Hart, Tom – The Most Powerful Gate

Website 

The Most Powerful Gate

I wonder how many 24 hour comics Tom did back in the day?  This is another one (from 6/24/95), and all of the comics I’ve seen from him with this format seem to be of the 24 hour variety.  As usual, that means a slight dip in the quality of the art, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the quality of the story, and Tom does know a trick or two to speed up the process (like drawing some of the action in the dark).  This one is the story of a man and his monkey and another man on an island.  The man on the island spends most of the issue saying (seemingly) random things, and the monkey ends up sick from too many bananas.  There’s eventually a convergence of sorts, but the ending is highly open to interpretation and, even though this is 15 (!) years old, my hesitance to use any sort of spoilers still remains.  Hey, who knows, maybe Tom or some publishing company will wise up and put a bunch of these old minis back in print one of these days.  I will say that compared to some of his other minis this one didn’t do as much for me, which is sort of like saying that it would suck for somebody to hand you $100 after that same person had spent the past few months handing you $1000 every day.  Still worth a look, and seeing as how Fantagraphics just put out a collection of some of the best small press comics from the 80’s, would it really be a terrible thing to do the same thing for the best minis from the 90’s?  It’s pretty much impossible to find minis from either era, after all…