Frank Cho's second issue with Image Comics isn't nearly as strong as his first, but it still made me chuckle a couple of times. Unfortunately, the main storyline running through the strips failed to hold my attention for long, and a couple of gags were repeated to poor effect. Still, Cho's zany characters and Bloom County riff remains a good bit of fun, and his clean art style and homages to the work of others in comics and animation are still sharp as well.
Ralph the bear has developed a new gene therapy that's "guaranteed" to make a man more attractive to the opposite sex, and Frank, desperate to catch Brandy's eye, agrees to the treatment. Unfortunately, Ralph's turned to Liberty Meadows' porcine resident, Dean, as a source of genetic masculinity for the experiment, resulting in two Deans running around the place. Meanwhile, Oscar gets to play catch, and Brandy has dinner with her mom... and an unexpected guest.
Cho's clean style makes for an interesting contrast. His human characters, for the most part, are quite realistic, and here they are, side-by-side with some cartoony, Pogo-like funny animals. It reinforces the surreal and over-the-top quality of the strip. The backgrounds are lacking, but that's to be expected with the comic-strip format. What did bother me about the art was Cho's depiction of women. He's always walked the line when it came to gratuitous cheesecake art, and he crosses it here with some pointless jokes about Brandy's roommate's penchant for skimpy costumes (webcam performances, dontcha know). It's not particularly funny. The brief titillation is rather pointless.
The guy who blames his drink for the weirdness he sees before him? That joke is played out... even moreso when Cho hits us with it three times in the same issue. And Oscar getting injured while playing catch? It wasn't all that funny once, let alone twice.
Still, the cartoon violence and a couple of odd wisecracks ("That's the worst ventriloquist act I've ever seen") elicited a couple of audible laughs. I think what this issue was lacking was a little more of Cho's self-depricating humor.
