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.