Monitor Duty
by Randy Lander
"STAPLE Part Three"
I know, it's been a month since I last tackled STAPLE comics. I haven't forgotten, I just needed a bit of a breather before diving into the last batch of comics. At any rate, everyone probably knows the score on these now: STAPLE was a small press show in Austin, and I have dutifully reviewed everything that was given to me, or at least one thing from everyone who got something to me. This is the third of these columns, and this completes my rundown of STAPLE comics.
 I don't have any information on this one, no price, no publisher, no website, which is a shame, because it's one of the standouts of this particular column. Oh, the artwork, by the artist working under the nom de plume of Stephen Future, is still very much in the developmental stages, and Jones's storytelling could be clearer as well, but there's a likable, fun and strange tone to the piece that makes me forgive a lot. The story starts off with the suicide of a well-liked landlord, takes a sidetrip into the arrest of a prostitute and her client and then comes around nicely at the end to show how these stories relate. The characters are quirky and fun, the dialogue between them equally entertaining and the revelation of a bit of science-fiction at the end an intriguing story element to go out on. (Correction: Chris "Dirty Uncle STAPLE" Nicholas gave me the website, which I've put up top there.
DEAD@17: THE COMPLETE FIRST SERIES & BLOOD OF SAINTS
by Josh Howard (Viper Comics)
Format: Trade Paperbacks
Price: $14.95
Website: www.vipercomics.com
 Dead@17 is a little bit different from the other books I've been reviewing from STAPLE, in that it's gotten a fair amount of mainstream market exposure. I've actually read a little bit of the original series, but while I found Howard's art striking from the start, the story didn't really grab me. I still have my quibbles, notably that the character stuff gets pushed to the side too often and that it tends toward the overdramatic, but the general concepts are very solid, and by the time Blood of Saints rolled around and Howard had introduced the hero's evil opposite, I saw that there was a larger plan involved that I wanted to see come to fruition. Dead@17 has elements in common with Buffy (hot girl chosen one battles evil), although the villain is a touch more on the Lovecraftian side of things and the monster of choice is the zombie instead of the vampire. Dead@17 is fairly dark, despite featuring highly stylized cute girl/animated style artwork, and Howard doesn't pull punches when it comes to hurting and harrowing his heroes and their friends and family. It's gorgeous to look at, and Viper Comics has put together a really well-designed digest sized trade program for the book to boot. Worth a look if you like cute girls, zombies, apocalyptic horror or any combination of the three.
DIGITAL WEBBING PRESENTS #6,8-10
by Jeffery Stevenson, Ryan Ottley, Scott Story, Deon Nuckols, Serge LaPointe & Cliff Kurowski (Digital Webbing)
Format: Comic Books
Price: $2.95
Website: www.digitalwebbing.com
 Actually, there are a number of other creators who contributed to these issues of the Digital Webbing anthology, but Jeffery Stevenson was the guy who gave me the review copies and my brain is melting from all of these comics, so I'm just reviewing his stories. It is clear in reading this snapshot of Stevenson's work that his mind was deeply warped by exposure to the same things other children of the '80s such as myself were, including Battleship, the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, Care Bears and maybe a little '90s influence in the form of Xena. Stevenson returns to Arazel & Xarenia, his lady thieves, twice in these pages, both times using a routine which involves going past traps and monsters in a dungeon to win a dubious prize, while "Bob the Battleship" from issue 10 is more of a spoof on kid show hosts with the odd story of a living, talking transforming battleship going postal over childhood trauma. Both are fun, and have solid art from Scott Story, Dean Nuckols and the rest, but the gem of the bunch is "Dungeon Bears" in #8, featuring terrific art by Invincible's Ryan Ottley and plugging the Care Bears into the roles of the lead characters of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon, with a little bit of My Little Pony action thrown in for good measure. It's remarkably silly and pretty brief, but it's fun, and indeed, that description could be applied to all of Stevenson's work here.
GREENPIECE: GALACTIC DETECTIVE
by Jason DeGroot & Adam Owen (Orbitalcomics.net)
Format: Minicomic
Website: www.orbitalcomics.net
 Greenpiece seems to be a book at war with itself. On the one hand, DeGroot has an interesting story about the murder of a clone, with political implications given that clones are hated on this world, and on the other, he's got a buffoonish protagonist and some cheesy, creaky jokes throughout. It's kind of like what you might get it you plugged The Tick into the plot of Identity Crisis. The book needed to be a lot funnier to work as a humor book (the character names are all sort of adolescent funny, like the anti-clone movement whose initials spell C.R.A.P.), and DeGroot would have been better off taking it all a bit more seriously, since he's got a decent twist to his murder mystery and plenty of potential in exploring the ethical dilemmas of a murdered clone. Of course, Adam Owen's work has a cartoony quality that makes it better suited to humor, but again, it's only ever mildly funny at best, and the storytelling is oftentimes clunky, getting the point across but not doing so easily.
