Farmer, Gloria – Gold and Blue and Gray

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Gold and Blue and Gray

I lost the thread with this comic early on and never seemed to pick it back up.  The maddening thing is that I think there was a really great comic in here, but I just wasn’t able to piece it together from what I was given.  Or I wasn’t able to piece it together because on this particular day I couldn’t keep up with it; I’ve been reviewing these things long enough to know that the fault can easily lie with me.  How do I explain this so it makes sense to somebody who hasn’t seen the comic… Well, there’s that sample below.  That’s the first page of the comic.  Go ahead and click on it, read it and come back here.  Done?  OK.  From what I was able to tell, a young man was watching, went outside because he was concerned about his dog, had his dog rip off his face and then turned into the dog, all this being watched from high above.  Huh?  The next page starts with the message “20 minutes earlier”, so the theory is that we’ll go back and have this all make sense, but it ends up making it even more confusing.  The dog is given birth to by a sunbeam shining into a pool (so I guess it wasn’t really that guy’s dog?), an irate Facebook friend transforms into a gigantic tentacled anime rape machine, the naked man on a leash is shown to be another man entirely (?), and the skeleton is removed whole from the fat anime thing.  That’s the tame version of events.  Still, it’s impossible to discount entirely, as her idea to use a fake message board conversation as a backdrop to all this chaos was brilliant (and hilarious).  And did I menti0n that that wasn’t even the main story of the comic?  That would be the first chapter of The Incarnation of Mayonezu Kuchibirum, which makes the first story seem downright linear.  This one has lots of sex, a narrator who knows how the lead character is going to die, a 12th birthday party where fucking the birthday boy against his will is apparently the thing to do, and all of this theoretically takes place in hell (which looks kind of like an apple core, hence the name of the comics company).  Again, impossible to discount, as there’s also a Spanish Inquisition rap in here that is one of the funnier things you’re likely to see.  So what does this all add up to?  I didn’t know what the hell was going on more often than not, but there were also flashes of (the most overused word in the language, but it happens to be true) brilliance.  Maybe this comic didn’t work completely or maybe it was just me, but either way I’m VERY interested to see what Gloria comes up with next.