Hill, Dan – The Fifty Flip Experiment #13

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The Fifty Flip Experiment #13

You can tell it’s going to be a great comic when you’re already laughing at the introduction.  Of course, I was laughing more at my own level of cynicism than anything else, as Dan apologized for being three weeks late with this issue.  Three weeks!  That’s a man who’s dedicated to putting his bi-monthly comic out on a bi-monthly basis.  Does anybody remember why Drawn & Quarterly was named Drawn & Quarterly?  Hint: it has to do with putting comics of a series out on a quarterly basis.  I think they kept to that for maybe the first year or so, or at least tried to, before abandoning all pretense of that being the case.  Of course, according to Dan’s website this is the last issue he’s put out (in September 2009), so maybe regularly putting out comics got to him.  So how about the comic?  It seems… fluffier than usual, like he was trying to burn up page space by dragging stories out for pages that could have ended far sooner.  Not that they’re actively bad stories, but I can see why the man maybe took a break after this one.  The first half of the comic is a story about an alien coming to earth, something that felt more like a movie of the week than anything else, but he did manage to spice things up a bit, and the fact that schmaltz can be funny helped him out a bit.  Other stories include a mildly pointless piece about lounging in space, a shortie about a psychiatrist with a good punchline, Spoons for Handsman eats too many Rolos (hey wait a minute, how did he open all those Rolos with spoons for hands?) and a meandering piece about the national conspiracy to hide any evidence of queefs.  Kids, ask your parents.  On second thought just use the internet, as asking your parents would be the most uncomfortable conversation of your life.  Overall there’s still good to be found here, but if he is taking a break from his grueling schedule (and in the context of small press comics I mean that sincerely), I hope he’s working on tightening his game up a bit.  That and deciding that it’s OK not to have at least one page per comic where you can still see the unerased pencil lines…  $2