Seck, Steve – The Trial of Sweetie Snake

September 29, 2010

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The Trial of Sweetie Snake

It’s not every day that you see a snake with a five o’clock shadow.  That’s the adorably named Sweetie Snake on the cover (duh, and no, it didn’t come all crumpled up, that’s just what the cover looks like), and it takes a little while to get him to trial.  Sweetie Snake, at the outset, could be mistaken for old school Bugs Bunny, as he is scooped up out of the river by an inbred prospector and goes on to a series of escalating pranks until his true nature comes out.  Hey, he is a snake, after all.  A sheriff stumbles across the scene, Sweetie ends up on trial for murder, then things get into O.J. Simpson territory, although it’s tricky to say more without giving away the ending.  The comic occasionally wanders over the line between funny and mean, but only for a split second and it still manages to keep it funny.  That’s probably not going to make sense to anybody without full access to my brain, but it makes sense to me.  The art maintains a cartoonish quality, but that probably has something to do with this basically being an illustrated cartoon.  I have plenty of other books from Steve to come, as he took me up on my challenge to send enough books along for me to review them once a week, so I should get a better sense of his skills in the coming weeks.  As for this one, it was funny, those newspaper titles were hilarious, and he managed to make the very dated O.J. Simpson references seem relevant.  Good stuff, that’s what I’m getting at.  $4