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Roberts, Rafer; Frost, Sean; Strang-Frost, Wendi – Wild Women of the Kitty-Kat Galaxy!

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Wild Women of the Kitty-Kat Galaxy!

Full disclosure time: if I had my druthers Rafer would be chained to his drawing desk and unable to leave it (except for short periods of time to maintain his sanity) until Plastic Farm was finished. That being said, if he’s going to put that on hiatus to branch out into other projects for a bit, I couldn’t be happier that he chose to do a sequel (of sorts) to Dope Fiends of the Zombie Cafe. Dr. Gravely and Billy are back, and Dr. Gravely still can’t remember Billy’s name. Things start off when our heroes (who, hilariously, really can’t stand each other) accidentally create a “nick” in space while they’re working on another experiment. They naturally decide to go through this nick to see what loot they can take from the other side, only to discover a lair of cat women! As you may have guessed from that title/cover. The cat women put them in a dungeon after an ill-advised punch by the doctor, and that giant spider plays a pretty big role before it’s all over. I’m not saying much about the plot, because if you can resist a cover like that then there’s not much I can say to convince you. The sheer joy in the writing of this story by Sean shines through, the art is on par with the best work that Rafer has ever done (and he’s been improving consistently over the years), and that coloring job by Wendi is ridiculously good, perfectly capturing the “B” movie vibe that permeates this book. My only minor complaint (and I’m still not sure that it really is a complaint) is that they did chapter breaks in the overwrought style of pulp comics, with dramatic images of what happens in the chapter to come. The problem is that this book isn’t big enough to support that many chapters, so the chapters ended up being pretty short and those splash pages could be a bit jarring. On the other hand, they were universally awesome, so it’s impossible to come down too hard on them. Clearly, the only solution is to make the next set of these into a mini series where those chapter bumps are more appropriate, FAR IN THE FUTURE WHEN PLASTIC FARM IS DONE. Or, you know, more one-shots like this would also be fine. Or I could acknowledge that I’m not the boss of him and that I’ll just be happy when more issues of Plastic Farm come out. But hey, buy this one in the meantime, as you’d have a hard time not loving it.

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Roberts, Rafer – Dope Fiends of the Zombie Cafe (written by Sean Frost)

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Dope Fiends of the Zombie Cafe! (written by Sean Frost)

First off, is there a better comic cover than that in the world? There are plenty of good ones out there in the world and more than a few great ones, but is there a single thing about that cover that isn’t fantastic? The story in here is a parody/tribute to the George Romero monster movies and Reefer Madness, with a bit of giant people thrown in for fun. Kids on a field trip are given radioactive carrots and told not to at them which they, of course, do. Then almost all of the beatniks at the open mic night start craving brains. An effort to cure/kill the zombies begins, with a cure coming from the mad scientist, but they seem to just chop people up as soon as they get the cure. Why? Who cares? This is about pure mayhem and hilarity, and it’s done to perfection. It’s $3, contact info is up there and if you can resist that cover you’re a stronger person than I…

Roberts, Rafer – Plastic Farm #3

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Plastic Farm #3 Now Available! $2.95

Well, this series has offically stopped making sense. Rafer mentions in his intro that this issue has little to do with the previous issues, at least right now, but for us to trust him because he knows what he’s doing. OK, I’ll trust him. After all, I still have three issues sitting here, so I can verify that he knows what he’s doing by what happens next. If it’s still a mess by the end of #6, watch out! Because, um, consequences will be dire! Anyway, this one has two unrelated chapters to keep us busy. In the first one we have two skinny people who are reluctantly eating their dog. They seem to have a working truck, so why they’re eating their dog is a complete mystery. They’re called on by a local commune to help with an injured member, and that’s the chapter. Then you have a drug deal of some kind going down involving a couple of detectives and a big crime figure. That’s it for the main story. I have no idea at all where he’s going with this, but he showed me with the first two issues that he can spin a compelling (and confusing) yarn, so I’ll stick around for a bit. The back-up story is by Sean Frost and Wendi Strang-Frost, and it might make even less sense than the rest of the book. All in all, easily the most confusing book of the series yet. Buy it today! $2.95, contact info is up there…

