Death Trip #1 – Review

By: Kenny Keil (story & art)

The Story: Dying in your sleep isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anymore.

The Review: In my first year at WCBR, I had the pleasure of reviewing Giant-Sized Tales to Suffice.  At the time, I didn’t have much exposure to non-Big Two comics, and considering the dubious quality of some of the indie comics I had advance reviewed, I had a certain skepticism towards comics that weren’t published through the traditional channels.  Keil’s delightfully funny, self-published, Kickstarter-funded book converted me to an indie believer.

Tales was pretty much a sketch-variety show contained in a graphic novel, and though there were some recurring features, it had no overarching plot or storyline nor even much of a theme.  It was an opportunity for Keil to pull out every joke and idea he could as rapidly as possible, moving on to the next punchline before you even fully reacted to the last, the Laugh-In of comic books.  So I was very interested to see what Keil would offer when tasked with an actual narrative.

The Real Thing – ft. Kenny Keil (Part 2)

Welcome back to the Real Thing and part two of our chat with Kenny Keil.  Previously, Keil talked about self-launching his first comic book project without a leg-up from any established publisher, major or minor.  Today, he talks about what makes his comic one of the funniest products on the off-road market.

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The entirety of Tales to Suffice is pretty much humor material.  How long have you known you were a “funny guy”? 

I always suspected it, but years of rejection letters from the Laffy Taffy people can wear a guy down.

I know you have a love for sketch and improvisational comedy, and Tales certainly has a sketch-comedy quality to it.  Did you ever do any of that, outside the comics medium?

I strive to get that sketch-comedy feel in my Tales to Suffice stuff, but up until recently that’s been the extent of my comedy writing experience.  The thing about comedy (or anything) is that you’re going to suck when you first start out.  And the great thing about comics is that they allow you to suck in the privacy of your own home without an audience watching.

What are some comedians or comedy shows you really love, and what are some that have influenced your own sense of humor and the humor in Tales?

I came up on stuff like SNL, The Simpsons, and Letterman, with a little Monty Python tossed into the mix.  Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock and a great deal of Adult Swim shows have rocked my world in more recent years.  As far as stand-ups go, I dig Rock, Carlin, Chapelle, and pretty much anyone who’s ever appeared on the Comedy Death-Ray podcast. Despite all of this, the comic sensibilities of Tales to Suffice remain best described as Dorf meets Chespirito.

What was the first tale to suffice, and how did the idea come to you?

Dang… I can remember a comic I read in 1984, but not a comic I made in 2007!  I’m thinking it was either The Red Atom or Ray Gunn, Space Sleuth.

The Real Thing – ft. Kenny Keil (Part 1)

Kenny Keil conceived, wrote, and drew his first series while working a day job as a designer. Tales to Suffice parodies a wide range of comic book genres and conventions, making jokes right down to the ads.  This combination of spoof and satire earned him critical acclaim when he released it through an indie publisher, but mainstream exposure remained elusive.  Using Kickstarter for seed money, Keil recently self-published Giant-Sized Tales to Suffice, which collects all his seen and unseen material.

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For some of us, comics are an addiction.  What was your first hit, the one that got you hooked?

Superman #395, May of ’84.  I’m pretty sure I couldn’t even read yet.  And the truth is I only bought it for this really sweet looking ad on the inside cover for an Atari game called Joust.  But I remember flipping through the book until it fell apart, just soaking in all that cool iconic Superman imagery and trying to piece together a narrative from the pictures alone.  By the way, the story?  Totally bonkers.  I still own the comic and to this day it loses me somewhere between the secret island of magical Viking warriors and the mind-controlling communist space satellite. It’s great.

Giant-Sized Tales to Suffice – Review

By: Kenny Keil

The Story: How do you tell a zombie he’s unemployable?  Can a robot and space sleuth really find love?  Is the barrel of this gun walnut or oak?  Get the answers to these questions, and more!

The Review: Even though comics spawned some of the most hugely profitable and popular films of the last decade, and produced literary-quality fiction for years even before that, they still get kind of a bad rep—or at least, the serial, mainstream comics do.  But maybe that’s to be expected; despite having entered a Modern Age, a lot of the stuff you see on the stands still plays with the old tropes that made comics a joke from their conception.

And if there’s any joke to be made about comics—from the readers to the creators, the various genres, the plot formulas, the cash-in opportunities—Keil’s going to make them.  He parodies the medium from top to bottom, but with the irony also comes a great sense of love for comics.  His collection includes a whole bunch of different features—you can almost call them sketches since they set up a scenario, get some laughs, and finish, with only a couple becoming recurring.

You have Ray Gunn, a take-off of all the weirdly body-suited space heroes from comics’ colorful past.  His stories come closest to playing it straight, taking your classic plotlines and giving them a twist, such as “rescuing the damsel from psycho robot—and that robot is your jealous lover” or “having a criminal steal/besmirch your identity—despite looking nothing like you.”  Silly as these twists are, you can’t say they’re predictable or fail to amuse.

Professor Wormhole and the Time Posse works to make fun of everything Ray Gunn doesn’t: the fraught delivery that turns everything into melodrama (“President Carter, put that burrito down immediately…the fate of the world depends on it!”); the deceptive covers (“A startling adventure in which this [aforementioned] scene doesn’t even appear!”); overworked acronyms (the Massive Invention Slapped Together for Kronological Escapades—just call it M.I.S.T.A.K.E.); and comics’ inexplicable love for gorillas.