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Skaggy the Lost
posted July 15, 2005
 



Creators: Igor Baranko
Publishing Information: Slave Labor, 176 pages, $16.95
Ordering Numbers: 1593620071 (ISBN)

I enjoyed a lot of the cartooning on display here without really ever surrendering to the comic. Igor Baranko uses an army of thin lines and a few judiciously spotted blacks in his figures and out to illustrate his comic book story of a hoarde of Vikings and their unique, berzerker leader encountering a Central American tribal city. His characters are mostly grotesquely ugly; softness comes in round forms and toughness in squares and triangles. It's a lot of fun to look at. The story left me kind of cold, I think because it had little in the way of scene to scene surprises. Once you identify players according to physical type, they act pretty much as you'd expect them to. That's also the quality that makes it difficult to latch onto something for memory's sake once the story is done. With its mystical pondering and nice, meaty and frequently funny battles, Skaggy the Lost is the kind of movie you'd enjoy watching from bed at 1:00 in the morning, with the volume down or all the way off.