Kamison, Michael & Arnold, Steven – Heel on the Shovel #1

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Heel on the Shovel #1

Boy, this one takes you on a real journey. I got one set of expectations from that cover, another one from the first few pages (although the hints were there all along when I went back and checked), and then quite another set after I really got into it. This is the first issue of three, and don’t fret! They were nice enough to send me all three issues, so there’s no danger of another unfinished series dangling around out there. This is a story mostly focused on three people: Adler, Muriel, and Daniel. Adler and Muriel are married and Daniel is their three year old child. You’d think there wouldn’t be a whole lot going on with a three year old, but Mr. Kamison has other ideas on that front. Things start off with full frontal male nudity, so if you’re at all prudish, move along I guess? Why you’d be buying small press comics if you’re alarmed by a dick is another conversation. Anyway, from there Adler and Muriel each go to console one member of a friend couple of theirs who has just broken up. Muriel is distracted because she’s thinking about biting people, and Adler just finds the apartment gross and tries to reassure his friend that every marriage has problems, even one that seems as perfect as his. From there things get dicey in terms of me saying too much about it, as spoilers for a comic that has two more issues coming seems like a bad idea. I’ll just say that Muriel is tremendously dissatisfied in her life (we get a brief synopsis of her former hopes and dreams) and finally decides to do something for herself, Adler tries to roleplay his way into cracking the case of the bathroom smoker at his school and ends up in an entirely different scenario, and Daniel tries to understand grownup problems as well as his new playground friend who is significantly further along the “woke” scale than he is, what with being three years old and all. All of this is expertly drawn into a collision by the ending, with everything coming together to cause a shocking ending. But hey, two more issues to find out what’s going to happen next! I had my doubts about the first comic from these two that I reviewed, but this one right here, this is an absolute winner. If you’re curious about their work(as they have a lot of comics to choose from), so far I’d say that this is the place to start. $8