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The Super-Scary Monster Show Featuring Little Gloomy #1
posted November 21, 2005
 



Creators: Landry Quinn Walker, Eric Jones
Publishing Information: SLG Publishing/AmazeInk, 24 pages, $2.95, 2005
Ordering Numbers:

This is what they used to call a "perfectly acceptable comic book," which really isn't the insult as much as it used to be, as wider industry standards concerning what the big companies are happy to release to their fans have jumped right down the toilet. Here, the jokes pretty much work, the character designs are cute, the art is attractive, and the page layouts are both functional and occasionally ambitious. I particularly like the story staring Carl Cthulu, which is a funny idea executed in a manner that's appreciative of that source material without leaving others completely out in the cold. What Walker and Jones' work here seems to be missing is some spark of creativity or madness or even top of the line display of artistic or writing skill that would distinguish it for someone who was not inclined to enjoy such material in the first place? Does that make sense? I think they're serving their readership in fine fashion, but this isn't a comic I would recommend to people who didn't already know about it. For a fan of horror-humor books, this does the trick; for a fan of comics as a medium, this is less stylish Richard Sala or less ambitioius Jay Stephens. It occurs to me that the Carl Cthulu story might work better for me because I haven't seen it before, whereas I've seen little aliens get their comeuppance or Frankenstein monster-building shenanigans.