So after reading my second Ben Sears book, done by a man who’s been cranking out comics for years but somebody who I’m only recently reading, let me say something that everybody else has already figured out: the man has range. The other book I read (Night Air) was a fantastical tale with all kinds of oddities in it. This one is more of a straightforward crime caper, with, sure, some fantastical oddities, but overall it’s much more grounded. Things start off with a man nervously testing some counterfeit money by trying to deposit it at the bank, and after he gets away with it this little angle is dropped for quite awhile. From there our heroes manage to take down a bad guy, go about their lives for a bit and then go back into the treasure hunters office to get more work. They’re asked to do something that’s morally abhorrent to them (rob the grave of somebody who died owing money), quit the business, and are forced to get real jobs. They end up in catering, which leads them to working an event in a hotel, which hey look at that, leads to them running across the people who were passing off the counterfeit money in the opening. There’s a chance encounter with the man who set up the counterfeiting operation years ago (and took the fall for it in the process) at the hotel bar, and the caper of our heroes trying to catch these people is off! One thing I love about Ben’s artwork is that you can really linger on any panels that have more than a couple of people in them or are outdoor scenes of any kind; the man does not waste any chance to tell stories in the backgrounds, which really increases the perception of it as a fully realized world. Also there’s a blurb on the back cover that describes these books as stealthily being OK for kids to read too, and you know what, that’s exactly correct. It didn’t dawn on me either, and there’s plenty here that an adult would appreciate more, but these are the best kind of “all ages” comics: the ones that don’t insult any age group. There are still many more Ben Sears books out there for me to find and read (and he has a Fantagraphics book coming out soon too), but after reading these two books, any doubts I might have had about that being a good idea have been erased. Check out his stuff, says I! $12
Posted by Kevin 
