Hansen, Adam; Zmith, Ben & Witty, Sara – The Visible Rooster Jack

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The Visible Rooster Jack

Ah, now I get the title.  Kudos on leaving it a mystery until the end of the book.  There’s a lot going on in this comic and there are a lot of characters doing the goings-on (I’m still not completely clear on that first page of wordless action), but Adam was nice enough to list all the characters and what they were all about.  Concise but effective, while still leaving the reader wanting more.  Crap, I’d better be careful with the “kudos” this early in a review.  Anyway, Rooster Jack and his band of adventurers is out camping one night when Razzle Dazzle (the perfectly named magician of the group who is “haunted by visions of a late 20th century world”) dreams of “basket of balls” with the ball and parts of the court being on fire.  Luckily Razzle Dazzle is able to undo pretty much all the harm he does to the group, and the group sets out in the morning.  What they’re out to do is never made clear, as Jack is attacked by a strange woman who tells them her tale of woe and convinces the bunch of them to travel to her besieged town.  Things get a little hairy from there, but you’ll get no spoilers here.  The mass of characters introduced later did leave me a bit confused, but maybe I’m reading these out of chronological order and there’s more to the tale.  Or Adam just packs as much in as possible and leaves it to the reader to keep up, which would also be a good thing.  Plenty of amusing bits are contained in these pages, the writing is smarter than you might think if you zoned out once you read “band of adventurers” earlier in the review, and he managed the difficult task of rounding out 5 out of 6 characters in the group in one mini comic.  The tiny fairy got short shrift, but other than that I already have an idea of where all these people are coming from.  The art was fantastic too; that hall of horrors in particular was gruesome, the backgrounds were impressive and all the characters were instantly unique.  A pretty damned good comic, that’s what I’m trying to say, unless you hate adventure stories of all stripes, even ones that are funny as hell, in which case I mourn the lack of joy in your life.  $4