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Toft, Mike – Brain Food #18
Brain Food #18
The NSA is coming for you! There, that should get me on any government watch lists that I’ve managed to avoid up until this point. Unless you think the threat/intrusion from the NSA has been ridiculously overblown, which would probably mean that you don’t follow the news too closely, but hey, willful ignorance is your right as an American. I’m veering towards preaching already, which is just how I get on those rare occasions when a comic deals with current events. Anyway! This is the story of a creepy clown (is there any other kind?) that comes to a cheap hotel to stay for a local clown convention. This clown balks at giving his address out to the hotel after they inform him that they only ask for that information in case the police call to ask who is staying at that hotel. The clown wisely points out that he already gave up his name, phone number and credit card number to get into the hotel, so he’s not going to give them his address too. Things escalate from there, as the NSA is called in to check on this disruptive citizen, a protest group is called in to take the side of the clown (although there seemed to be a crossed wire about the sexuality of the clown somewhere along the line), and various branches of the government fight with each other to get credit for this arrest. I loved the bit where the protest group posted a picture of the clown being arrested to Facebook, and the clown is rightly annoyed that his picture is now on Facebook without his consent. His comment that being on Facebook is the same as just giving your information right to the government is dead on, which is one of many reasons why I have a dusty, unused Facebook page, but that fight has already been lost, culturally speaking. Anyway, lots of interesting tidbits about intrusive government overreach, along with probably a few exaggerations on his part, but he’s nice enough to list a bunch of links on the back of the comic so you can check all this for yourself. Worth checking out, unless your preferred reaction to news of the NSA is to stick your fingers in your ears and chant “la la la la” until it’s over. $1
Toft, Michael – Brain Food #5
Brain Food #5
Well, I can say one thing for sure about this mini: it’s wildly inventive. Some of the dialogue seems stilted and some of the pictures look, well, a bit off the mark, but there’s all kinds of crazy stuff going on in the main story. It’s about a punk, a feminist and a straight man (this is according to another review in the book, it’s in the middle of the story so it took me most of the story to figure out who they were supposed to be) on a mission to stick it to THE MAN. It’s odd. I didn’t like it for the first 10 pages or so, but it’s just so earnest that it’s hard not to warm up to it after a while. He’s still learning but hey, who’s doing mini comics (besides John Porcellino) that isn’t? It’s worth a couple of bucks to take a look at this. There are a couple of other stories in this, but after the insanity of the main story it’s hard to be that interested in a trip to work gone wrong. Send him some money at: Free Lunch Media P.O. Box 7246 Minneapolis, MN 55407.
