Salazar, Souther – Peanut Butter & Jelly #2 (with Saelee Oh)

April 26, 2010

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Peanut Butter & Jelly #2 (with Saelee Oh)

There’s another one of these things out there and I don’t have it? Granted, I might not even know about this one if Souther wasn’t kind enough to send it to me, but it still hurts to think that there’s unread stuff out there from this guy. I’m not sure who did what here, but Saelee either kept up with this guy or inspired him to greater heights, so either way she’s a force to be reckoned with. I should admit right now that I’m hopelessly biased to these observational, see-the-beauty-already-in-the-world kind of comics, but I’m starting to think that nobody does it better. In this issue we hear back from Qwerty, who is apparently a recurring character (and I just got the the joke for his name as I was typing that. Try it for yourself if you don’t believe me), who drives over all kinds of things while drunk. Funnier than it sounds, trust me. There’s also a story that, wonderfully, goes nowhere, and all kinds of random stuff. You get no more from me, because why should I take the joy of reading this away from you? If you’re starting to think that this guy might be able to throw paint at a wall and still have me call it incredible, I’m starting to think that you might be right…


Kiersh, Dave – Last Cry For Help #3

April 24, 2010

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Last Cry For Help #3

I should almost put this on the Various page because so many people contributed to this one, but eh. It’s mostly Dave and Souther Salazar, as always, but there are also a bunch of other people with contributions of varying size: Saelee Oh, Dan Moynihan, David Heatley, Ron Rege Jr., Todd Webb, Rachel Sumpter and Daria Tessler. It’s 38 pages and Dave and/or Souther still have something to do with 75% of it or so, but the sheer number of artists makes this book much more diverse than the other issues. It’s almost jarring when you get to the 11 page strip by Dave towards the end of the book; looking at the same art for that long doesn’t seem right. The only consistent underlying theme I could find here was the visual poetry that went into every story. The words were universally beautiful, sometimes the art wasn’t, but it was never less then pretty good and it really didn’t matter once you got the messages of the individual stories. I can’t imagine that I have to “sell” the work of these two to anybody, but if I do, this is only $2 and is a great showcase for a lot of cartoonists, with long enough stories so that you can still feel like you got your “fix” of Souther and Dave. I’m sure it’s up on the Catastrophe page, buy it already…