Last Kiss: Sex Day by John Lustig

I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations - and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes.

So I haven't mentioned the syndicated comic "strip" Last Kiss here before, as far as I can tell. But I've been aware of it, and read it here and there, and I'm definitely not against it. (I'm sure some people are - repurposing of art brings out a lot of thoughts and emotions in some people.)

The deal of Last Kiss is that John Lustig takes panels from mostly '50s romance comics - a lot of Dick Giordano and Vince Colletta, I think, a lot of people who can't be exactly credited seventy years later - edits them a bit, has them recolored, and adds new, humorous dialogue and captions. It's all juxtaposition humor, with those clean-cut young men in crew cuts and young ladies in classy gowns talking about Gangnam style or whatever. Last Kiss has been running for quite some time - I want to say something like twenty years, in CBG and as a few issues in comics format and mostly on GoComics - but there's a deep well of original material to work from, and I don't think Lustig pushes out lots of material at any one time.

Last Kiss: Sex Day is a mildly themed - sex is the theme, though that's at least an underlying theme a lot of the time in Last Kiss, since it starts with romance comics to begin with - collection of the strip from 2013, a short book of about sixty pages. As far as I can tell, it's only available digitally, which is just fine for this kind of frivolous exercise.

Last Kiss is all individual panels, and they're presented one to a page here, with an occasional second page to show what the art looked like in its original form and with its original dialogue. (Lustig's is always funnier, but often vastly less weird.) It's sarcastic, it's at least mildly "weren't those old people totally squaresville" humor, and it's all in the same territory of jokes. So this is a good length, and an amusing package: if you like the idea of Last Kiss, and don't mind some mildly risqué humor, Sex Day is a fine sampler.