I HUNT MONSTERS VOL. 2 #1-2
by Wes Hartman & Craig Babiar (Antarctic Press)
Format: Comic Book
Price: $2.99
Website: www.apmanga.com
 Like Viper Comics, Antarctic Press is one of the bigger dogs from the STAPLE show. The company has been around for 20 years, and is probably most famous for publishing "Amerimanga" titles like Ninja High School, as well as the critically-beloved work of Rod "Neotopia, Courageous Princess" Espinosa. Espinosa is listed as creator and plotter of I Hunt Monsters, but most of the creative chores fall to Hartman and Babiar, who craft a fun if exceptionally lightweight story about four friends whose unique abilities lead them to seek out and battle monsters. It's the kind of thing we've all seen in this genre, with the morally uncertain femme fatale, the heroes with a legacy, the newbie hero who is heir to a powerful legend, powerful vampire lords, etc. etc. But it's still a great deal of fun, and when Babiar really gets to cut loose on the gray tones (with assists by Robby Bevard) as he does on the four page intro of the concept of issue one, I'm reminded of the likable energy of guys like J. Scott Campbell and Mike Wieringo. Actually, come to think of it, the tone of I Hunt Monsters isn't that dissimilar from that of Danger Girl, only applied to more of a horror/action genre rather than espionage/action.
 In The Man Who Hates Fun, Thornton has created a book that pokes fun at pretentiousness even while showing off a vocabulary and understanding of philosophy that shows he must have come close to the dangers of it at some point. This is one of the weirdest buddy comedies I've ever read, as three self-hating iconoclasts living three different kinds of rigidly-guided lives of philosophical devotion squabble over mundane things like where to live, who to date, how to deal with parents and of course, how to get along with each other. It's actually a whole lot of fun, full of dry and sarcastic humor and dripping with enough irony to give you a month's worth of your daily allowance. It's also clearly a creator in the early stages of development, as Thornton's story has pretty weak transitions and his artwork, while perfectly capable of telling the story, is crowded and sometimes off-putting, helped not at all by the tons of packed-in and crudely hand-lettered dialogue. This crazy, scrawled and jam-packed look is actually fitting to the art-meets-low culture approach of the book, but it also makes the book a chore to read, even if the humorous payoff turns out to be worth it.
MARIMONT HOME FOR EVIL GENIUSES #0
by Les Weiler & Joe Riley (Goathead Publications)
Format: Minicomic
 A retirement home for evil geniuses. It's a good concept, and Weiler and Riley craft a fun story out of it, wherein an old man tries to escape the home with his giant robot only to find that the nurses are ready for him. Unfortunately, at 10 pages, this is a bit slight as an introduction to the book, and the gag is really that nine pages of build-up are spent for a one page deliberately anti-climactic conclusion. Kind of fun, but very forgettable.
 Potlatch is a trade collecting a number of very short stories by a number of very amateur creators with the proceeds devoted to a comic-book fan club in the second issue and a small press alliance in the third. Because of the whole "let's get together and put on a show" vibe, I can't bring myself to be too harsh, but truthfully, not much of the work here connected with me. Most of the stories are too short to come up with any kind of point or even the clever Twilight Zone style twist that is common to this kind of anthology, and the artwork is pretty simplistic across the board. Potlatch gets big points for enthusiasm and earnestness, but it's just not very good.
SHORTS: A COMICS ANTHOLOGY
by T. Weier, Christine Pointeau, T.N. Tapp, Shane Patrick Boyle, Jim Siergey & Tom Roberts (Dash Comics)
Format: Black-and-white magazine
Price: $3.50
 How to describe Shorts? Well, there are a couple ways. The first one I can think of is "What the hell was that?" which was my immediate reaction to the book. Not my cup of tea, to say the least. The better way to describe it is try to imagine Mad Magazine if it were published by Fantagraphics. Jim Siergey and Tom Roberts are the saving grace of the book for me, delivering goofy promo and advertising parodies, with the highlight being their dark satire of sitcoms in "Mr. Dead" and "H.P. Lovecraft's Yog." The rest of the book is largely a stream-of-consciousness journey into the bizarre, with Tapp and Boyle's stuff being on the grosser side and Weier's work delving into the realm of random anxiety.
Email Randy Lander comments about this review.
|
