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Steiner, Steve – Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #1
Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #1
It’s the return of Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs! Long time readers will be well aware of this comic, but for the rest of you Steve put out about 30 issues of this series (along with a few other unrelated series) but I hadn’t heard from him in a few years. I think he should have kept a running total and called this #31 (or whatever number he’s up to now) but this is very different from his older series, so maybe he had the right idea starting over. The humor is still similar to his older stuff, but the quality of the art has gone up considerably. Every bit of it is in full color, and a number of these strips feature claymation figures (obviously not in motion due to the fact that they’re in a comic book). I have no idea if he’s actually working clay or using a computer program, but it looks impressive either way. Stories in here include insurance problems with saving the damsel in distress, a lonely Yeti, common mistakes of dumb pirates, the inability of a caterpillar to cope with his future as a butterfly, a bald troll, dead superheroes, how to survive being ruled by robots, an art critic robot, innovations of cavemen, and endangered species that have vanished from memory. And that’s only the first half of the book! I can’t find a website for Steve (outside of a “Hire Steve Steiner” website with only a few strips on it), which is baffling, but you can always reach him through email. I have no idea of the price on this. Full color books are usually more expensive, and this is in full color and fairly hefty, so my random guess is $7. There are a few clunkers here, as is usually the case with this many strips, but there’s far more to love here than not. Check it out, that’s my advice to you…
Steiner, Steve – Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #32
Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #32
I call foul! If you’re going to have one of the better zombie covers that I’ve seen in all my years of reading zombie comics, you at least to have more than a panel covering said zombies. Oh well, the fact that the zombies wrap around to the back cover makes up for it. Here’s another solid issue from Steve, even if it seemed oddly lacking compared to some past issues. Let’s go through this and try to figure out why that is, shall we? It starts and ends, as it has for a little while now, with a strip about Crocodile Man, and he seems to actually be keeping a story going with the guy. Crocodile Man overhears a coworker bragging about his alligator shoes. This leads to a fairly brutal death for the guy, and that carries over to the strip at the end. Also in here you have the origin of the famous art-eest (who legally changed his name), a survival guide to monkey world domination, an angry mouse, cheating rhinos, warning signs your neighbor is a terrorist, man boobs, Colonel MacTagart, a guide to lame monsters (which is where the vegetarian zombies come into the picture), rise of the machine, and wacky whackers. The Colonel MacTagart stories just don’t do a thing for me, but everything else in there was either moderately amusing or hilarious, so maybe he just set the bar too high by being funny on all his other books. Mostly great stuff, and that wraparound cover is worth the price by itself. $3
Steiner, Steve – Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #31
Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #31
The haphazard reviewing of these issues continues, but in the grand scheme of things all these numerical holes will be filled anyway, so why be all neurotic about it now? This is another issue that’s almost all comics (except for a delightful text piece about how to catch a Bigfoot), which is great news to me, as his art is pretty damned good when it’s not trapped in a rushed, journal comic format. The story running through this issue in small chunks is Lizard Love, dealing with two roommates learning to love their new pet lizard. It helps that the reluctant roommate runs into a pretty girl outside walking her lizard, but this story is as close as I’ve seen this series get yet to sweet. Also here in here are comics about the thoughts of goons, the obvious fact that your boss is a creepy alien who secretly eats people, an angry rhino in couple’s therapy, cavemen inventions, a snooty artist trying to pay for coffee with a sketch, Crocodile Man drinking and signing a birthday card at work, and a mostly useless piece with a couple of explorers that is saved by the wonderfulness of their moustaches. Good stuff again, and the sheer consistency with which these issues are released continues to impress me. $3
Steiner, Steve – Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #30
Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #30
How can you not love that cover? I’m getting to like Steve’s art more and more, which is odd considering that he started sending me these zines when they were mostly text. This is the issue where Crocodile Man began his career as a recurring character, with a piece at the beginning and end of the comic: fantasizing about killing a coworker and engaging in some bathroom humor. Sandwiched between those are all kinds of goodies including a pretentious artist sitting in on a grade school art class, warning signs that your cat is possessed by Satan, an attention deficit monkey, how a tiny umbrella saves the day, how to deal with dangers at the park, a terrible football coach, and some genuinely awful (but hilarious) advice on how to get out of trouble with your girlfriend. There’s also a text piece about Oprah becoming president and another one of those pieces involving the explorers from #30, which I’m just going to ignore as it once again didn’t do a good thing for me, but why let that bring down an otherwise solid issue? I think Steve would be perfectly suited to a Mad magazine type of venue, if there was a funny Mad magazine type of thing currently being published. In the meantime he’s doing just fine here. $3
Steiner, Steve – Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #28
Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #28
Gee, I go to all that “trouble” of opening the site up to zines, and now Steve decides to do an all-comic issue. Oh, and #27 is noticably missing at the moment (6/13/07) due to the general chaos of my apartment, but it’ll turn up sooner or later and I’ll add it to the page. Anyway, this is a journal comic from 9/16 to 10/11 of last year, in case you can’t read the scan. Steve deals with a long distance “sort of” girlfriend, sort of falls for an internet friend he finally meets in person, sells t-shirts at an outdoor art festival, gets drunk, bitches about the other shift not being productive at his job, and deals with getting new glasses, among other things. It’s an entertaining enough journal comic, if unbelievably sloppy at times. Well, almost all the time. Steve fesses up in the intro to doing these all in pen, in a sketchbook and mostly meaning them to be seen only by himself. He’s done, by his count, 1800-1900 of these comics by now and he’s just now decided that he wants some of them to be in his zine. He also says he’s chopped out the more boring and bitchy strips, so kudos to him for that. Not everything done in a journal comic is really worth seeing, and it’s great that he gets that. He was also going to go back and patch up the general sloppiness but wanted it to be unedited, as it was written. I think it would have been fine to at least make the lettering legible in some cases, but what do I know. Overall an entertaining issue, unless you’re a neat freak and/or really can’t stand journal comics. $3
Steiner, Steve – Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #26
Nobody Can Eat 50 Eggs #26
Look out, it’s a zine! Well, half zine and half comics, but screw it, the site is now open to zines. Why� Mostly because this one won me over, and the only reason I hadn’t bothered with them in the past is that I already had my hands full with the comics, which seem to be coming out more and more sporadically these days. So I’ll take my independent, free-thinking acts of artistic expression any way I can get them, thank you very much. Like I said, about half of this is comics, mostly fairly sloppy drawings about dreams, unrequited love, and some madcap fun involving a gun and an agile monkey. The meat of the book, though, is in the text pieces, specifically the one entitled Get Rich The Easy Way, a nice step by step tutorial on how to marry a rich old man and sneak your way into his will. Steve details the whole thing in detail, including the fact that you may have to get a sex change to marry an old guy, but old women tend to live longer and, at the end of the day, the sex change will have been worth it. He also deals with a much better death scenario for the Crocodile Hunter (is it still too soon to make fun of that? Oh well), stereotypes at weddings, evolution gone wild, alternate hunting weapons and the seedy underbelly (and knees) of the Amish. Something made me chuckle on almost every page here, and it’s hard to come up with a better recommendation than that. Also, the fact that he’s at #26 is impressive as hell in this day and age. $3
