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OBSESSIVE CRUSH
by Pat Lewis
($3.00 from Pat Lewis,
www.lunchbreakcomics.com)
Review by Tim O'Neil
Pat Lewis is a cartoonist who immediately impresses. Although
Obsessive Crush is a small story, it is extremely well told.
His linework is spry, with an attractive eagerness. The design work is especially nice, with an eye towards the type of curvilinear simplicity that works well on the newspaper page. Also, its worth noting that he has some of the best-composed panels I’ve seen in this type of gag work in quite a while: his characters interact in a well-defined environment, and the panels convey every storytelling element in the most feasibly efficient way possible. His spotted blacks and spare zip-a-tones help to make every panel a concise and appealing unit.
If there is any problem with this book, it’s that for the amount of obvious craft Lewis has at his fingertips, I wish there was more to this. It’s a fairly simple romp with some wacky sci-fi elements, like a Jekyll & Hyde formula and a love-stricken killer robot – amusing, but even the characters who are actually in story seem to have trouble taking it seriously. It didn’t take me more than a few minutes to read, even though I found myself studying the pages for a long time afterwards. I hope his next project is more ambitious, because right now he’s got as good a mastery of the craft of humor strips as most professional strip artists working today.
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