Retro Review

In a rare moment of boredom and extravagance back in the late nineties when I was living in Poland, I bought an issue of an American magazine, despite such things being very expensive and my salary being rather low. I’d run out of things to read, I’d gone through most of the interesting part of the local English-language library’s collection, and I just wanted something new. The magazine was called Wizard, and was about my favorite medium, comic books. The only thing that I remember about the issue now was the article praising a comic book called Box Office Poison, which was created by Alex Robinson, and was about a group of ordinary people in New York. I was intrigued, especially because I’d been looking for some non-mainstream super-hero books to try, but I didn’t reckon on being able to find any issues anytime soon. It was very nice to be proven wrong: on my very next trip to Dublin, I found Box Office Poison Kolor Karnival on the new releases shelf of Sub City Comics. I bought it without even looking through it, just on the strength of the article, and I was not disappointed.

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Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld is one of my all-time favorite comic books. Defying convention and classification, this appropriately self-titled “most peculiar comic book experience” ran for 21 issues, each one sown with clues revealing a little more of a world like no other. I was thrilled to hear that the series is coming back with the Beanworld Holiday Special this December, and I’m hoping this will be the first of many new Beanworld books.

On the surface, Tales of the Beanworld is about a tribe of creatures called Beans, who try to live in harmony with their small world, which they do not realize is a damaged, fragile place. Each Bean has a role to play in the tribe, either as a hunter-gatherer or as a thinker or artist, and their way of life is simple, but not without danger. The Beanworld is also inhabited by the Hoi-Polloi, with whom the Beans have an adversarial relationship, although both sides recognize that they need each other to survive. Furthermore, the Beanworld is part of the Big•Big•Picture, in other words, the Universe or Multiverse, and for the first time in the Beans’ memories, creatures from other worlds are encroaching on theirs.

At a deeper level, this book is whatever you bring to it: an ecological fantasy, an anthropological study of tribal structure, a creation mythology, a political commentary, or the beginnings of an epic cycle. You could even argue that it is a gentler kind of super-hero comic. Continue Reading »

What would you do if you lived in a world full of super-humans, and your child was one of them? How would you cope with a super-strong toddler? Or a five-year old who could control minds? How could you keep your kid from flying into air traffic? Is there any solution when your child can dismantle the TV to make a time machine? Well, if you lived in the world Aaron Williams created for PS238, you could send your metaprodigy to a top secret elementary school, where the trained staff are themselves super-humans dedicated to teaching and training the next generation.

Aaron Williams’ brilliant PS238 has been around for 6 years, but it may be one of comics’ best kept secrets. It obviously has enough of a following to keep it in publication, but I’ve never seen it on a comic book store shelf, I rarely find it in back-issue bins, and I only know two other people who’d read it before me. Continue Reading »