Frost, Sean – Johnny Public #9: Entering Bridgewater

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Johnny Public #9: Entering Bridgewater

You may remember that the main complaint I had from the previous issues was that there were too few pages and not enough of a chance to get what was going on issue by issue. Well, this is an extra dollar, sure, but well worth it because it’s a whole 20 pages and plenty more time to let you know what’s going on. Which means, of course, that a lot of it is still a complete mystery, but there’s enough going on here to keep me clamoring for more instead of just wishing I had a few more pages to go on. It looks like (and I’m certainly no expert here) this is the start of another story arc in the Johnny Public universe, which I explained in those other reviews, so I won’t go into it at length here. It starts with a traveling salesman seeing an unconscious girl on the road, so he stops to help. It turns out that a lot more is going on here than he thought, as zombies (apparently) are coming back to life, and he gets enlisted in the fight to get them under control. Which sounds like the most simplistic thing in the world, but the story takes some serious twists after that that I’m not going to spoil for you here. Suffice it to say that I can’t wait to see what happens next and I still can’t believe I don’t have the first story arc. Maybe next year at SPACE I’ll have a few extra bucks…

Frost, Sean – Johnny Public #1

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Johnny Public #1

If you’re curious about this comic, go ahead and read my review of their preview. Go ahead, I’ll wait. What you have here, on its face, is the story of a man trying to find the right word to finish a sentence in a novel he’s writing. He’s at a bar and gets advice from what appears to be a stranger, then that’s it for the comic, as it’s only six pages. That, by itself, would be a pretty stupid comic. Luckily for us there’s a panel by panel (mostly) synopsis of what was really going on there, and how the bar is inside the head of the main character. It’s a fascinating central concept and you really can pick this apart panel by panel, at least you can once you know what’s going on. And that’s a fundamental problem I have with this (and other currently poor people are probably going to have): $1.50 per every six pages of actual story is ridiculous. The cover looks great, don’t get me wrong, and I saw them all lined up at SPACE and they look great together. The way to go with this series, a lot more than most I think, is to get them all in a graphic novel and go from there. There’s just no way to get a good idea of the story in these tiny volumes. I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen and there just might be a really great story here, so don’t think that I’m blasting this comic for that reason. Anyway, there’s contact info up there, this is $1.50, and I think you could do a lot worse than get a collection of these stories, but one by one I just don’t think they’re worth it…

Frost, Sean – Johnny Public: Out of the Wilderness

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Johnny Public: Out of the Wilderness

OK, you can all see that this is only a preview, right? Because that point needs to be perfectly clear before I launch into anything. This is a sample of an (apparently) already published 80 page graphic novel about a man named William Denn. William has many, many personalities in his head, and the book is (supposedly) about all of them trying to work out their places in the internal hierarchy. I’m throwing all of those qualifiers in because the preview didn’t make much clear at all. To give you an idea of my reaction, here’s how I read this comic: read the intro from Wendi which, frankly, didn’t tell me much of anything about the actual story. Then I read the 8 page comic, followed by the issue by issue synopsis, followed by the glowing reviews on the back cover. Just a friendly hint to the both of them: if I learn more from the reviews than from the actual preview, you could have put out a better preview! Anyway, after I read the reviews, I turned the book over and read it again, hoping that it would make more sense. No such luck. So, what am I trying to get at here? Just that I can’t say much about this series one way or the other. It seems like an interesting concept, and the reviews were glowing, not that that tells you much. I’d say at least give the first issue a shot to see where it went, but I would definitely tell you to avoid the preview. Here’s a website, maybe some confusion can be cleared up there!