I saw you” ads in the local paper. He sees it and they eventually get together for a date… and that’s where the real awkwardness begins. The only thing they really end up having in common is their mutual interest in making art, which ends up making the night much longer than it otherwise would have been. Things eventually get mildly heated, they end up back at her place, and I’m about to tell you the whole story here, and nobody likes that. Let’s just say it’s not as salacious as I’m making it out to be. I’m hopelessly biased towards Kelly’s comics at this point, so of course I’m going to love this one. If you have to have your comics with excellent technical proficiency, maybe you should start with some of the later Slithers and then work your way back to this. If you like heartfelt awkwardness in all forms, it’s hard to go wrong here. $1
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Big Deal #5
Uh oh, looks like the cover’s crooked! Oh well, you get the idea. Also, I think Patrick has a new e-mail address, which you can try by clicking on this, although the one up there might work just fine. So what’s the story with this one? I completely loved the first issue, still liked #3 a hell of a lot and this one? Well, OK, I mostly loved this one too. Strips in here tackle such subjects as the wisdom of wearing a wizard hat, what you can do with x-ray eyes really, being an outdoorsman, making it in Hollywood, floods, french doors, insomnia, how to tell if your lover is a washing machine, being a shrunken band, and the fact that werewolves are cool. Much more too, of course, and he even does a serious strip or two, but you’re going to have to buy this to find out what I’m talking about. Hey, when have I ever steered you wrong before? It’s only $2 you cheapskate you.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Debbie’s Story
Be honest now: how many of you have taken the time to get to know the real stories of your relatives? I have various assorted stories for different relatives, but I have only rarely gotten the real “whole story”.  The Debbie mentioned on the cover is Kelly’s aunt, and Kelly takes the time to question where the current version of the woman came from and gives us the story in lovely mini comic format. Debbie is, at present, essentially a stunt double for her mom: same basic attitude, same interests, and they talk on the phone every day. Back in the day, however, she ran with a gang (well, the small town version of a gang from 40 years ago or so) and hung out with a local scumbag until her parents sent her away to the National Guard. That’s right, that was her punishment. Still, where a lot of people would take that punishment as a hint to never come back or to make their own way in the world, she chose to return to her hometown, marry one of the losers from the local gang and have a couple of kids. She also got a job cleaning (alongside her mom) and has settled into a quiet, uneventful life. It’s the personal family bits in here that make this special though, as Kelly gets inside information from family members to make this a more complete portrait. It’s not going to come as a shock to any regular readers that I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it really is fascinating. I can even see Kelly still being able to enjoy family dinners after this, as things never get TOO personal, although I can see that being a subjective judgment.  Check it out, then go down the rest of this huge page and think about sending her a chunk of change so she’ll send you a pile of comics. No price, so… $2?
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Gabagool #3
What’s not to like about this comic? You have the “bounty hunters” on a quest to retrieve the guitar of Ace Frehley, another great rant from Cousin Lenny, fighting, swearing… everything you need. Add that to the fact that these two are putting these out, what, every couple of months or so (how often can you say that about anybody these days?) and I don’t see any reason why they can’t take over the world. Look, these days, any comic that makes me laugh gets my vote (yeah, I’m biased about things actually being good, what can I say). I love the art, the characters are becoming more and more memorable with each issue (and they’re helping their cause a lot in that department by putting these out so quickly), it’s just a great comic. Contact info above, I think I set a new record for parentheses…
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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The Magpie #1
This might just be my favorite mini comic of the year. Well, I read a lot of comics and I have a notoriously bad memory, so that might not be as impressive a claim as it sounds right off the bat, but I loved this comic a lot. There’s a great quote on almost every page, a delusional (occasionally) magpie running around threatening people with physical violence, and general revelry. What’s not to love? What’s even more impressive is that Doug says this is his first mini comic, so I guess those sketchbook-like things were a good warmup. I’d say this is $3, I don’t want to ruin any more of this with analysis so I’ll just say that you should check the contact info up there immediately, send the man an e-mail and get a copy of this. Really!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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The Hed-Sed Murders
Sketchbook! That’s just a little advance warning in case you were expecting one of them there “formal reviews” or something. There are a couple of pages of something vaguely resembling stories, other than that you have sketches of dinosaurs, robot love, odd creatures, Rod Serling and many other things. Hey, why tell you everything that’s in here? As is the case with most sketchbooks, if you like the guy’s work, well, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t know who he is you’d probably be better off with his other book on this page before you decide if you want this one. Luckily it’s a free country (as of 3:35pm on 4/8/05, anyway) and you can ignore my advice if you want. Contact info is up there, this is a buck or two!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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The Stories of Tiny and Odd
