Brain Parts

By Holly Foltz

Huh, so Americans like fireworks a lot. (Guess what day I'm writing this review on!)

This brief comic features a bunch of reasons why Foltz hates her job (or rather, why she hates the people she has to deal with at her job). The reasons themselves are nothing that fantastic, but the art style is accomplished enough that I think Foltz could produce some pretty good work. This is backed up by an amusing comic on the back page, which features Foltz pretending to be the Alien from the titular movie using a cat. It's cute, funny, and the art has good facial expressions and body language.

Shabba's Crappy D Stories Part: 1

By Saban Kazim
www.shabs.net

I have, thankfully, never worked in fast food. However, as I am currently not working anywhere I suppose those working in fast food have one up on me in that they have a paycheck and know where next month's rent is coming from.

The two brief stories in here are good at showing how terrible these sort of jobs are, and how to find humour in them. The horrible customers, the worker/manager relationship (where all the power seems to be with one, but occasionally the other can get the upper hand), the nonsensical rules, the horrible tasks, the trying to do as little as possible. It's kind of impressive that all of that is portrayed in just a few brief pages, but I guess so much of those things are part of popular culture nowadays that it just has to reference them and I understand them far more in depth.

There aren't many backgrounds and Kazim reuses panels and character art, but you don't really notice that on your first read through. I like the character designs of his boss and the customer, both of which remind me of muppets (is it the eyebrows? I think it must be). Kazim's art style isn't the most polished, but it manages to tell the stories that he's set out to tell, and I was a little disappointed that this was so short, as I wouldn't have minded reading some more tales of fastfood life.