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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Agreeable Comics<\/strong> The eight-page preview is just $2.30 and you can hook your own bad self up at the Agreeable Comics<\/a> website.<\/p>\n (And as I kill time at work and cast my eyes about the web, I notice Benjamin Birdie’s website<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The Homeless Channel<\/strong> 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<\/a> this week at my shop<\/a>, but man, $4 is a lot of money. Even for good shit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nKevin Church<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n
\nMatt Silady<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n