By Dustin Cabeal

For the longest time on the site, we supported Kickstarters and crowdsourced comics in general. After a long while, I noticed that we stopped moving the needle on these projects. There were too many, and our audience either became numb to them or worse, stopped caring about them. Either way, we dropped Kickstarters from the site unless we could review the material. Of course, all this feeds into Monster of the Week which is heading to Kickstarter. The book is finished which is always the best way to bring your comic to Kickstarter, and so the creators sent it my way to check out. I’ll tell you right now: this is the type of book we were always looking to support and help out.

The world of Monster of the Week is clearly inspired by Pacific Rim and every other kaiju movie before it. The weather changes and people start freaking out. A teacher is called, and she announces to the class that monster season has begun. Yeah, that’s right, like winter and fall, monster is a season. Much like our main character with his meaty arms, “Yeeessss” is the only correct emotion. The story continues, and while we don’t learn everything about this world, there’s enough here that I wanted to read a lot more.

There’s plenty of unanswered questions to be discovered. Why are the monsters coming? Are they really trying to destroy the world or is something else going on? Then there’s the hunters, men, and women that have dedicated their life to beating giant monsters. Why? Because it’s the only thrill left in the world.

The writing is sharp and to the point. There’s plenty of information giving through natural progressing dialogue which is just so damn rare in comics it seems. I don’t know when we all just excepted that info dumps and exposition was a necessary evil in comics, but it’s not. It’s not. What was also great were the kids. They sound like kids, they act like kids, they’re "geared" like adults which was funny. It wasn’t that weird adult-kid humor that everyone loves (and is now turning their back on thanks to Stranger Things), but just kids. Kids enthusiasticabout killing monsters.

The art is my favorite thing about the book. I think, because I don’t know for certain, that it’s going for a bit of an Adventure Time vibe. I don’t actually like Adventure Time, but I still like this art. If anything, it’s more in line with the young adult animation comedies that Cartoon Network has been having great success with. The art is stylized, detailed and colored wonderfully. Especially the monsters. The designs were refreshing, a little cutesy, but also very cool. I hope the artist is on this book for the long haul.

Again, this is exactly the type of book I want to see on Kickstarter. This is the type of indie book that I want to read and stumble upon in general. It’s creative if not familiar, it’s humorous and yet sets the stage for something serious later, and it’s entertaining as hell. Head over to their Kickstarter if you’d like to support it or at the very least share the project so that others might stumble upon this gem.

Score: 4/5

Monster of the Week #1
Writer: Ryan Little
Artist: Mike Vasquez
Colorist: Joe Hogan
Self-Published
Kickstarter Link!

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