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Mimi’s Doughtnuts #19

I don’t believe it.  Not that I want to call Marek a liar or anything, as I’ve enjoyed his comics immensely and he always seemed like a nice enough guy to me, but I don’t see how this was a 24 hour comic.  OK, he used stick figures for the stories, and OK, the backgrounds are reasonably sparse, as that’s a requirement with 24 hour comics.  Still, the backgrounds aren’t THAT sparse, the layout of the comic doesn’t look possible in a 24 hour time frame, and there are just too many distinct stories in here for me to understand the time frame.  He did say in his intro that he had a number of stories ready to go before he started, that he used tales from his childhood, his friends and friends of friends to make these pieces.  He also mentions that the restricting spaces of the stories sometimes changed the stories he was told/remembered a little bit, but the basics are the same as real life.  Aw, screw it.  I’m going to give up my skepticism and just give him credit for putting out an exceptionally thought out mini comic in a very short time span.  The theme of the comic, as should be expected from that cover, is health.  The characters from past issues of Mimi’s Doughnuts don’t make an appearance, as these are all stories about various health problems and the trouble that everybody has with their health insurance companies.  The health problems listed include early allergies (and the awful moment when a young Marek (?) found out that he was allergic to cats), a persistent cough (and hey, that story was missing a resolution), spousal abuse (OK, the kids heard it as a mutual fight, but it didn’t look good to me), acne (with the hilarious ending of finding out years later that the pills prescribed may cause later heart problems), a broken/damaged thumb, a stroke (with his later fight against the symptoms of a deceased relative), a finger (with the obligatory fight with the insurance company for coverage of the problems), a kidney (and the insurance company’s deliberately cheating him out of his needed payment), a heart (with the heartbreaking tale of the young girl who would need a transplant possibly by age 25 and how tough it would be for her to ever get insurance because this was the dreaded “pre-existing condition”), blood (from a heart attack), and face (with a silly facelift and the conversation that went with it).  It’s a great pile of stories that wasn’t hurt a bit by the 24 hour time limit.  Check it out, anybody who has ever been sick can relate to some of the nonsense in this volume.  $3

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Mimi’s Doughnuts Zine #17

Finally, a non-instructional comic from this man.  Granted, I do have the hefty collection of stories, but I still haven’t had a chance to get to it.  Still, this was a nice primer of what to expect from that giant book and, overall, I was pleasantly surprised.  Anybody who reads this site on even a slightly regular basis knows that the three panel strip is a dangerous thing, often forcing the writer into horrible puns and is rarely a good idea.  There are exceptions, of course, and just enough of them to make me give them a chance when I see them and not run screaming in the opposite direction.  This book is an odd combination of all that, as some of the strips are three panels, some of them are the whole page and all of them combine to form a slightly jarring whole.  That’s the first 16 pages anyway (out of around 40).  Marek is nice enough to have a recap page to start off, telling us what must be just about everything we need to know.  The big underlying story after that was of a group of friends dealing with holidays and trying to figure out alternative sources for energy.  Yes, there is a serious environmental conscience on display here, and if you’re at all like me your cynicism may reach up and grab you by the neck.  Still, more than a few funny bits and an excellent cast of rejected Christmas mascots won me over (Slushy the Snow Mound in particular is a fantastic idea).  From here we go to two pages of comics from other contributors (assuming they’re all not just pseudonyms, which, come to think of it, they probably are) dealing with the financial crisis which, again, were actually pretty funny.  One suggestion though: maybe Marek should put the date of the strips somewhere in them.  Or somewhere in the book at least, as I could figure out that this was all 2008-2009 from the topical references (and, um, the note in the front that says everything is from 2008-2009) but as these things get older a little more specificity might be nice.  After all, this is #17, which is an impressive number for this sort of thing, and Marek seems to be very serious about the concept of subscriptions.  Following this is the heart of the book, a silent story about a farmer trying to make a living with his goods, trying out a deadly chemical to kill off the bugs and then dealing with the consequences.  Generally speaking it’s not a good thing to have your villains be utterly adorable, but it manages to be a good story regardless.  Finally there’s one page which is a call for the comics industry to be bailed out as well, to which I would like to wholeheartedly concur.  Think of the tiny amount of money the government would have to give out to have all the mini comics creators in the world free to make whatever they wanted!  Not to mention how little it would take for people like me to make this our full time job, bringing the word of decent comics to everyone.  Just sayin’.  So: I was pleasantly surprised by this, as I wasn’t at all sure what to expect after the instructional books.  It might overwhelming in a huge collection, but I will be finding that out for myself in the weeks to come.  $4