Blog Archives

Miller, Rob (editor) – Khaki Shorts #2

Website

khaki21

Khaki Shorts #2

Technically this is apparently the second edition of this series, but it’s only notable to people (not me) who have seen the other stuff, so I’m just calling it #2.  Just on the off-chance that anybody was worried about that.  This is an anthology of various folks in the UK, there is no table of contents and some of the stories aren’t labelled, so I’m going to go with my best guesses.  First up is a piece by Shug 90 called The Wildebeests, dealing with conspiracies over the years while substituting animals for the humans.  Hey, it’s funnier than it sounds.   Next up is an ongoing story by John Miller called Star Trudge, and if you were guessing you had a 50/50 shot of getting it right: it’s a parody of Star Trek.   Once again it’s funny stuff (and I’m sensing a trend), as the Captain starts off waking up to a drunken crew and has a series of adventures throughout the book.  Float by Martin & Adam Smith is next, which is about some guys who wake up, um, floating.  It’s a long way to go for a poop joke, but at least it’s a funny poop joke.  Generic Street by Alrite Miller (no, I don’t know if that is Rob or John either) is next, and this piece breaks the trend by not being funny but instead being extremely odd.  There’s some genuinely odd imagery in here to go with word balloons coming from arms, and I’m not even going to try to explain it. Following this is the story from the cover, which immediately follows their story from the last issue, which leaves the reader a bit lost.  The hyper-inflated superhero team and the incompetent archenemy bit looked like it had some potential, but three pages was way too short to get much of an idea.  John Miller has a piece up next that makes me a bit dizzy to think about, as that panel structure was all over the place, and I’m frankly not entirely sure what was going on there.  Dollyforce 2020 (by Adam Smith)follows and it’s the longest piece in the book, dealing with a group of kids and an adult trying to free their grandma from a small army of robots, all being controlled by a man with a crush.  It meandered a bit but really came together in the end.  There are two more short pieces by Rob Miller and one on the back cover by John Miller, but I’m leaving them a surprise for when you pick up this book for yourselves.  Have I mentioned that it’s consistently funny?  And when it’s not funny it’s thoroughly bizarre and inventive.  I’ve felt all day vaguely like I got hit by a truck, so I apologize if this isn’t up to my usual standards, whatever they are.  I just wanted to make it perfectly clear: you will not regret getting this comic.  That is all.

khaki22