Here’s an odd little tale (although I guess you can get that from the title) about two creatures who get out into the real world and decide to eat at a generic fast food place. One of the characters has never had it before and just wants the quiet life, the other one loves the greasy food. I wish I could tell you more than that, but there’s only 8 pages of story here (as well as some sketchbook pages that I liked a lot), so that’s all I know. He’s pretty clearly influenced by Dave Cooper and Marc Bell, which are two pretty great people to be influenced by. This may or may not be a good series, it’s hard to tell from just this issue, but I got more stuff from him at FLUKE and I’ll be able to give you a better idea in a few weeks or so. Here’s an e-mail address, this is 2 or 3 bucks (another one with a mystery price).
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Skyscrapers of the Midwest #4
It’s saying something in a series as fantastical as this when my favorite parts end up being the quiet moments. This issue deals with two young boys and the rich fantasy lives they dream up to cope with living in a profoundly dull town. One boy dreams or his lost toy dinosaur and his team of friends fighting big fights while the other dreams himself to be a fake comic book hero, Nova Stealth. Joshua pulls out all the stops for that particular parody with a wonderfully accurate old Marvel style cover, even putting in an ad for a Nova Stealth video game that is really a polemic against video game cheats. There’s significantly more quiet moments that you’d think in such a book, and it’s rare that you get equal parts goodness of the chaotic bits and the more introspective moments. Not sure if this is a continuing story (as I missed #3 somehow) but if every issue is as good as this what difference does it make? Great stuff, well worth hunting down. $5
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Skyscrapers of the Midwest #1
Where did this guy come from? Did I miss more hype? This book is fantastic. I love the endings, mostly because they’re so totally random in almost every case, but that’s a hard thing to talk about without giving stuff away. In here you have a boy pretending to be a robot, the end of the world, Granma dropping some pies, and a robot family with an angry father. Throw in a “cowboy” answering some fake letters and you have a solid book all around. I love it when you throw in little things like that to go with the art. Why have blank pages? The book looks great (that includes the art and the packaging), it’s $2, and Joshua looks to me like somebody people should support. Here’s an e-mail address, I have no idea what else he has available but I’d be interested to see it…
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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The Soap Lady
Well, I always said that sooner or later I’d get around to reviewing this, and it turned out to be much, much later. And even then it was mostly only because Top Shelf sold it for so very cheap. Oh well, at least now I get to see how Renee does with a children’s book. All I’d seen was the book above, which didn’t seem like it would be the kind of thing that children should be reading at all, so I had my doubts… which were crushed completely after reading this. It’s done as a children’s book, like I said, with one panel per page and the text beneath the illustration. It’s the story of a lady made of soap who comes up out of the lake and befriends a young boy who’s trying to win a bet with his mother by staying clean for a week. She cleans him up and then gets to work cleaning up the whole forest, but people have a tendency to fear things they don’t understand, and, children’s book or not, I don’t want to give away the ending or anything. Oh, and I also don’t usually mention the blurbs on the back of the book, but this one is notable because they’re from Penn Jillette and Arthur Penn (director of Bonnie and Clyde and Little Big Man), not your usual quotable for a comic. Great stuff, I wouldn’t hesitate at all in reading this to a child. it’s $19.95 at cover price, but I’ll bet you could find it for cheaper if you did some digging. Oh, and here’s her website!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Marbles in my Underpants
I’ll post a full review of this later, as it is possibly the single most disturbing collection of comics that I’ve ever seen. With an introduction by Jim Woodring (who is probably my single favorite living artist today), this thing starts off bizarre and just gets weirder. Buy it, you absolutely, positively won’t regret it. Note from 3/1/02: I may or may not review this at any point in the near future, as I’m still recovering from the last time I read this, so here’s what “to stew in one’s one juice” means, from A Hog on Ice and Other Curious Expressions: To suffer the consequences of one’s own act. This, or its variant, ” to fry in one’s own grease'”, is very old. In the latter form it appears in a thirteenth-century tale of Richard the Lion-Hearted, and there is a French equivalent, cuire dans son jus, It is presumable that the older expression, at least, was originally literal; one fried in his own grease when, having committed some act punishable by such means, was burned at the stake.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Micrographica
Only Renee French could take a story about a ball of crap, a dead guy, a
sandwich and some tiny rodents and make it into a thing of beauty.
