Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"I got you some things."
"Oh really?"
"Green things and for the sun... It's a hat and gerkins."
"I can see that. Thank you."
Here's my early front runner for weirdest comic of 2019! It's not going to win, I suspect, as there's a fair few furlongs of freaky to go before the finish line and no doubt something even more insane will come flying up late on the rails like Oliver Schrauwen's PARALLEL LIVES did last year to snatch the gonzo glory.
But Joe Kessler has laid a pretty fair marker down with this anthology of the abnormal, let me tell you...
From a child riding the bus network alone late at night, to being teleported to go shell collecting by an evil wizard, to worrying about a lack of vitamins, to receiving summary justice from what appears to be worrisomely all-powerful jaundiced version of Noseybonk, there is much going on that is very strange indeed here. Like a fever dream leading in an entirely abstract direction, I didn't guess where any of these stories were going, and that is certainly a very considerable part of their charm. Frequently they adopt a semblance of surface normality before veering off savagely into the surreal!
As an aside, I did wonder at one point if the various stories very, very tenuously all linked together, a little like PARALLEL LIVES but even more disparately, but I'm honestly not sure. I think so...
Style-wise, it looks like Joe has used felt tips. I love felt tips, who doesn't?! Simpler times... The actual colour palette often harkens back to even simpler times still. I would say the days of four colour, but instead of cyan, magenta, yellow and black Joe has gone for seriously bright red, yellow, green, blue and black. A proper bunch of fives to the flushed, confused face and highly activated optic nerves.
As I said, weird and abnormal. I loved it!
