Square Eyed Stories #21

Square Eyed Stories #21
By Arthur Goodman, David Goodman, and Jim McGee.
www.squareeyedstories.co.uk
Half sized, £2, €3, $4, ¥500

I dug this little anthology comic zine, even if the weird chair monster/vehicle on the cover doesn’t show up inside.

The short strips inside by the three different creators are in a variety of different styles, but are all pretty funny, usually in a mean spirited way of some sort (that poor jetpack monkey!).

Jim McGee’s strips are the weirdest out of the three creators (though it’s kind of hard to say that when one of the other comics is about a zombie baby panda). His strips frequently have a sort of desperate, Hunter S. Thompson-y nonsensical style (I am probably wrong in referring to it as such, but I don’t know how else to do so really), or feature organs that walk around. And just what are the Banana Brothers? Are they actual bananas? Strange.

The strips by the two Goodman brothers are more linear if nothing else, though they still contain the same weird humour found in McGee’s strips (the aforementioned jetpack money and zombie panda amongst others). I have to wonder if it was a conscious decision to run the strips featuring normal humans doing normal (ish) things next to each other, while those featuring violent little girls also ran on opposite pages. Hmm....


There’s also a couple of jam strips, that seem more coherent than most. Which is probably the result of the creators doing them for agggges. So, overall it’s pretty good.