Reviews
Graphic Classics: Edgar Allen Poe
Review by Xerexes
(Excerpt)
For that reason one of my favorites from this collection is "King Pest" by Antonella Caputo, Anton Emdin and Glenn Smith. It has a the most cartoonish style of artwork in the book but it is also the most lively artwork in the book (other artists took much more stilted approaches to their portrayals). It also made much more use of comic's full set of visual tools to incorporating dialogue and other text into the comic. This was one of the few tales in the book where the creative team seems to understand that text in comics has as much to do with how you situate it in the panel as what the text says.
Graphic Classics: Mark Twain
Review by Sarah Meador
(Excerpt)
"A Ghost Story" is a more exact representation of the story, but Anton Emdin's illustrated reenactment has a manic animation that adds character to Twain's often dry narration.
Cruel World #s 6, 7 & 8
Review by CNG
Cruel World is a vindictive attempt to make you laugh and somehow find endearing the sickest sexually perverse sequential art I have read to date. Featuring overly pimply teens, severed male heads indulging themselves in a naked woman's breast while she sits on the toilet, one cannot help but feel this series is a cruel joke on the mind-but I have to tell you is actually well done!
Involving mostly oversexed teens and a sperm seeking to making it big in Hollywood (hence his name Hollywood Sperm), each comic provides episodic shorts that take us into the deep recesses of a clearly disturbed and under stimulated (or over stimulated) Australian, Anton Emdin.
Definitely not for those who are offended easily, Cruel World provides plenty of chuckles at gags only meant to make you groan. Sweet Valley Thigh in issue 6 set up the entire set perfectly. Two high school students - Beth, the extremely ugly one, and Cindy, the somewhat better looking blond, find themselves in a predicament when Cindy believes she has killed one of her classmates. So the two try to cover up the situation only to find that the dead boy might actually be a zombie, so he must be stopped! As the story unfolds we get plenty of unnecessary female nudity and teen sex with Becky and a boy, whose penis met an unfortunate accident with a wooden leg.
Then of course there is the adorable Hollywood Sperm who only wants to be taken as a serious thespian, and move on from pornography films. Moving along to The Legend of the Brown Nose, Emdin really crosses the line, even further than South Park did with Mr. Hanky kissing people. Emdin tells, what I hope is a fictional story, of he and his friends on a trip to South Africa, where Emdin learned about the legend of the brown nose after one of the boys pulled down his pants stuck his finger in his butt and wipes what comes out under someone's nose.
I will not go on any further, you will have to buy the comics if you wish to make yourself even more nauseous. But it gets even stranger when a disregarded penis takes root and grows into some type of tree and the psychotic stylings of Squiver (Squirrel/Beaver) and a wasp with a really nasty attitude find themselves always in pain, horny, or dead.
For something different in sequential art, that despite its perverse and gross nature can entertain - Cruel World will make this REAL cruel world seem a little less dark.
Cruel World #7
Review by Paper Tiger Comix
An interesting and darkly funny comic from Australia. It seems there's a strong influence from Peter Bagge & Kaz in Anton's work which is not a bad thing.
The first tale The Taming Of The Shrewd is an autobiographical short in which the artist portrays himself as the poor underdog, victimised by his tyrannical girlfriend (who in one panel he draws as godzilla on the rampage). Dandyland is a cute one pager where a guy enters a cute alien land where nothing bad happens...even if you're decapitated!
Porn Again Penis is a 3 part tale running through the comic about a wretched loser who gets rejected when trying to enter a career in the porn industry. His dream smashed, he cut's of his member, but little does he know it's developed a life of it's own!
Knock Yer Writer's Block Off is my favourite strip, a hilarious tale of a squiver (half squirrel, half beaver) & a bug called Angelo. Squiver accidentally kills his friend and then panics as he realises they're only part way through the strip and the script is ruined! What to do? Oh the humanity...
Other Strips include Sammy The Sperm, Trendy Nose-Jobs, Fast Food For Thought, Baby Chad & Freudian Slit.
Not a bad collection of strips at all!
Sick Puppy #13
Review by Rick Bradford
The thing that first got my attention about the Graphic Classics line was the impressive diversity of talent. This volume alone (the eighth in the series) contains work by Rick Geary, Milton Knight, Evert Geradts (Dutch underground artist), Anton Emdin (great Australian cartoonist finally starting to show up more in the States), Lance Tooks (Narcissa), William L. Brown ("President Bill"), Simon Gane, Mary Fleener and Skip Williamson, to name just a few.
Of the adaptations there are several that I particularly enjoyed. The first and by far the longest piece at 36 pages is Geary's "The Mysterious Stranger", a blasphemous story about a 16th century village's encounters with a young man who, unbeknownst to them, is the Devil. I find it amusing that Twain's view of religion at the turn of the 20th century fairly matches my own in 2004. Coming in at a close second to "Stranger" is Gane's take on "Is He Living or Is He Dead?", a tale about a group of painters who staged a hoax in order to get rich. Gane's work has been the subject of buzz lately thanks to the recently-published All Flee! (Top Shelf), but the truth is that he's been doing interesting work for years. And, finally, the third is Emdin's "A Ghost Story" about the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, one of many fraudulent oddities made famous by PT Barnum. Emdin's exaggerated cartooniness is just what the doctor ordered.
This review only scratches the surface, of course. In addition to the adaptations, there are also a few text pieces, my favorite of which is Twain's address to an audience on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1905. Be sure to check out the website for more info and a healthy selection of art samples.
