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Bowman 2016

Is it condescending for me to say that it feels like Pat is now all grown up as an artist? Almost certainly, yes. But hey, I have been reviewing his comics for around 10 years and have nothing but respect for the sheer volume and increasing quality of his comics, so I’m going to say it anyway. And that’s with me not fully understanding everything that goes down in this comic, but that feels more like a failing on my part than on his. First off, giving the hero of the book a horse with the head of Garfield was brilliant. And yes, it does say/think various Garfield-like things throughout the book. Our hero is chasing down some creature/man, eventually catches up to it and savagely bashes its head in. After that he takes the leftover bits of uniform from the creature and puts them on (as detailed in the sample below, which is probably the simplest page of the comic). There are also a few flashbacks thrown into this book to show how our hero got to this point, although honestly they could have been made to look a bit more distinct from the rest of the book to avoid confusion. Anyway, our hero goes to a big city with his new uniform, and those few pages have more detail that most entire comics. I don’t think Pat left a bit of background blank in this entire book, and the result is a feeling of complete immersion in this world. Things get increasingly ridiculous (and I mean that in the best possible sense) from there, with space gods, giant monsters and huge battles going on all over the place. My only complaint is that I wish the translation for the letters of the alien language could have come at the start of the book instead of the end, but other than that my advice is to sit back, relax, and let this book wash over you. And then read it again, as you’re probably going to need to to put the whole story together. And then flip through it one more time, without reading anything, just to appreciate everything that he’s thrown into the backgrounds. So yeah, I’d say that’s worth $5.