Apparently these images were done first in an online strip and in a much
tinier format, so if you’re looking for her usual gorgeous level of
detail, you’re going to be disappointed. Still, I don’t know about you,
but I go to Renee French for her writing much more than her drawing,
because the mind on that woman is unmatched by anybody I’ve ever known
or read. The story begins with Preston finding a tiny ball of crap, who
shows it to his friend Moe, who immediately takes credit for it. They
leave the crapball with Aldo, an even tinier rodent who seems obsessed
with the thing, as they go off exploring. This leads them to what
appears to be a dead body (or at least I hope it was dead as Moe was
crawling around in its eyeball), while Aldo finally cracks the crapball
open and we get to see what’s inside. I can go through the whole story
here, but why bother? Chances are you know already if Renee is somebody
whose work you like, and if she is I can’t imagine this description
would lead you away from checking this out. She also has a crap gallery
in the back, featuring crap drawing from such luminaries as Jim
Woodring, Dylan Williams and Penn Jillette. There’s also a nice blurb
from Jenna Fischer from The Office (NBC version), and it always makes me
happy when vaguely famous people push work like this, as this is the
sort of thing that should be read by humans everywhere. $10
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Edison Steelhead Now Available! $9
With Renee, most people already have their minds made up. If I say that this book is a series of drawings of deformed girls and rabbits, accompanied by a brief description of the subject and the circumstances where the drawing took place, you’re probably either intrigued or just think she’s being “weird” again and you have no interest. To which I say, well, more for us I guess, although you should really think about expanding your horizons just a bit. This is a fairly simple concept, as I described above, but I found myself eventually being drawn into the sad life of the fictional sketch artist, Edison Steelhead, and his sad, lonely life, told only in the briefest of descriptive sentences. Add to that the sight of a lineup of deformed rabbits and little girls and it’s hard not to be the slightest bit moved by the whole spectacle. All told, it’s another unique and indispensable comic from Renee, like everything else I’ve seen from her.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Detached #1
In case you were wondering about the concept of this comic, one morning a man wakes up to find that his body has detached itself from his head. Like the name, get it? DO YOU? Ahem. Anyway, the body has to go through a normal day at work, trying to get a girl to like him, and drinking out at the bars. This is a lot funnier than I thought it was going to be, frankly. It’s silly, obviously, but never really crosses that line into being stupid silly. OK, maybe it does, but it does it in an engaging enough way to make the book a fun read. Incredibly thin line, you have been successfully navigated! Wackiness ensues throughout the day, the funniest part being that nobody seems to notice that this guy is walking around without a head. I don’t know if this concept would hold up for a regular series (or even if that’s something that Jim has in mind, although the whole “number one” thing would indicate that there’s more), but I’d be curious to see it in action, and Jim has won me over enough with this issue to make me trust him for a little while. Worth a look, maybe there’s more samples on the website if you need more convincing. $2.95
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Slam Bang #1 Volume 3 Now Available! $9.95
Somehow this massive book has been available in the store here for almost a year and I’ve somehow missed talking about it. I blame the elections and the loss of my appendix last year; that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Want some details? As the cover says, there are over 50 contributors, this massive thing is over 200 pages, the cover art is gorgeous (even though the girl on the cover doesn’t actually appear in any of the stories) and keeping something this packed to under $10 is an impressive achievement. As for contributors, there are way too many to list them all, so I’ll just stick with the ones who have pages up here at the old Sloth for reference: Dan Taylor, Brad Foster, Tim Corrigan, John Lustig, Stan Yan, Dean LeCrone, Matt Levin, and Jim Siergey. That