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Various Artists – The Hic and Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humor Volume One: The United States
The Hic and Hoc Illustrated Journal of Humor Volume One: The United States
Do you like your comics funny? Do you like some or most of the creators I listed in the tags section (right below this post, in big letters, you can’t miss them)? Then this one should be an easy call for you. There, now that I’ve made that case, I’ll go about my afternoon… wait, you want something of substance? Egh, fine. Laurent Barnett does the “Me Likes You” comics (which you should already be reading on a regular basis), and she was one of the editors, so there, that’s substantive. Strips in here include Noah Van Sciver’s fever dreams (both with and without music), funny jokes that aren’t really jokes by Bort, Martha Keavney’s tales of a pet human, Nikki Burch showing us that saying “that’s what she said” too many times will end up with you getting what you deserve, Anne Emond’s cat style, Sam Spina’s ridiculously awesome sex comic, a couple of pages of single panel jokes by Sam Henderson (which should be worth the price of admission right there), Grant Snider’s fears and feats (he had four pages of strips and I don’t want to ruin any of them), KC Green’s depressed fish, Jane Mai’s dream of male lingerie, Nathan Bulmer’s tale of ninja tricks, Julia Wertz’ attempt to get serious and Ian Anderson’s tale of a bear that’s just trying to fit in. But wait, there’s more! And you can discover it for yourself if you buy this. Unless you just have an unnatural hatred for all anthologies, which I guess I could almost understand, but it makes no sense to hate the good ones too, and this is one of the good ones. Hell, just pick three of the names of people who contributed to this, go to their websites and see what there is to see. If you don’t laugh once then I release you from your duty to buy this, but seriously, good luck with that. $10
Keavney, Martha – Badly Drawn Comics #7
Badly Drawn Comics #7
This is one of those comics where I don’t really know what to say. The art isn’t very good, but you can tell that from the title of the book and if the author doesn’t have a problem with it, why should I? I thoroughly enjoyed the main story, The Mix-Up, in this one. Let me try to sum it up for you. Martha gets a job by convincing her employer that she is dating someone when she’s single. She calls on a female friend to help her out for the night, and she’ll hook Martha up with a supposedly gay friend if Martha transports the dead body of her cousin to the funeral home. Things get even more confusing when they get to dinner, and there are all kinds of twists and turns thrown in. It all goes together a lot better than I thought it would and it was pretty funny. How could you ask for more? Pretty much the only thing that I didn’t like were some of the gag strips, as they just weren’t suited to my sense of humor. I think that was what put me off about some of both of these two issues, even though they definitely both had enough to make them worth checking out. They’re done pretty well and it’s obvious that Martha is an extremely intelligent woman, it’s just that they seemed kind of… plain at times. That’s probably a horrible way to describe it, but that’s the best that I can come up with. Regardless, The Dead-End Job, The Mix-Up and some of the shorter pieces were great, and that’s almost the whole book right there. If you’re incredibly worried about the art, you can tell by her website that she has improved over the years. So, even though I can’t point to anything as being that specifically bad and the things I can point to were actually pretty good, I’m left with an impression of “eh”. Maybe because that’s just been my mood all day, I don’t know. That should show all of you who are trying to read these things and expect an intelligent analysis of these comics… Seriously though, go to her site and decide for yourself. There are all kinds of samples there. And here’s a couple from me:
