People I Know #10

(Thanks to Timothy's site for the cover image.)

By Timothy Winchester
www.timothywinchester.com

Ooooh, a flip comic! How exciting! This one takes the interesting idea of taking the same story and ending it in two different ways: "How it was" and "How it should have been". What this means in the simplest terms is that there are actually quite a lot of repeated panels. In fact the first two pages of both comics are identical. However, that's not a deal breaker as the rest of the comic diverges quite a lot and we have two very different endings.

The story starts off with the cover character hanging out in her space ship, talking to her robot, and trying on various outfits for the bounty hunter awards (as she is a space bounty hunter, no I did not guess that from the cover either). Soon she gets some sort of space-video-hologram-phone call from her boyfriend and she rushes off to see him on the planet Platurn for one of two very different reasons depending on which side you're reading.

I actually read the "how it should have been" ending first, and I'm kind of glad I did, as the "real" ending was far more exciting and violent! The "good" ending had more robots and monsters though, a conundrum.

I think part of the appeal here is that Winchester's character designs are quite cute and the characters seem excitable and happy, so seeing them (or at least imaginging them) be bounty hunters and do horrible things to people is kind of shocking to the reader. Even if that's not the reason, it's pretty amusing.

Oh, and if you go to his site there's lots of comics featuring Thundercats, Lady Gaga, and other weird popculture things.