leaves all sorts of new cartoonists for you to discover in here, doesn’t it? As a whole, well, it’s an anthology, so some parts are stronger than others, but there’s more than enough in here to make it worth your while. Highlights include Ethan Wenberg and Stan Yan’s tale of the poo-flinging reporter (which makes this the most political book I’ve seen all year, sadly enough), the brief Kevin Hanna puppet theater story explaining to kids how the fast food is made, Ron LeBrasseur’s vampire love story, Dean LeCrone’s tale of an old lady trapped in a hot car by her dog, Tyler Sticka’s fly fight over some poo, Dan Taylor’s story about a successful weight loss clinic, Dan Lauer’s Iron Chef Funnies, Anton Bogaty’s tale of a space crew trying to defeat an unstoppable alien, and John Lustig’s always amusing Last Kiss comics, which are scattered throughout. The heart of the book though (figuratively and literally) is the Tim Corrigan Mighty Guy piece about the slave driver that is Allen Freeman and the methods he uses to keep all his cartoonists happy. Mighty Guy has been around for decades (although if I remember correctly it was always self-published) and I’ve always thought it was vastly underrated. What fan of cartoons ever wouldn’t appreciate Mighty Guy being shoved into a tin can (when trying to take over “Marvelous” comics) by the “Bulk”? All told, this is a pretty solid bunch of comics. A few stinkers, naturally, but more than enough good stuff in here to make up for it. $9.95
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
Website
Double Cross #15
It’s like I’m out of Tony’s comics all over again, as this is the last one I have to ramble about on this website. For those of you reading this site in the future and wondering what the order of the reviews is on this page… forget about it. Chronologically speaking they’re all over the place, so focus on the art instead, OK? This is the second part of his More Or Less story, which is reprinted in a collection above, but since I haven’t looked at that in years I’m going to go ahead and assume that it didn’t reprint this entire issue, and thus it’s OK for me to bring it up again. Hey, even if it did reprint the whole thing the world (the tiny part of it that reads this website, anyway) needs to be periodically reminded of Tony’s work. This is the story of a night in the life of Tony, as he has to attend a family dinner for his grandma’s birthday. He relates trying to work out to get her with his mother, when he should show up for dinner (and when he actually shows up), dealing with his brother when he tries to pass Oasis off as “just like the Beatles”, and shows a very frank and human family dinner. To top it all off he gets home earlier than his roommate expected, and I won’t even try to describe what he finds there. Tony is probably the only comic creator around who can misspell words like crazy (OK, he only misses a few) and not have it bug me, and that is probably due entirely to his reaction to a Dave Sim speech at SPACE in Ohio 5 or 6 years ago. It’s a funny story but I don’t want to post it here (unless I already did somewhere, and in that case “oops”), so ask me about it sometime. Lucky for you Tony has a fair chunk of his work in print in collections, or close enough to being in print that you could find it with a little persistence and help from the Google. Trust me, it’s worth the effort. $2
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Envy
This says in the inside front cover that it’s an “attempt” at a 24 hour comic. Wonder how close it was? For one thing, it’s significantly less sloppy than your average 24 hour comic, which leads me to believe that he came up with idea and then redrew it later to make a decent mini out of it. Why aren’t I talking more about the comic? Oh, come on, you know I like Tony’s stuff. Is there some mystery to what I’m going to say about it? OK, fine. It’s about a man who has a twin brother who’s a superhero, but the other twin is stuck with an unbearably ordinary life. So the ordinary twin decides to kidnap his superhero brother, steal his costume and reap the rewards of fame and fortune himself. Along the way he finds out that he might have some superpowers after all… but the only way to get them is to do good deeds. Great stuff and, like I said, this sure doesn’t look like your average 24 hour comic. $2 maybe? I don’t know, that’s a pretty sweet cover, it might be $3. Ah, just check his website, it’s all over this page and I’m sure there’s info there.
