Awesomer was the second anthology benefiting the Indy Spinner Rack podcast, published by the awesome guys at Top Shelf back in June of 2009. It's edited by entities calling themselves "Charlito" and "Mr. Phil," which is mildly disconcerting, but I'll forgive that in my love for Top Shelf and for a cheap anthology (I found this for half-price back before Christmas) full of creators I don't know already.The cover is by Jeff Smith, whom I do know -- and I hope you do, too.
Actually, there are plenty of people here whose work I'm familiar with: Jeff "Essex County Trilogy" Lemire, Julia "Fart Party" Wertz, Chris "Crogan's {Foo}" Schweizer, Alex "Box Office Poison" Robinson, and people like Miss Lasko-Gross, Sarah Glidden, and Fred Van Lente, whom I don't feel compelled to shove the title of one of their works into the middle of their names. The two hundred pages of comics here include 54 stories -- obviously, all pretty short ones -- by those names and many more.
The styles are all over the map, from the vaguely satirical funny-animal antics of "Party-Poohper" by Jon Adams and Waltoon to the clean-lined historical fiction of Jesse Post and Fred Chao's "The Greater Escape" to the creepy, carefully rendered family story "Widows" by Rantz Hosely and Salgood Sam. Everything in here is at least pretty good, though. Some of it is awfully weird, and a lot of it is silly, but, still -- fifty-four stories in two hundred pages, by a whole bunch of people. Unless the only thing you like about comics is characters older than your parents hitting each other, you'll find something to enjoy here.
Book-A-Day 2010: The Epic Index
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Listening to: Barzin - Look What Love Has Turned Us Into
via FoxyTunes
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