Kelberman, Dina – Important Comics Are Bad

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Important Comics Are Bad

Hey wait a minute, no they’re not! I’m not sure if it’s a good sign that this title is designed to make you start arguing with it, or maybe that’s just me. This is a collection of comics covering the very vague time period of 2008-2011. Dina was able to get a weekly strip in the Baltimore City Paper, and she masochistically includes a letter from a reader of that paper begging them to cancel her strip on the back of her book. For you philistines who haven’t seen any of her past work, her comics are simply drawn with word bubbles bursting out of the confines of those little square panels. My only complaint about this book is that that choice makes some bits of these strips unreadable (not many, just a few), as the words straggle off the page and into the page break. You know, that part where double page spreads in comics go to get mixed up? That one. Anyway, some themes are procrastination, enjoying a good day, equally enjoying a crappy day or event, and her fantastic Tron 2 review/drawings. There’s even an  index in back that lists the locations of the various strips, just in case you’re so familiar with these strips that you want to look them up by title. If you think that I’m cheating you by not going into detail on more of these strips, well screw you, chum. Go to that website listed and flip through her many samples if you haven’t seen a thing that she’s done; I’m keeping most of the strips as a surprise for people who already know her work and want to be surprised by this one. It’s a bit bigger than her last collection (90ish pages compared to 45ish), but it’s only a few dollars more expensive ($14), so that still sounds like a good deal to me. Buy some copies why don’t you? The world needs more genuinely unique comics like this one.