3 Car Pileup #2 from Idiot Box. Matt Bors, Dan Custer, Brian Koschak, Lucas Rager, Ed Waara. 3 Car is an anthology book put together by these guys that features their stories and artwork. Coming from multiple artists and writers, it's a mixed bag, as you might expect. The opening bit, "The Harvest," concerns a tribe of warriors out to perform their annual ritual. Storywise, it's not bad and a even a little humorous, but for some reason, they saw fit to produce the thing landscape, i.e. you have to turn the book sideways. This is unfortunate, as they don't really have any panels marked either--so the artwork (which is actually pretty good) seems crammed together on the page and it's hard to follow what's happening at any given moment, especially in the action sequences. The next story, which is an ongoing bit about a koala (don't ask), features Rager's solid and sparse artwork, but is very short and very trite. The ending wants to bludgeon you to death with a visual metaphor. Dan Custer's "Bulimic Consumer" is the high point of the issue, featuring his interp of the whole Moses story and how people are hard to please. The artwork is crude and cartoony and it works. I'd like more of this, please. Matt Bors' "Just Another Coming of Age Story" is...well, exactly what the title says. It's cookie cutter indie comics stuff that, sadly, has no real point. Then "Idiot Box" is a series of cartoon strips that feel like they should be funny, but they're too concerned with Making a Political Statement (TM) to actually achieve the goal. Koschak's parody of the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima does a better job of making the point in one image better than a page and a half of densely packed "Idiot Box" strips. The main thing to bear in mind here is that everybody involved shows potential, and as this issue was an improvement over the first one, so too I expect #3 to be better still. Looking forward to it.
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