Crespo, Jaime – Slices #1

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Slices #1

Please note: this is not listed as #1, and I have no reason to believe that there is more of this series to come.  It’s mostly just a hopeful gesture from me that he keeps these coming, because you’re not likely to find a more entertaining pack of short bios of the lives of all sorts of people.  This strip is based on a much older strip that Jaime gave up years ago, so the people described are mostly folks Jaime knew 20+ years ago.  He tries to give “where are  they now?” type information whenever possible, but there are plenty of people in here who just faded away.  Some of the highlights of this 40 page comic (and, with each page being a strip, that’s basically the life story of 40 people) include the life of a 22 year old cat, an annoying drunk who at least always paid for beer, a “ladies man”, a busybody, a rich asshole (is there any other kind?), going way too far with “God’s will”, an acid casualty, the perfect stereotype of a stoner (that happened to be a real person), the stupidest guy in the world, “dog face”, a punk rock girl who just couldn’t seem to leave town, a very creepy gay guy, a born hustler, a girl shaped like a cylinder who never spoke, a self-destructive musician, Jaime getting stuck on a train, the mystery of Skip, and a dog that peed everywhere.  I’m still leaving out about half of the stories, and I’m barely scratching the surface of the ones I did talk about, but there are a few samples up at his site so you can pick through them at your leisure.  I’m glad to see Jaime getting all the way back into comics, I was just starting off with the small press stuff right around the time that he quit originally, so I only saw a few of his earlier books.  Still, he was on his way to becoming a small press legend (for whatever that’s worth) when he dropped out because of the need to raise a family and make a few bucks, so I’m thrilled to see a couple new comics from the guy and the fact that he’s working on a graphic novel at the moment.  If you’ve started reading these things in the last 10 years or so you might not know the guy, but keep an eye out for his name, as I think he’s going to win over all sorts of folks.  It was tough as hell to pick a sample strip for this comic, which is always a good sign, and pretty much all the strips in here are either entertaining, informative of just plain weird, which is the right mixture for me.  $4