Fuller, Tim & Wolverton, Basil – Ol’ Man Maggot Sucks!

May 24, 2024

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Ol’ Man Maggot Sucks!

If there’s a theme with the comics from SPACE 2024 that I’ve reviewed so far, it’s that they’re not available on the respective websites of their creators. This has baffled me for as long as I’ve been doing reviews, and it still does today. If somebody picked up one of these comics at SPACE like I did, but was curious to see a few more (he had a number with a similar theme, which was “Tim rewrites the dialogue over a classic story and artist”), well, good luck with that. Once or twice would just be the person selling their newest work without a chance to update their website (even though they could literally update their website during quiet moments of the con), but to not find the comics on the website so many times? I’ll never understand it. Too many of these reviews have ended with “it’s not listed as available for sale, so just contact them.” Make it easy or lots of people won’t bother! OK, rant over, but maybe I reached an artist or two. And to think, all I wanted to talk about originally was how happy I was to have a chance to review a Basil Wolverton comic, even if it is only sort of his comic at this point. Kids (or middle-aged people, I guess): Basil was an artist on the old timey EC comics like Tales From the Crypt and Weird Tales back in the 50’s, among many, many other projects. I’d be curious to see which comic this originally came from, but we get 16 panels of the comic with Tim rewriting them, sometimes seemingly barely at all and sometimes quite a bit. The story is about a drifter who comes into a town, hears a story about some riches held by a very old man, and decides to go after those riches, despite all the warnings from the townspeople. Tim does a solid job with the rewrite as there’s some really funny stuff in here, and boy howdy was Basil ever one heck of an artist. Check it out, if you’re lucky enough to find one! It’s listed as only $.50, but I vaguely recall paying more.

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Posted by Kevin

Hager, Steven & Rosenberger, Bruce – Dutchy Digest #10

May 20, 2024

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Dutchy Digest #10

I was all set to go with a review, but when I got to the Dutchy Digest website (which might be dead, because it’s looking rough, but it was the most current thing I could fine online for them) I was greeted with a banner ad that said “what is a vampire breast lift and how much does it cost? Take a look!” and suddenly I’m filled with questions that I would have never thought to ask. No I didn’t click it to check, as it might as well have said “click here for malware!”, but boy howdy am I curious. OK, back to reviewing! I’ll stay on topic. This is the story of a small town that makes a colossal doughnut, the theft of said doughnut, and the efforts from there to both figure out who stole it and why. There was a nice little fake-out a couple of pages before the end of the comic where I thought they were just going to leave the mystery hanging, but worry not! We do eventually figure out what happens. It’s a fun little story, in which I learned two new facts about hobos (that a group of five of them are called a “tramp” of hobos and that they leave a bent nail as tribute after being fed) and had to puzzle over whether or not the eventual thief would have had his plan work out how he wanted in real life. There are plenty of these issues out there and I’d say it’s worth hunting a few of them down, but I’m not sure how confident I am about suggesting that you use the linked website. Maybe it’s fine and it’s just the banner ads that are a giant red flag. Or maybe you should look them up on Facebook or something. Or hey, just go to SPACE in Columbus next year! No malware there. $3 (roughly)

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Posted by Kevin

Fuller, Tim & Collins, Daryll (and original artists) – Scam Comics #1

May 10, 2016

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Sham Comics #1

I somehow ended up with two different comics from SPACE 2016 that featured old artwork from the 40’s or 50’s with new dialogue written over bits of it. The other one was mostly the same dialogue (and terrible, terrible artwork) with a few random “fucks” thrown in, meaning that it was more or less awful, so I didn’t bother to review it. Yes, I do sometimes follow the “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” edict. Does that make me useless as a critic? Eh, probably. Anyway, this one was mostly a lot more inventive than that, meaning that it made me chuckle a few times with some really inventive substitutions. There were about a half a dozen satirized examples of those old full page ads from back in the day, including the famous one about the muscled dude telling you how to get muscled too and some real talk about how you get to be a comic book artist. Other stories featured the giant robot featured on the cover (in two stories; I’m guessing he was originally meant to be a hero but these two turned him into a sadistic murder machine without needing to change any artwork), how the comic came to be (told using old artwork, of course), a quick and fairly pointless werewolf story (which was readily acknowledged by the new authors) and the story of a horny astronaut who discovers a woman tied to a cactus and won’t take no for an answer. That last one was probably the funniest, as it did a great job of showing how she was playing sex games and not nearly as helpless as she appeared, leading the human to go on a rampage to “save” her. Oh, and there was a story with a crime-fighting duo where the kid member farted a lot, but there’s not much more to be said for that one. The fact that they still managed to get a laugh or two out of me on that story says a lot. I guess whether or not this comic is right for you depends on how much you’d like to see older pulpy artwork made funny. Like I said, it can go horribly wrong, but this one got it mostly right. $5

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