Lindo, Sara – Carl Finds Love #2

February 22, 2012

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Carl Finds Love #2

Wait a minute, this is a comic for little kids? It had honestly never occurred to me before, but Sara puts a few cut-outs towards the back of the book and suggests that kids “ask the closest responsible adult” to help them out. Granted, there’s no cursing, nudity or anything else that would prevent kids from reading this, but it is all about the quest for love of one man, and I’m thinking that pretty much everybody is cleared to use their own scissors before they care about such things. Unless she was kidding, in which case please don’t mind my denseness. Anyway, this time around our hero decides to get some ladies to like him by himself, which leads to the fantastic scene that I sampled with him giving away flowers to random ladies. This page also really showcases Sara’s visual inventiveness, and that along with several background scenes really help the book feel… meatier? Thicker? More substantive, that’s what I was looking for. Any work that you can go back in and pick up several things you missed the first time around is OK in my book. After our hero passes out flowers he gets some advice on this tactic from his friends (who basically tell him that people in cities aren’t used to such things) before getting him to agree to going on a few blind dates. He gets a bit more advice (and a lucky coin) from a pizza man, then the issue wraps up. So apparently there is going to be at least one more issue if that title is going to end up being literally true. I’m enjoying it and am curious to see what happens next, and once you’ve won me over on those two fronts I’m generally good for the long haul. Granted, the haul is rarely very long in small press comics (the Cerebus epic notwithstanding), but I’m still in. Even if the story hits a sour patch there are still all the random “people” populating the landscape to look forward to… $3


Lindo, Sara – Carl Finds Love #1

January 19, 2012

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Carl Finds Love #1

Ah, love. Judging from the pink store displays it is almost that time of year again where you are legally required to be dating somebody or else be considered a hopeless loser. Sara tackles the question of what it is that ladies like in this issue, which is kind of odd as she is a lady, but hey, I’ll take useful advice wherever I can get it. Um, I mean wherever the reader can get it. Anyway, things start off with what is almost an accident between a construction worker with a traffic cone for a head (or is it only ON his head?) and a car driven by a man with a tomato for a head. Oh, and the whole thing is witnessed by a walking, talking screwdriver. I know that Sara is dating the frantabulous Steve Seck (you know, those “Life is Good” comics that you are all reading), so now I have to wonder if they both decided to depict their characters as living inanimate objects or if it was their mutual preference for such characters that got the two of them together in the first place. There’s some pretty rough perspective work on that second page (a nearly wrecked car should not be smaller than the doors for a nearby establishment, and the traffic cone head guy should not tower over the vehicle as he walks towards it), but that’s the only error of that nature that I noticed. From there the guy with a tomato for a head offers the pair of gents some advice about the ladies: complimenting them on their appearance so that they know that “all that time they spend in the bathroom doesn’t escape our notice.” This man then walks up to a couple of ladies and uses one implicit and one explicit really bad pick-up line, and they both work like a charm. This confuses our two heroes (the traffic cone head guy and the screwdriver guy), but after seeing it work they decide to try it themselves on their lunch break. The result of their attempts are depicted below in the sample, and the rest of the comic is them talking with friends in a restaurant about their failed attempts and what it is exactly that the ladies like. Left unsaid in that conversation was the thing that flummoxed me: if the ladies hate that type of behavior in guys who were asking them out, why did the two ladies that the tomato head guy talked to give him their digits so readily? There’s still another issue to go that might explain that part that made no sense to me, but overall it’s a pretty fun comic with some pretty terrible advice on how to woo the ladies. Which, I believe, is kind of the point. $3