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Rubber Necker #3

Once again, I read the last issue too long ago to have any idea of what's going on in the main story. That's the main problem with buying the individual issues, I guess. If I wasn't living out of boxes (and so very, very lazy) I'd dig out the other two issues and put them all together. One of these days! Anyway, I wasn't as impressed with this one as I was with #2, but I was tremendously impressed with #2, so don't take that as a major step backwards or anything. There's the third part of the main story, Drop Celing, in which our hero follows a young woman to an art class and tries to deal with his crazy mother. I don't mean "crazy" as in "wacky", I mean just plain crazy. Then there's The Little Things, a wordless story about a young man and his daughter enjoying some "quiet" time together. Good lord, was that a pun? Oof! Then the last story is Overpass, a story that was originally in Expo 2000, but it's a good one to throw in here for fans of his work who might not have seen it. It's about a man who designed an overpass for its artistic value and has spent decades in seclusion before finally agreeing to an interview. A solid book at $3.50, this is still one of the very few series out there that everybody should keep up with.

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Rubber Necker #2

The thing about regular series like this is that it's usually hard to tell if they're worth the trouble right away. That's the pessimistic view, of course, as You could always just assume that a good first issue means that the whole series is going to be fantastic. You'd be wrong a lot of the time, and a lot of the other times the series just ends right away anyway and what difference does it make? It seems like I had a point with all this but it's slipped away and I'm just digging myself a deeper hole here so... I liked this book. A lot. I'm going to have to dig up this issue when I move so I can read the first part of Drop Ceiling, but this part holds up really well on its own. Parfum, the story of a man and his journey into his own sexuality, is fantastic stuff. Quite the heartwarming conclusion. It's the kind of thing that you would see on billboards for comics if I was in charge of the world, but I'm not going to scan it here and ruin it for you. "There Was Something I Wanted to Tell You But I've Forgotten What It Was" was an interesting choice for adaptation, but the length of the title prevents me from talking about it anymore. Good stuff all around. I like these new series that have all kinds of random stories instead of just being obviously designed to be a graphic novel in a year or so. Not that I have anything against graphic novels or anything, it's just nice to know that there is a reason to buy the issues.