Sunday, June 11, 2017

Keenspot Spotlight 2007 / Wicked Powered

From the random stack of unread comics. This was the thickest book in the random stack. Tomorrow will be a catch-up-day reviewing marathon!

Title: Keenspot Spotlight 2007 / Wicked Powered
Publisher: Keenspot
Date: 2007
Writer/Artist: Chris Layfield, Pascalle, RC Monroe, Mark Shallow, Starline Hodge, Kel McDonald, J Grant, Mel Hynes, Dan Shive, Maritza Campos, Jeff Darlington, Teague Tysseling, Smith, Zuckerman, Risberg, Eisu, Thomas K. Dye, Ryan Smith, David Wright, Mike Rosenzweig, Owen Geini, Chris Crosby

Flip book. This is one of the more massive Free Comic Book items I've come across, weighing in at 104 pages.

I'll start with Wicked Powered, one of the two "cover features". This story reads a lot like Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, with a high school loser visited by time travelers (of the cute manga girl variety) who inform him of his future as a great intergalactic hero. The only problem is that the bad guys have send a monster back in time, and they're planning to assassinate him now, while he is decidedly unheroic. Most of the jokes in this fell flat for me, but the bit where the three girls from the future try to pass themselves off as typical 21st century high school students ("My name is Brangelina Tomcat, and these are my friends, Suri Obama and Snoopdogg Clooney.") was genuinely funny.

Flip the book over, and you get a massive sampler from the webcomic site Keenspot. Sixteen comics are previewed here, and it was as much of a mixed bag as you might expect. I particularly enjoyed the geeky comedy Out There by R.C. Monroe. Dan Shive's El Goonish Shive was a nice bit of light urban fantasy that had a lot of fun-looking subplots going on. Maritza Campos had a bizarre series of "What Kind of Roomie Are You" strips what got some laughs from me.Something Happens by Thomas K. Day had a pretty funny gag strip involving ants and an Etch-A-Sketch.And I loved the art style and dialogue on the high school drama Everything Jake by Mike Rosenzweig.

Most of the other stories had at least something that caught my attention, although a lot of the jokes failed to hit my sense of humor.

Still, this is a solid collection with a lot of intriguing samples.

Rating: 6.5/10

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