The late 2009 reviewing of these Hoax issues continues, wildly out of order and for no good reason other than the fact that I somehow missed reviewing them all these years, and these comics frankly deserve better. This one is especially interesting in that it essentially has origin stories for other comics available in the store, or at least early attempts at those stories. There’s the story of the family from Chromosome Crossroads (namely how they got their start and how they weren’t always an interbreeding mess) and an early version of the guy from Cannibulimic, which I still contend is the best title in my store. The title itself, that is. It’s a pretty great comic too, but there’s a whole lot of competition in there. Other pieces in this issue include Nate Neal with a Mexican adventure, Ben Carrico with a text piece telling us to use cash to avoid detection, Nate Neal with Truckhead reading his fortune, Karl with a short piece (all I’ll say about it is the title: Plop N’ Scrub), Ben Carrico with another text piece (this time about his personal view of the ghetto from his apartment and the cycle that keeps them all there), Nate Neal resurrecting Bill Hicks for his take on the current state of things (and, while it was tacky to do it, he sure seems to have come up with an accurate portrayal of the guy), Karl with a short silent piece on the wonders of life (and if you’ve read even a bit of Karl’s work you know that’s sarcasm), Nate with another Truckhead piece (where he’s haunted by commercials in his dreams) and a longer piece on various conspiracy theories. There’s less variety in this issue at least in terms of the number of creators, but the pieces are stronger and you can tell they’re all really getting a handle on their various characters. It’s a shame that none of their individual series seem to have been kept up, but it’s entirely possible that I just missed them and they’re still out there chugging away. Either way this is a fun issue, and that’s a lot of comic for $2.

Does it make any sense at all to review a comic made in 2002 as my first book of 2010? I’d have a hard time justifying it, if I had anybody to justify it to. Luckily it’s a dictatorship around here and I don’t like having theseunreviewed comics sitting around. I reviewed #4 and 5 before #3, keeping with my usual higgledy-piggledy style, and the good news is that they worked a lot of bugs out for those two issues. The bad news is that those bugs are mostly still present here. This is a giant newspaper of a comic (in size, but there are only 12 big pages), so no samples from me. Stories in here include serenity during a plane crash, the struggle to find a clean toilet in the men’s room, the hilarity of a piano falling out of the sky and the new erotic doll series (by KarlKressbach ); the last straw in regards to men and another funny horoscope (by Lydia Gregg); and accepting the dullness of life, an alcoholic’s take on the rabbit and the hare, Truckhead’ s troubles with women and how to quit smoking (by Nate Neal). Ben Carrico has a series of text pieces as well, but those are so horribly dated that it seems unfair to even comment on them. After all, we must have all our terrorism and civil liberties problems worked out by now, right? Anyway, I prefer the later, more comic-heavy issues to this one, but your mileage may vary, or maybe you just want to see some of these artists in their early years.

Just to make this clear to readers in the future: I’m reviewing this in late 2009. It was made in 2003 and I believe it was edited solely by Karl, although that’s hard to tell. I’m spelling this all out because, as a monthly regional magazine/anthology, there are going to be pieces in here that are damned near irrelevant 6 years later. For example, the center of this book is made up of an interview with Nathan Neal about his film “The Naked Eye Will Be Shot”. Good luck finding anything about that now, although it does sound interesting. Luckily comics are timeless (mostly), and there are some great ones in here. Nate Neal gets things started with a simpleton just barely taking the easy way out instead of facing nuclear war, and is this the Nathan Neal from before? He wouldn’t list his comics under Nate in here and then do the interview under Nathan, would he? That seems needlessly pretentious, if true. K.Throoper (whose art sure looks like Karl’s) is up next with a brilliant piece about drive-by religious services , and the baptism is about what you’d expect. Lydia Gregg is up next with the highlight of the issue, a story of pussy versus pussy. A man takes a woman home for the night, and she remarks on how cute his cat is before it attacks her. The rest of the night involves an escalating series of attacks from the cat, culminating in something that made me laugh out loud. As the proud owner of a cat who is also an asshole, this piece really made my day. Karl is up next with a mildly baffling piece about love and abduction, which is followed by Lydia’s sampled piece about how we’re just a pit-stop between product and feces. Lydia then put together a funny fake horoscope (and yes, it is important to note that it’s funny, because many of the fake ones are not) along with a short piece on the dangers of talking on your cell phone while on the treadmill. Finally there’s an utterly baffling piece by Karl involving a stopped bus and a hitchhiker, and it’s all capped off with a funny Halloween piece by Nate. There are also a couple of mildly paranoid rants by Ben Carrico , in case the comics weren’t enough for you. For some reason I never reviewed any of these books, but I plan on correcting that in the weeks to come. This one is worth it for the cat story alone. .

How do you scan something that’s the size of a newspaper? Anyway, this is a collection of essays and comics about government and conspiracy theories. If you think somehow that Bush is a wonderful man (and please let me know how on earth you could think that), chances are you won’t like this.

I’m honestly not sure if it’s fair to review this now. Today is 3/5/09, six years after GW Bush started one of the dumber wars in history, and this comic has a fair amount of strips that are from that early time period. Making fun of GW was still considered a mildly subversive thing to do (instead of something every sane person did) and it was easy to rail at the inaction of the completely indifferent population. So let’s just leave it, huh? The strips are between funny and mildly amusing, but they’re of more use as a time capsule at this point. That still leaves a fair amount of comic that isn’t quite as political to go over, so how about it? The first strip (for students of comic making only) deals with a character and his dog challenging the boundaries of the panel and failing miserably. Next up is a brief strip about a man who makes a comic to try to help starving people, but nobody reads comics. A couple of shorties follow (and I’ll leave them as a surprise so I don’t ruin absolutely everything), then a strip about a man, at the end of his rope, walking off into the distance. Very slowly. No, it didn’t do much for me. All told there’s more than enough funny stuff in here to warrant $1, and if you prefer your GW bashing a little quaint then you’re not going to want to miss this.

If you’re going to have a comic about incest, this is about as good a title as you could have. It’s the story of a family of a mother, brother, father, sister, and daughter, and an awful lot of those people are able to claim more than one of those titles in regards to the same family member. It’s creepy, sure, and it’s easy to lose track of who is who even with the handy introduction, but there’s a little bit of bizarre charm in the way that some of these people relate to each other. Little things like showing off local landmarks, when viewed in the larger context of what a weird world the live in, come off as surprisingly poignant. Or maybe I’m just an emotional sap today, you be the judge. Anyway, it looks good and it’s original enough to be worth a look.

This whole “draft” business deserves a bit of an explanation. The second draft is a redrawn version of the first, with the impressive color cover that you see above. It’s a pretty noticeable improvement, although frankly I’ve always been a bigger fan of letting older work stand as is and putting effort into making future work better. The first draft is the same story, with a few pages different here and there, but it doesn’t look as good. So I guess if you’re a cheapskate you can go ahead and get the older version, if you’re looking for the best possible edition of this comic you can get the second draft, and if you’re a comic scholar you can get both versions to compare and contrast. Everything clear now? Update: Karl says that he redrew it because he has a much longer story in mind, in case you were wondering.