Various Anthologies – Failure

May 2, 2010

Failure

This is an anthology that’s all autobio stuff, and it’s all about some real or perceived flaw of the author. Naturally, that means I love it. Hey, you should all know by now that I’m biased towards good autobio comics. The first story is by Rose Crowe, whose main failure is her inability to accept praise and good things. Then there’s Antar Ellis, with an average (I only say average because I’ve seen the concept so many times) story about how he screwed up meeting a woman back in school. Jerry Stanford is up next with a depressing tale about addiction, not that there are many stories about addiction that aren’t depressing. Greg Vondruska follows that with a story about rapidly gaining weight, something that I can relate to after too much time in a “comfy” relationship. Last is Drew Weing with a story about being covered in moles (not the underground kind, the skin kind) as a child and dealing with other kids. Lots more to all these stories, of course, but it’s a solid enough book that people should pick it up anyway, so why give anything away? It’s $3, check out the website, I’m sure there’s more goodies there and contact info for everybody…

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Pappalardo, Tom – Failure, Incompetence

April 26, 2010

Website

Website for Broken Lines

Website for Famous Fighters

Failure, Incompetence

Want to make your book critic-proof? Or at least for wishy-washy critics like me? Here’s a quote from the brief (but hilarious and insightful) intro: “I hope that you find the jokes-to-dollars-spent ratio to be within acceptable parameters.” That’s it, I’m shut down completely. $5 is a bit much for a comic, granted, or at least it is in my fantasy 1997 world where that sort of thing was still rare. But all you have to do is pick this thing up and you can tell by sheer weight that you’re getting a lot of pages. And he’s right, there are jokes packed all over the pages, so even if you don’t like two or three of them, well, there’s still 5 more right there either on that page or the page next to it to make you laugh. The only complaint that I have about this is that, as this is my first impression of the guy, I could have done with a slightly smaller book that didn’t have some of the dumber strips in here. But then, as humor is mostly subjective, who’s to say what that is? At least this way you get to see the bad with the good. So what’s actually in here, as I seem to be skirting around that? Well, it’s mostly because there’s no chance for me to tell you everything in here without this being the longest review ever, so I’ll just stick to a (relative) few of them. Australians, outer space adventures, voodoo, fat rats, superhero school, and when he was a headbanger. That’s probably about 1/100 of the book right there. He also has a few text pieces that I really loved, including the best blanket apology that I’ve ever seen. Oh, and out of all the things I could have sampled, of course I went right for the potty mouth…

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