Neal, Andrew – Meeting Comics #9

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Meeting Comics #9

Anybody else enough of a former Marvel comics geek that they tried to get a No-Prize, that joke prize for finding mistakes in comics that I sadly didn’t understand until I was an adult? Well, the inside cover for this one says it’s #8, but it’s actually #9! …do I win anything? I’ll just wait for my award in the mail. Speaking of Marvel, Andrew really messed up by not putting some version of “in this issue, someone dies!” on the front cover. Silhouettes of some of the characters, gravestone in shadow, that sort of thing. Because this one does start off with a death, even if it doesn’t mean all that much to the story. One of the horde of people at Kevin’s house, his father, starts the issue off by croaking. Spoiler, I guess, but it’s literally the first strip. Anyway, Kevin didn’t much like the guy, and and even when he passed away it didn’t exactly bring up a wellspring of emotions. At the funeral it quickly becomes clear that the feeling is widely shared, which is a nice and honest change of pace from the way deaths are usually handled in four panel gag strips. Unless deaths aren’t usually handled at all in such strips and I’m just making things up, which is entirely possible. Also the image of their baby going all emo after witnessing the death got a real laugh out loud from me, and I just realized that I just used “emo” in both reviews this week, despite probably never saying that word out loud. Huh. Other subjects in this here funny book include Gil hitting on the boss’s granddaughter, finding out what’s under the beard, finding out what’s under the hat, a real “oof” of a strip about adopting a cat while passing an ICE center, flex out a tiddy, how quickly an angry mob forms if a cartoon is rebooted with the lead character having a different race than the original, and the new girl. And lots more, of course; as usual I’m only mentioning roughly half of the strips. As always, check out a few samples on his website if you’re still on the fence, otherwise this is another solid issue. $5