Free Comic Book Day, pt 2

I’m very slowly making it through my stack of comics from Free Comic Book Day a couple of weeks ago. Here’re my thoughts on these most recent reeds:

• Alternative Comics Presents – I know there’re some creators published by Alternative Comics who I really like–Nick Bertozzi, Rebecca Dart and Robert Ullman, just off the top of my head. Why then is this Free Comic Book Day anthology seemingly filled cover to cover with boring, boring, boring autobiographical stuff? Who knows…but I can’t imagine that this sort of thing would really win the uninitiated over to the world of comics. Judging from the covers James Kochalka has recently discovered Photoshop and is in the inevitable “if there’s something Photoshopcan do, then by God I’m gonna do it!” phase.
• Comic Festival – I’m not exactly sure who/what entity produced this book—its unifiying theme is that all the artists are Canadian. I think it may be some sort of official Toronto Comic Art Festival thing. Anyway, there’s some great stuff in here, including: a great cover by Darwyn Cooke, a collaboration between Dave Sim and Chester Brown (it makes no sense, but it’s a cool pairing), and some brilliant stuff by Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca drawn in a cool Little Orphan Annie sort of style. One of the standouts is a story called “The Day that I Wanted to Fight Bruce Lee,” by Kagan McLeod, whom I hadn’t heard of till this—I’ll be on the lookout for more of his stuff.
• Bone Sharps, Cowboys and ThunderLizards – by Jim Ottavanani and Big Time Attic. Although there was some dodgy storytelling that made parts of this somewhat of a chore to follow, it was one of my favorite books so far. Ottaviani’s stuff succeeds or fails largely on the artists involved and in this case “Big Time Attic” is a studio featuring Zander Cannon, whose series The Replacement God is one of the most underappreciated and undernoticed comics in recent years. This book features a single story that’s a teaser to a full-length book that’s (presumably) being released soon—I’ll definitely pick it up when it does.