I am a huge fan of Mahfood's artwork and design sense. His stories, I've noticed, are about a world that I am just not a part of. I'm too old and unhip to really relate to hot young tattooed girls going to clubs, selling and doing drugs and painting or admiring graffiti. I've already picked up most of the material collected here in mini-comic format, but this is a fantastic little package, and though the mini-comic format feels ideal for the sort of one-man jam that is 40 Oz., the collected edition works surprisingly well too. This is a terrific showcase for Mahfood's artwork, and it has some really fun stories as well, notably the zombie and monster movie influenced stories of Zombie Kid.
40 Oz. is put together from mini-comics that Mahfood has been doing from the beginning, even before he got his big break with Clerks at Oni Press. So the early pages are a little more rough than you'd probably see from him these days. However, I'm surprised to see how much polish he had even this early on, as the opening Zombie Kid story is a little more inky than I'm used to seeing, but has a nice level of detail and insanely cool action sequences, as well as terrific designs for the monsters and Zombie Kid himself.
Actually, the Zombie Kid shorts tend to be my favorite, as it's the story I can relate to the most. Which isn't to say that I'm living the life of a zombie comic artist who protects a weird city, but that the melange of George Romero, Toho Studio, Shaft and other pop cultural influences makes for an accessible and entertaining set of stories. Mahfood's stories tend to be of the pretty simple variety, largely built on cool catch-phrases, barely-justified action sequences and monster movie cliches, but it's a deliberate appeal to the cool factor of cinema and comics, and the result often puts a smile on my face.
While the Zombie Kid stuff is fun, and I also really enjoyed Mahfood's autobiographical story of how he got into mini-comics in the first place, it is the art and not the stories that I really love about 40 Oz. Collected. Mahfood throws in pin-ups and flyers in amongst the stories, and it all gives a really strong sense of his skill as artist and designer. The off-kilter, deceptively simple designs of mundane objects like a television and a DJ setup on the cover is a pretty good indication of the sort of skewed sensibility that Mahfood brings to his art, and he really does have one of those distinctive styles you can recognize instantly.
40 Oz. Collected is sort of like being invited to hang out with Mahfood for a while, and letting him show you some of the stuff he loves. That includes drop-ins from friends who are artists (including Scott Morse and Troy Nixey, equally talented and distinctive gents), musings on esoteric subjects from drugs to music to comics and a lot of stuff that seems like the kind of thing you'd make up to get your friends to laugh. It's a lot of fun, and it's a gorgeously designed art object as well.
