Friday, March 06, 2009

Whatmen

Now this was a nice surprise. IDW has been putting out some particularly nice product but I hadn't even heard about this one when I traipsed into my local comic shop for the first time in months a few weeks back. WHATMEN is a MAD-style (read: Kurtzman and Elder-style) parody of WATCHMEN that actually works at least 90 % of the time. Oh, there's the usual ratio of just pointless silliness for these types of things but even then it's carried off well by veteran comics writer Scott Lobdell (not normally known for his comedic work). The art team of Alejandro Figueroa and Aldo Giordanelli does a splendid job of mimicking Dave Gibbons' signature art style and everything from the coloring to the lettering effectively evokes the original! I won't give away the gags because I want YOU to go get a copy and enjoy it for yourself. I will say that my favorite is the fact that Ozymandias is portrayed as a grown-up Calvin from CALVIN AND HOBBES with his pet Bubastis as a Hobbes stand-in who is only seen as real from his point of view. At other times, he's simply a stuffed animal. Something tells me WHATMEN is ten times funnier than the real MAD parody.

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