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
Website
Slam Bang #3 Volume 2 Now Available! $4
It’s time to go back to another forgotten issue in my constantly growing online store, and three cheers for it being another good one. There’s only one mildly weak piece in this anthology, and on further review I might have even misread that one. This starts off with a story from Allen’s childhood (drawn by Christine Wald), where he tries to keep up with a friend on a much better bike through a raised dirt trail with disastrous results. Next is Moose of Terror by Mark Monlux, in which two moose (meese?) wander into a small town, followed by a small gang of wild turkeys. Eric Weems then has what is essentially an ad for the comic in which a variety of celebrity spokespeople are chosen and then discarded, and I confess to being mildly baffled by the punchline. Anton Bogaty is up next with The Short Biography of an Unknown Artist, the “weak” piece I mentioned, but looking again at that title I think this story works well as a one-pager that ends abruptly. Revenge of the Booth Babe by John Lustig (who should be on this page much more than he is, as I always get a kick out of his Last Kiss series) has an abused model of comic conventions turning the tables on the middle-aged fat guys who always make her dress up in degrading outfits. Finally there’s one of the better stories of pure mayhem that I’ve ever seen, Power Struggle by Dean LeCrone. There’s a young boy, you see, who wants a cookie. His father does not want him to spoil his dinner and so refuses said cookie. What follows is ten pages of constantly escalating violence including power tools, crapping on the carpet, stuffed animals and flesh-eating ladybugs, and that only covers the first few pages. Seriously, if the rest of the comic sucked I’d be recommending it for this story alone, and the rest of the comic is already pretty good. If you’re a fan of mayhem, this is required reading. If you prefer the quiet stories, there are plenty of those on this website too, you big baby. $4
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Esoterica #2
One of these days I’ll learn that trying to keep track of a story when I only see a new issue once a year is an iffy proposition at best. Maybe if I had any kind of order to my comic piles I’d be able to grab back issues… but I digress, as I usually do. If you read the review for #1, you’ll see that I thought this had a lot of potential, so has that been realized here? Well, sort of, but this is obviously a long story, and it’s one of those cases where I’m not going to be sure about that until it’s over. In this one most of the characters from the last issue find themselves in an alien universe, with a handy-dandy guide to let them know a lot of the important facts about the place. There’s an alien on the planet who needs to sacrifice them to his god in order to save his people, and (not to give anything away), I’m REALLY intrigued by the god, who we do get to see. Other than that, the art is solid, the writing is fine (although some of the dialogue isn’t great), and I’m still cautiously optimistic as to where this whole thing is heading. Contact info is up there, this one’s $3!
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Posted by Kevin
April 23, 2010
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Slam Bang Volume 2 #6
Kudos to Christina Wald for that cover, there’s plenty to unpack before you even open the book. In case you can’t read the fine print (which is a shame, as there are jokes all over the cover) this is the advertising issue, basically an excuse for the people involved to take the “random fake ads” gag and have some real fun with it. Edward Pun (which can’t possibly be his real name) shows a bad day that ends in a clever ad for a massage chair, Brad Foster has a “rehabilitated” quack doctor, Ryan Estrada shows off the civic conscience of the actual Big Boy, Roger Langridge has the inspired idea of selling “mother in a jar” (just in case you’re too independent), Dean LeCrone & Allen Freeman have a time machine for sale, Tyler Sticka plays with celebrities in his bit (and hopes to get sued to “land a major distribution deal”), John Lustig again steals the show with his bit about the biological clock and where to place the blame after a bad break-up, and Jim Siergey has some games for children to help them find their place in life (as automatons). That’s leaving out plenty of stuff, as this thing is packed with ads that are only 1/2 or 1/3 of a page long by all sorts of folks. Big laughs, big issue, all kinds of stuff to pick through, what more do you want? $4
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Posted by Kevin
