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Various Anthologies – Liquid Sunshine

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liquidsunshine1

Liquid Sunshine

Have you ever wondered what comics creators do all day when they’re stuck at a convention?  Most of them don’t have a line at their desk all day long and some of them (especially when they’re at one of the big conventions where the small press people are sometimes all shoved into a far corner of the building) get very few visitors at all.  Well, sometimes they do little jam comics like this, purely for the hell of it.  This tiny comic contains all sorts of people, namely Andy Runton, J. Chris Campbell, Duane Ballenger, Chris Pitzer, Sam Henderson, Rob Ullman, Jacob Chabot, Chris Giarrusso and Justin Gammon.  If it wasn’t for the table of contents I would have no idea who drew which pages, as they mostly aren’t even using their usual drawing style.  This book doesn’t say for sure, but I’d guess that they would do a panel and pass the book along to the next person to see what they came up with, as this doesn’t follow much of a story or have much of a point.  There’s some liquid sunshine, you see, and a boy is carrying it around.  Another boy wants to steal this glass of liquid sunshine for the obvious piles of money he’ll get for it, but abruptly drops this idea to urinate in the glass instead.  It wanders around a bit more after that, but you get the general idea.  This is a great comic for those of you who are curious about what artists do in their spare time at these conventions, otherwise it’s easily skipped.  No price, but it can’t be more than $1.

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Campbell, J. Chris – Quitter

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Adhouse Books

Quitter

J. Chris Campbell appears to love robots, and why not? They’re easy enough to love as it is (until they inevitably kill us all, of course), but with the way J. draws them, why not fall completely in love? This mini is essentially every argument you’ve ever had in your head about quitting your lousy, dead-end job. And if you’ve never had one of those, my hats off to you sir or madam, you’re one of the lucky few. The robot on the cover does a bit of soul searching, asking questions about how much he’s relied upon, how only losers quit, and how whatever job he does next would have to better than the current situation. So you have beautifully realized robots playing out fantasies about quitting work, what could be better than that? $2

Campbell, J. Chris – Zig Zag #1

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Adhouse Books

Zig Zag #1

What a gorgeous book. Really, Adhouse does it again with this one, I have yet to see anything but fantastic packaging from this group. Take a minute to check out that website of theirs, it doesn’t hurt anything that they’re publishing the works of some of the best people working today either. The vast majority of this comic is about the epic struggle to get to a movie on time, with a date, while being a tiny bug. Funny stuff throughout, mostly because it really can be this much of a chore to get something as simple as a movie trip organized. And that’s witout the handicap of being, you know, a bug. The front end of the book is about hilarious celebrity deaths and the back end is the cover story, about a robot who finds a screw and just wants to get a simple answer out of the doctors as to what could be wrong with him. This, of course, takes months of red tape and is too much of a shortie for me to go into. The front and back ends of this are in full color while the bulk of it is on a mixture of browns and white, just so you know. It may seem a little pricey at $5.95, but you get what you pay for. I mean, look at that sample and tell me it’s not purty…