Black Ghost Apple Factory
Top Shelf Productions
See, there are these black ghosts that look a lot like Pac-Man’s ghost monsters, only black, right? And their job is to fly up to the clouds, squat in them, and, um, crap out apples, which fall like rain down into the barren trees below, attaching to the branches, and turning them into apple trees.
And that, according to cartoonist Jeremy Tinder, is where apples come from.
It’s also where the title of his hilarious little anthology book comes from. The title story isn’t really about trying to make you lose your appetite for apples, though; it’s also a love story.
Tinder has a wonderfully loose and fun art style, and an eye for design that leads to plenty of super-cute characters, many of whom look like they were parented during a ménage à trois between an old Golden Age cartoon character, a kids’ cereal mascot and something off a Japanese T-shirt.
His stories star robots, elephants, bunnies and grizzly bears, but Tinder gives them rather standard indie-comics problems and personalities, the gap between their looks and problems leading to some absurdly funny stories, like the one in which the happy-go-lucky talking kitty cat goes to the vet to get “fixed,” unaware of exactly what that means, only to immediately get dumped by his (human) girlfriend, who was only dating him for the sex. She immediately starts dating someone else—the kitty’s own vet.
Flight Vol. 4
Villard
Wow, is it that time again already? It seems like just yesterday that the third volume was released, but I guess time flies while you’re waiting for Flight.
This installment is the strongest one yet, which makes sense—a group of relatively young and still up-and-coming creators, the Flight collective only gets better as the years pass.
These sorts of multi-creator anthologies are almost inevitably a mixed bag, given the subjective nature of art, as well as the differing tastes and aesthetics of those creating it, and of those consuming it. The more creators involved in an anthology, the greater the chances that a reader is going to run into something they don’t like. This one features 25 stories from about as many creators, spread across almost 350 pages.
So that’s a lot of chances to disappoint, and yet it almost never does. Part of that may be due to the goodwill the creators have built up over the last three volumes, and part of it is simply skill; many of them work in animation and illustration as well as comics, and it shows in the winning character designs, the strong page layouts and the way the action flows so effortlessly from panel to panel, in some stories without the benefit of dialogue to push things along.
The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen
DC Comics
Superman’s pal (and Clark Kent’s co-worker) Jimmy Olsen is a pretty ordinary guy. He doesn’t have any superpowers, he doesn’t wear a colorful costume, and he has a fairly ordinary, real-world job. And yet somehow his adventures, chronicled in 1954-1974’s Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, ended up being probably the most insane of any old DC Comics character.
Perhaps because of his very square ordinariness, writers were always having Olsen ingest weird formulas and be exposed to strange rays, giving him bizarre superpowers that generally lasted 10 pages or so. He’s become a wolf man, a Plastic Man, a pop singer, a pro boxer, an ape-man, a merman, a Superman, a fat man, a human porcupine, a human fly, a genie and a giant turtle-man with no eyelids. And that’s not even counting his really weird adventures, like those involving time travel and elaborate pranks perpetrated by his Super-pal.
This book collects 200 pages of some of his more bizarre transformations, some of which are already available in the black-and-white Showcase Presents: Superman Family, but while Showcase aims for completeness, here the focus is on highlights (presented in color).
After a few chapters of this, Superman’s ability to fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes isn’t going to seem all that fantastic at all.