Hill, Dan – The Fifty Flip Experiment #15

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The Fifty Flip Experiment #15

Dan has been doing this comic for 15 issues now (obviously, and huzzah) and he’s clearly getting tired of this one particular view of reality. This time around he’s mixing it up even more, throwing himself in a few times (and not obnoxiously; Dave Sim, take note), and generally treating the stories and panels as his playground. And why not? I’d say he’s been doing this long enough to have earned it. The very first strip with a drunken Pinocchio talking to Gepetto (I’m not giving away the punchline) should have been your first clue, as it’s always a good sign when the opening strip is fucking with you. From there we get a single page image of an attacking helicopter, Darth Vader getting blown/cut with an axe, somebody fleeing from a burning building, a giraffe, and a viking holding a bong. Next is the strip I sampled below, and from there it’s best if you peel the layers of this particular onion yourself. Subjects in some of these stories include funnies about Diogenes, a funny (in a New Yorker-ish kind of way) joke about slavery, pirate humor, a night at Perkin’s (this one may only make sense to people who live in Champaign, unless that place is a chain of some kind), creepy Dan and a woman trapped in her bed, the soul destroying powers of TGI Friday’s, and happily ever after. Dan seems to be taking more time between comics these days (no human could keep up the pace he was on when he started), but if the result is books like this then I’m all for it. Not that I hated his older comics by any stretch, but I’m all for packing as many layers in as possible. $4