Blog Archives
Various Anthologies edited by Mark Innes – Romantic Eye #1
Romantic Eye #1
Is that a great cover or what? As always, when it comes to reviewing romantic comics and/or love stories, how jaded I am will inevitably shine through. This doesn’t say a single negative thing about the quality of the stories, the artwork or the wonder that is people in love… it just says that I tend to get a bit overwhelmed with this sort of thing and am not the best person to be rambling about it. That being said, time to ramble! There’s a wide collection of folks in here and, oddly enough, Mark Innes isn’t listed. Is it legal in comics world for somebody to publish an anthology and not be a part of it? Huh. Stories include Earl Geier’s tale of a post apocalyptic world and the man left fighting for all he has left of love, Henrik Rehr’s odd suggestion that I have a kid to compare that to being a kid, Ron Kasman’s seriously wonderful take on the hazards of getting cold feet while in the middle of a teleportation, John Migliore & Larry Blake’s Tales From The Crypt-esque ode to love in modern times, Steve LeBlanc’s warning about getting what you wished for, and Larry Blake’s explanation of how an attractive, ageless superheroine finds love. There’s a fair amount of shorter stories in here too, as this is packed for just a regulation size comic. Come to think of it, most of the stories in here aren’t as overtly sappy (re: legitimately romantic) as I first thought, and a bunch of them are clever even when expressing genuine emotions. It’s worth a look, probably even for us jaded types. Oh, and generally with the sample I try to capture either the art or the overall tone of the book, but for once I decided to sum up my feelings on the general idea of romance. $4
Rehr, Henrik & Horneman, Lars – Oatmeal II
Website where you can buy this comic
Oatmeal II
There’s a very simple rule I try to follow with this website: if I’m going to talk about something, there should be a simple way for anybody reading this to get that comic. A website is best, an e-mail address is great too (I’m a big fan of making the attainment of said comic as easy as possible), but if all I have is a PO box or regular address, I’ll stick with that. Why am I mentioning all this? Oatmeal is, as far as I can tell, not available anywhere. I’m pretty sure I got this at SPACE last year (2008), so it’s still possible to find, and I’m breaking with tradition here because this is worth seeking out. OK, maybe it’s not if you don’t like clever, sprawling outer space adventures with a varied and ridiculous cast of characters, so if that’s not you there’s plenty of other things on this site to keep you entertained. The level of detail in the art here is tremendous, as there’s no wasted space at all. Lars uses every bit of the panels, even if it’s just to show various debris scattered on the ground. Kids today, take note: if you’re going for sprawling and/or epic, attention to detail like that is key. I should mention that this came out in 1996, maybe they just did things differently way back then. How about the story? Two young women set out (in space) to visit their aunt. There’s a crash, some space sirens, a brief time stranded on a planet, a strange genius with a clumsy assistant, and sorry but there’s just no way a capsule review is going to do this thing justice. Like I said, there’s no easy way to get this that I could find online. This is here more as a public service announcement, that if you do see this lying around somewhere then yes, it is worth picking up.
UPDATE: Mark Innes contacted me and provided me a link to his publishing house, which puts out this and all sorts of other comics, which you should maybe think about buying.
