Pfft!...If he knew REAL magic, he'd
have made this comic disappear (seriously, I kid..)
I've
been a fan of Penn Jillette for a long time now. It is pretty easy to see why,
what with his Renaissance-man list of career choices and his modern day
sensibilities, what's not to like. Well, okay for some of you maybe a lot.
Jillette is an avowed outspoken atheist, which rubs some people raw, was
co-producer/co-director of the awful The Aristocrats movie that was almost as
bad as the joke itself, and he regularly exposes his negative views on
pseudo-science and metaphysics in a way that is very difficult to refute.
Only
the middle one of those three do I find upsetting.
As
to the good, he has for years been the speaking part of the magical duo of Penn
and Teller, an astonishing act with a style as offbeat as their tricks. He's
made several popular television appearances on everything from Celebrity
Apprentice to Babylon 5 to Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (and many others). Penn
even added his levity and expertise to my very own career field when he became
a contributor to PC/Computing magazine as a columnist of the back section,
which I frequently turned to first.
So
I have a lot of love for Mr. Jillette.
But
this book of his with Eisner, Ignatz and Harvey Award nominated illustrator Renee
French is pretty much worthless for anything but using as a starter for my next backyard barbecue. I take little pleasure in saying that. When respected artists and
performers get together, I love telling my audience tales of the awesome
thing that only cost me a quarter in my latest bin diving.
But
alas this time it is not to be the case. The two stories contained do not
amuse. Granted they don't offend either, they mostly just bore. Which in this
case is kind of unpardonable.
We
begin with the secret identities of the titled Rheumy Peepers and Chunky
Highlights playing poker with two musician buddies. Now before we get too
involved, I'm going to dispel a few expectations: 1.) there are no superhero
antics in this. 2.) there are three, count them, three jokes in the entire
book: two on page two and one on page three. After that it is a joyless
experience that makes you wish you were reading something else.
Anything
else.
The
back of the shampoo bottle, perhaps.
So
let's at least give these two the benefit of making you crack a smile, even if
it is a weak one at best. Here are our two heroes poking fun at their friends
while cheating them out of their earnings by sharping them at cards.
Their
friends are both trombone players.
So
you see, That's the JOKE! Or two of them.
Then
the trombone player says…
And
that's the OTHER joke.
Then
30 pages later, the comic book ends.
Seriously.
There is nothing more to see here. We, the audience spend an extraordinary
amount of time on the characters, by which I mean drawing panels that do little
to move the action along and in which character's interactions don't actually
tell us anything. Something as simple as collecting the winnings becomes the
montage of handing a box, characters looking at each other, touching the box,
looking again at each other, taking money from the box and putting a wad of
cash in their sock garter.
It's
enough to make a Bendis book look frenetic and fast-paced in comparison. We
don't need to show every interaction, every motion, every frame, especially when
they do little to establish anything of note to the plot or to inform the
audience about the characters. I'm reminded of many first stories by writers
where they spend time establishing everything a character does or telling us in minute detail their exact height, weight, age and what they are wearing. Ed Greenwood's
horrifically boring "Spellfire" springs to mind.
The
key to this is simple: don't include it if it does nothing to advance the plot,
develop the characters or describe the setting. And even if it marginally might
do one of those things, do NOT bore the audience. Which this does.
Four panels…that could easily have been compressed into two…or one…or best of all,
NONE.
So
rest of this story is this: Each of these two men who have been cheated at
cards later receives a large sum of cash from an anonymous donor. Note that the
reason they were being scammed at cards was so Rheumy and Chunky could use the funds to
further their crime fighting careers. Which we never see, by the way. So
sometime later when the money comes rolling back in….
…as
the audience, we have to ask: How do the absent duo dynamic suddenly have the
scratch to pay off these people they've fleeced? Where does the money come
from? How do you make money from being a superhero? You don't! That's the
freaking point of doing something altruistic, you don't get PAID!
Yet
this is really just the setup for this "joke."
This
makes me mad at the time invested in reading the intervening pages. What's
worse is there is a second story in the book featuring these characters and
once it started to meander down this same track I immediately stopped reading
it. Because I have better, more enjoyable things to do with my time than read
bad comics that hold NO redeeming value.
What
I'm saying is this: surprise me, shock me, make me hate you or love you or
anything…any emotion at all. Just don't waste my time.
Which
clearly The Adventures of Peepers and Highlights did. Oni released one of these
and that was it…no follow ups and no number 2's.
Sadly,
I expected more from Penn.
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