Indie, Baby

Indie, Baby

Oct 20

I’m not ashamed; I fully admit that I buy comics to indulge in escapist fantasies of superheroics and supervillainy. Ninety percent of what I buy is awful-to-really good mainstream pulp.

I always WANT to buy smarter, more “artistic,” independent comic books. Yet my spare $3 inevitably goes instead toward whatever new drug the Big Two are trying to shove down my throat.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I LIKE mainstream superhero bullshit. It helps me relax. It makes me feel good. But I admit that my buying habits tend toward the average middle of the road, at least when it comes to my sequential art tastes.

That don’t mean, however, that I don’t recognize good indie shit when I smell it. Or read it, even. Here’s two good books you should hunt down as a wily fox would hunt down a poor, defenseless bunny rabbit.

Agreeable Comics
Kevin Church is no doubt familiar to all you fawning, drooly bloglodites who worship at his altar of comedy. I am one of you, even as I envy his mad skillz and burgeoning writing career. He and Benjamin Birdie put together quite a tasty lil’ black-and-white dose of comedy strips, aiming for the high concept and the absurd, and mostly hitting the mark. Church’s stuff is funny, but I must confess, I love Birdie’s strips more. The Kings of Pop is some kind of mini-masterpiece of satire and carefully-observed comedy. It makes a pretty sharp point pretty quickly, but there’s all these little real human moments. It’s got the rhythm of reality, like a scene from a Coen brothers flick. It’s such a perfect vignette I almost don’t want to see more, but of course, I do, I really do.

The eight-page preview is just $2.30 and you can hook your own bad self up at the Agreeable Comics website.

(And as I kill time at work and cast my eyes about the web, I notice Benjamin Birdie’s website has oodles of fun stuff, including more Kings of Pop and links to a Kevin Analog minicomic that I can BUY for my OWN self. RAD.

The Homeless Channel
Matt Silady brings an intriguing style to an offbeat story, mixing photoreference and Photoshop with a gift for bold page layouts to create a tottering unreal reality for his tale of an actual channel of homeless people. There’s a dollop of satire, but this is really a story about people, and the first issue has me eager to find out where the path will end up. Plus, he’s a fellow former Chicago boy who logged six years teaching eighth grade in public schools–for that, he deserves more than a glowing review. He deserves a Papal dispensation.

And see? That’s even all I got. Just two. Pretty sad, eh? I seriously need some recommendations. I almost bought Chip Zdarsky’s Monster Cops this week at my shop, but man, $4 is a lot of money. Even for good shit.