Leonard, Brian – Riptoid

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Riptoid

If I ever set up a ratings system here it would have to be something based on food. Hear me out before you wander off in bemused annoyance, please. See, the quality of any book is bound to be subjective, excepting obvious errors like misspellings or forgetting to draw eyeballs on a character. So it’s always seemed like the height of hubris to me to place permanent (after all, reviews generally come up quickly when you do an internet search for a book) ratings on books where you’re likely to have your opinion change over the course of years, especially when an artist improves significantly in later work and that lets you have a fresh opinion of an earlier comic. The food analogy comes in when you think about what you get out of a comic. Some hefty, wordy minis are full course meals, while other tinier minis (you know, the kind that you can read in about 20 seconds) are, say, popcorn shrimp. One of them is hardly a meal, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. And with that we finally get around to talking about this comic, which is definitely one of those popcorn shrimp. This is a rhyming tale of a creature called Riptoid as he tries to escape from people who are trying to kill him for mysterious reasons. It’s six pages of story with one completed rhyme on each page, so it’s over pretty damned quick, but it’s still a fun comic. A little insubstantial maybe, and it’s not like that ending cleared anything up, but who says there’s anything wrong with being mildly insubstantial? I did enjoy the art, although I’d have to see it in a longer story to make any kind of conclusive judgement on it, but it did make me want to see more of his work, which is all you can ask for in a tiny thing like this. $1