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Lasky, Dave – Boom Boom #4
Boom Boom #4
Hey look, a flip book! Are you allowed to do that if you’re the only person involved? Well, Dave sure thought so back in 1994. There are plenty of interesting stories in this one, mostly largish biography pieces. The first side of the flip (the sampled cover) deals with the story of John Lee Hooker, a legendary blues man if you didn’t know, and how he slowly rose up and made money singing the blues, even with his unique style. Following this is a story of Dave as a young artist learning his craft, trying to anticipate where he should go with his answers and picking up a lot through it. Once you flip the book over there’s a dense, thickly black (just a mildly different artistic style) tale of Pablo Picasso in a quiet time, telling the story of his early years to a woman he’s just met. Finally there’s an utterly random piece detailing the adventures of the Iron Duke fighting his way free against a giant eyeball. It manages to be short enough to stay funny and still packed enough to tell a very quick story. Sure it’s a parody, but he manages to keep the story logically consistent, and that’s no small feat. Again, this is almost certainly out of print for those of you without time machines, but it is worth seeking out if you have resources, or one of those rare comic book stores in your area that has old mini comics available. Or do those places only exist in my head?
Lasky, Dave – Boom Boom #2
Boom Boom #2
Here it is, another in what’s turning out to be a long line of “what do you mean this guy or girl doesn’t already have a page here?” posts. It may have taken me until 2010 to put the guy up on my website, but he was one of the precious few comic artists that got me hooked on this mini comic business. His adaption of Ulysses into mini comic form was a thing of brilliance, and that probably should have been the comic I posted first, but hey, that just leaves something good for later, right? This particular issue is, essentially, a birthday card to his dad. He wanted to do something different for his dad’s 55th birthday, so he asked a bunch of relatives and friends to tell their favorite stories of the man and illustrated them. He kept things interesting by illustrating these tales in a lot of different styles, including old school Popeye, Matt Groening overbite, and Peanuts, including a few more that I probably just didn’t recognize. Stories in here include his dad growing up, running away from home and picking cotton at the age of 13, volunteering to discipline some neighbor kids, telling the kids that they’re going to the zoo and having the day fall completely apart, never paying his parking tickets (and eventually getting his car booted), accidentally joining a spa for the elderly, and how he had an endless supply of stories to tell his sons at bedtime. It’s sweet, it’s funny, and even if you’re too cold-hearted to care about am over-sized birthday card to the guys dad, the variety of artistic styles alone should be enough to keep you interested. I didn’t see any way to buy these on his website but, as is often the case with these mini comics folk, somebody really should put all this older stuff into a collection of some kind. It’s a shame to have so much of it be impossible to find trivia at this point. $2
Gaynor, Jerome (editor) – Flying Saucer Attack
Here’s a partial list of who’s in this: Jessica Abel, Joe Chiapetta, Jennifer Daydreamer, Fawn Gehweiler, Tom Hart, Megan Kelso, James Kochalka, Dave Lasky, Ted May, John Porcellino, Brian Ralph, Zak Sally, Jeff Zenick, Jenny Zervakis and Aleksander Zograf. There’s more, and I can’t believe that there’s no review for this anywhere on my site, as it’s really one of the best anthologies of all time, not that I’m biased or anything. It’s also from 1995, so it’s one of the early small press books that I read, so there’s probably a bit of nostalgia going on over here. Still, take a look of that list of talent and tell me that it wouldn’t be great.
