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Motley, Tom & Allen, Lonnie – Aline the Alien/Wonder World flip book

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Aline the Alien/Wonder World flip book (with Lonnie Allen) Now Available! $3.50

When does a book get too experimental?  I’d previously thought just about never, but now I’m having my doubts.  This is a flip book where both creators play with the panel structure of comics, smash through the fourth wall and talk to the readers, and generally smash many conventions of making a comic.  All well and good, I say, but throwing in time travel too may have just made my brain explode.  I’ll put it this way: in both stories there’s a repeated page, front and back.  Due to the nature of the stories I’m not entirely sure if that’s a printing error (if so, shame on them for not being extra careful with stories this complex) or just them making a statement about comics.  So how about the comics?  Tom’s half deals with Aline the Alien, and things get off to an excellent start with a good old fashioned pie fight.  Then Aline starts to notice the panel boxing her in, the author is introduced, the guy who does the text boxes ponders his existence, and things end with a spectacular two page spread of Aline being trapped in a time bubble, panels and word balloons all over the place.  Lonnie’s half smashes through the fourth wall and deals with time travel, facing the fact of their two-dimensionality, and becoming real.  If I gave the impression here that this wasn’t a fun book, well, sorry, as it is a blast to watch these two play around with comic concepts.  That doubled page just threw me completely off, as organized chaos like this really needs to be free of errors like that.  Unless it was a commentary on the printing process that I missed…