Barnes, E.J. – Blaster Al Ackerman’s Tales of the Ling Master #3

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Blaster Al Ackerman’s Tales of the Ling Master #3

That “#3 of 3” on the cover worries me. This can’t be the end of the Blaster Al Ackerman tales, can it? There must be more of them out there, or new ones on the way?  Frankly, this is a series that is just begging for treatment in an anthology, with a number of different comics writers and artists doing their own take on the character if nothing else.  As for the comic, E.J. warned me that this one was a little more “out there” than most, which is a tall order in this series, but she wasn’t wrong.  It’s often difficult to review these things without giving too much away, and these stories take that up a notch, but I’ll give it a shot.  Stories include a fable about a little boy who teased apples and his eventual meeting with an apple golem, another fable about a canary, a headache and a cigar on a plane, a professional “geek” (the circus kind, not the Bill Gates kind) trying to find out the truth about squid people, and one called “The Blue Catfish.” I don’t want to say a single thing about that one, but due to reviewer obligations I will say that it involves head shrinking, the concept of soul transportation and one of those stores that appear out of nowhere and vanish after you leave.  It’s difficult to detail the demented brilliance of these stories, but if you can’t get behind a guy wearing a stained pillowcase as a hood doling out advice at $5 a pop, often in parable form, and generally when there’s at least some veracity to the utterly bizarre questions being posed, I don’t know how to convince you.  If you like your comics genuinely different, there are three of these readily available that you should pick up as soon as possible. I’m hoping we can turn it into a cultural phenomena and realize my (five minute old) dream of an anthology with various takes on this character and/or the author.  Make it happen America!  $3