I have been sitting on this issue since… I don’t even know when. My wife had a kid and I became Mr. Mom and while that doesn’t make it into all my reviews for this one it does because I was kind of new to the Mr. Mom’ing and while I wanted to sit down and read the hell out of Strange Kids Club I never did. Obviously I have now and all I can say is that I want more. I may even want the first four issue to check out and that’s fucking rarity from me.
Strange Kids Club is one half fake magazine and other half real comics. There is a mixture of real ads for nerdy shit throughout the magazine, but then there’s stuff like retro video games that don’t exist. You kinda want them to exist, but they don’t. In a way, it’s a reminder of what made magazines so much fun as a kid. Strange Kids Club is trying to capture that feeling. Because there are generations today that don’t care or want to understand magazines and comics in print form. Because as a kid it wasn’t there only source of info and they don’t have to wait a month for new news on a subject because the internet has made all of that instant. Strange Kids Club or SKC is a throwback to that. It’s a polished, well produced, fantastically written magazine for a generation that’s aged, but still hasn’t grown up.
Now… as for the comics. There’s a few winners. I enjoyed the art for every single one of them. I want to say that first because that’s really important. The artwork is killer here and if I had money I would totally hire any of these artists for a project. On the story side… there were a few too many in the fantasy barbarian genre. That may have been an intentional theme. Thankfully they all told different stories and had different gags, but by the time you get to the last one it’s like okay that might be too many. Also they’re a bit too short. I wanted just one or two more pages of each one to really get the feel for them. As it stands I would definitely return for more, but it was a shame that I couldn’t make up my mind on them with what there was to read.
Again the production on this magazine is great. It’s 100% legit in terms of that. There’s reviews of board games, vintage movies and again ads for products that are real and yet strange. I loved it. Even flipping through it again for this review it put a smile on my face. If you want to check it out head over to StrangeKidsClub.com and keep an eye on Kickstarter for future issues to support. Hopefully Founder and Publisher Rondal Scott III is already working on another issue.
Score: 4/5
Strange Kids Club #5 Publisher: Rondal Scott III Publisher: Strange Kids Club Price: $5.00 Format: Print
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This aftermath is where Remender leaves us, with Dent resuming his place as a bodyguard for Mr. Flak (the corporate king of L.A.) with Davey Trauma as Flak’s advisor. Tokyo is now a giant theme park for the rich, and Flak and the .01% of society are going to live there and let L.A. die. This is when Debbie (who is somehow still alive) rejoins the picture. She has the katana that was gifted to her by the leader of Tokyo that acts as an EMP, shutting down all electronics around it. And.. here it is, the name drop of the title, she has become the… Tokyo Ghost! Ok, so yeah, it’s kind of a lame way to bring the name in, especially in the second arc, but whatever. At this point, the social commentary has become secondary to the plot and it’s mainly based on action and violence (not that it wasn’t before). The puns and jabs at tech culture today fade into the background, they’re beginning to feel stale, but the heart is still there. At the end of the day, this is still a sad love story about a woman trying to break someone she loves away from addiction.
Well it honestly doesn’t matter because this series has reached a certain level in the comic book community that it’s revered. It can do no long and fans of the series don’t want to hear about its short comings, but rather it’s success. Really that’s the only thing any fan or creator wants to hear about in the comic book industry so I’m not going to bother listing anything else. It won’t change the issue for me and it certainly won’t change the issue for anyone that enjoyed it.
What’s really interesting about the story is that even though there’s all this corruption, the two original murders and all of Addison’s murders that followed have spelled the end for Trent no matter what. It’s snowballing as more and more people turn on her and while I don’t think the ending will be happy in any capacity, at least the bad guy is destined to get what’s coming to her.
Although I jumping aboard a little late, I figured out the premise of the series. A young woman named Sandra has been investigating some odd and tragic events that center on the tunnels around a place called Satan’s Hollow. This Ohio town seems to be plagued by unnatural disappearances and unexplained occurrences.
Being a fan of this series, I didn’t mind the exposition. That and it’s been needed. The series unfortunately spent too much time just kind of being whacky and having Janey stumble into trouble. When Mendoza went solo on the writing the series started to take a real direction, but it couldn’t afford to slowly build up the storyline it’s on anymore, meaning we’re going to get some exposition. Love it or hate it, it’s needed here.
The reprintings are a great collection for children and adults with a child’s heart. Readers will enjoy great tales focusing on the areas of the theme parks that we all have visited. Where kids will get a kick out of stories featuring the beloved Disney characters, adults will be fascinated by the liberties writers took with story elements before society felt the need to sanitize comics and cartoons. For instance, Scrooge McDuck will use gunpowder and whale oil as fuel to propel his paddlewheel boat. In that same story, Ratchet Gearloose tries to coax his brain to think of a problem’s solution by clocking himself on the noggin with a hammer. Yes, that was the beauty of writing back before we became hyper-sensitized and over litiginous.
Working to this issue's advantage is the b-story which, to myself and many longtime readers' delight, is a Death story. In world where every comic and film brims with quiet, angrily, ultra-masculine action heroes like Frank Castle, Mad Max, Jason Bourne, Bruce Wayne, and Judge Dredd, it can be easy to take Hickman's Death for granted. But I think there's a soulfulness with the white clad cowboy that only the best versions of those characters are granted. Death isn't a cold figure, he's an emotional one, cut from the same cloth as the hardened but sensitive western heroes of John Wayne. This issue has Death pursuing a reunion with his son, with the help of an increasingly shady bartender. Also highlighted here is the faintly (but never overpoweringly) ridiculous nature of Death's overblown steely bravado. While I love his skill with a six-shooter, I am equally in love with the ridiculous image of Death leveling it a pink, slimy, talking eyeball.
As for the characters, the dude is named Awyn Gardner… he’s also the fucking Gardner. A little too on the nose. He has super impressive knife and fighting skills because of whatever past he’s running away from. It’s teased some, but at awkward points in the story making it feel out of place. The demon woman’s name is Vyrde and we don’t learn that until the 76th page and then the last page we learn her angle name... way too long to wait for either. She’s just the fan service character. In this world the demons/angels become weapons for humans so it really makes their power seem shitty when they need someone to wield them. The other main character is Awyn’s boss/love interest. She’s so one-dimensional that I’m not going to talk about her in any depth. The characters aren’t unique and they’re not interesting. Awyn’s name sucks a lot and his gimmick of loving to garden is just… blah.
You’re probably wondering why Batman had to team up with Joker? Well as he puts it, they’re both been given different pieces of the same puzzle. Which is true for about a minute. When they team up it stops being true because they’re just teamed up and stopped receiving different parts of the puzzle anymore. They’ve both been infected with a virus and the solution is really stupid… I mean I figured it out in the first chapter of the story and yet the world's greatest detective had to have his hand-held and told the solution. Just goes to show that Batman doesn't detect anything anymore and that DC should maybe give that moniker to Ralph Dibny in the reboot.
