Lindo, Sara – Carl Finds Love #2

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Carl Finds Love #2

Wait a minute, this is a comic for little kids? It had honestly never occurred to me before, but Sara puts a few cut-outs towards the back of the book and suggests that kids “ask the closest responsible adult” to help them out. Granted, there’s no cursing, nudity or anything else that would prevent kids from reading this, but it is all about the quest for love of one man, and I’m thinking that pretty much everybody is cleared to use their own scissors before they care about such things. Unless she was kidding, in which case please don’t mind my denseness. Anyway, this time around our hero decides to get some ladies to like him by himself, which leads to the fantastic scene that I sampled with him giving away flowers to random ladies. This page also really showcases Sara’s visual inventiveness, and that along with several background scenes really help the book feel… meatier? Thicker? More substantive, that’s what I was looking for. Any work that you can go back in and pick up several things you missed the first time around is OK in my book. After our hero passes out flowers he gets some advice on this tactic from his friends (who basically tell him that people in cities aren’t used to such things) before getting him to agree to going on a few blind dates. He gets a bit more advice (and a lucky coin) from a pizza man, then the issue wraps up. So apparently there is going to be at least one more issue if that title is going to end up being literally true. I’m enjoying it and am curious to see what happens next, and once you’ve won me over on those two fronts I’m generally good for the long haul. Granted, the haul is rarely very long in small press comics (the Cerebus epic notwithstanding), but I’m still in. Even if the story hits a sour patch there are still all the random “people” populating the landscape to look forward to… $3