Eric A. Anderson and Manny Trembley are best known for Sam Noir, their film noir/samurai flick fusion comic about a private eye who happens to be a samurai who speaks and narrates exclusively in hard-boiled tough guy-isms. But prior to that, the pair collaborated on web comic PX! (for Panda Express), and in the grand tradition of a later success getting a previous effort released comes PX! Vol. 1: A Girl and Her Panda.
Like a practice run for Sam Noir, the strip prefigured the pair’s interest in mixing and matching genres and pop culture tropes in the hopes of transcending them. Here, their mixing and matching is a lot less thematic, making for a less polished pastiche, but it has a ramshackle charm, with each of its characters seemingly having arrived from completely different Saturday morning cartoon shows.
See, there’s this evil goat who smokes, has an odd speech impediment and seeks to rule the world. He’s also a cabdriver. He kidnaps the inventor of a battle panda robot and forces him to build a bigger, nastier robot panda. The inventor’s daughter, meanwhile, rides her own robot battle panda aimlessly about, looking for her dad. An inexplicably Victorian English secret agent named Weatherby Ian Poppington III seeks to rescue her from harm, while a roller-skating disco samurai named Wikkity Jones is hired to kill her.
Hilarity, obviously, ensues.
Much more ambitious, and much less successful (perhaps in part because of that ambition), is The Surreal Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo. The title character is the anthropomorphized imagination of Edgar Allan Poe, whom we first meet splashing in the water beneath an outhouse the influential American literary figure is seen exiting (thus the surname). “Poo” looks like a big-headed, cute version of Poe, and it journeys to the magical, sword-and sorcery land of Terra Somnium, aided in its quest by a giant talking rat and a tiny talking crab, encountering figures of Greek and Norse mythology willy nilly.
Despite the considerable charms of Thomas Boatwright’s painterly artwork, writer Dwight L. MacPherson’s story has little to do with the work or life of Poe, who sort of co-stars, and the choice to tie this story to the author seems pretty random, casting a pall of confusion over the whole endeavor.
Also confusing is the complete lack of any surreal elements: Boatwright’s character designs are a shade cartoony, but his landscapes are perfectly natural, and all of the monsters and talking animals look perfectly realistic (for monsters and talking animals). Visually and verbally, it has far more in common with Tolkien than Dali.
But I guess The Completely Standard Fantasy Adventures of Edgar Allan Poo doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
This trade paperback collection betrays the original serialized format, a danger in any strip-to-book collection (although one PX! managed to avoid). Poo’s book features climaxes and cliffhangers coming every few pages, only to be solved on the next page, making for a rather frustrating read.