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Cabaret Comix #2

And here I was starting to think that Mike was working exclusively on Gabagool these days. Don’t get me wrong, I like Gabagool a lot, it’s just that his work on Cabaret is a lot more quiet and reflective. More stories about people and less mayhem and humor. This could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending completely on your mood. This comic is made up of two main stories and a short one on the back cover. The first is a wordless story about a day in the life of Mike. It’s wordless and it’s the portrayal of a quiet, average day, except for the part when he shoves something up his cat’s butt. Hey, I’m going with it being some kind of legitimate medical procedure, or he’s just created a new level for self-disclosure in autobio. The second is the story of a conversation between Mike and some friends that follows his friend Steve as he attends a protest to hang out with a girl he’s interested in. As far as I’m concerned this guy can do it all. He nails funny stuff in Gabagool and he quietly examines loneliness and the motives of humanity in general in Cabaret. Well worth a buck, contact info is above…

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Cabaret Comics #1

I’ve had really good luck with the random comics that people have sent me in the mail so far. I don’t think I ever even exchanged e-mails with this guy and boom, there’s a comic waiting for me in my mailbox yesterday when I get home. And a damned good comic at that. I guess you’d call it a tale of relationships. The book is broken down into two parts. Part one is about a man and his “relationship” with a high school girl and the second part is about this man’s roommate and his sexually adventurous girlfriend. This worked a lot better than I thought it would, frankly. Flipping through the book before I read it, nothing really hit me over the head. I thought it might be an OK book but that would be it. This guy managed to hit me over the head with the goodness in this book and it’s a good thing he did.

You could say that the first part is a little weak, I guess, if you really wanted to nitpick. We get to see nothing of the relationship or how it happened, just what happens when his friend starts making fun of the girl for being in high school. Still, the confrontation and what happens afterwards is great. I really like his way of running the word balloons together and cutting off a lot of what’s said, it adds to the general chaos of some of the conversations. The second part of the book is disturbing as hell. It shows why the second couple showed up at the restaurant at all and why they were in such a big hurry to leave and a lot of it’s wordless. I’m becoming more and more of a fan of that type of comic. It leaves so much more up to the imagination and the skill of the artist, and guys like Mike can certainly pull that off. This one is $3 and it’s a welcome addition to anyone’s collection. Good stuff, and I hope he does more soon.