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REGGIE 12
by Brian Ralph
(
Highwater Books)
Review by Rick Bradford
Although
Top Shelf Tales and
Alternative Comics #2 are lots of fun and I recommend hunting them down,
Reggie 12 is hands-down my favorite of this year's crop of Free Comic Book Day comics. I'm a big fan of Brian Ralph's work but this one still caught me by surprise for some reason. I hadn't read any of these strips before (some of them originally ran in
Giant Robot and
Nickelodeon) but clearly I've been missing out and I
hope a larger collection will be published at some point (Are you listening, Tom Devlin?).
This all-ages comic is
funny. I guess because I'd gotten used to "typical" Ralph work (
Cave-In,
Climbing Out) I'd forgotten how funny he can be. These strips are about a boy robot (shades of Astro Boy) who protects the city from giant villains with names like Bobbletrox and Octillipus. Everybody loves him but he still has trouble fitting in. It's the classic Pinocchio-out-of-water syndrome. but there's no real drama – only laughs. And sight gags! Remember Jeff Nicholson's Ultra Klutz? This sort of mines some of the same territory but without so much slapstick.
As an added bonus there's also a full-page drawing by Paul Lyons and a four-page Reggie 12 strip by Martin Cendreda. This is easily the best kids' book I picked up on Free Comic Book Day but I'd recommend it for all ages. I don't know how you can get your hands on this but try your local forward-thinking comic shop to see if they have any left. You won't regret it.
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