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TALES OF FANTASY #25: "The Seeing Eye"
by Larry Johnson
($2.00 ppd from Larry Johnson / 9 St. Peter St. #4 / Jamaica Plain, MA / 02130-4907 USA. Web:
groups.msn.com/LarryJohnsonart)
Reviewed by Evan KeelingDon't all eyes see? Badump bump. Sorry, now that that's out of the way, on with the review.
Tales of Fantasy seems to focus on the supernatural exploits of reporter Lew Brown. This issue was about Lew's investigation of Thee Seeing Eye Institute and the man who runs it, Dr. Ocular. This organization, despite its vision related name, claims to cure mental illness. But there is no cure to be found, just inhabitation by communal parasitic alien eyeball creatures, who may or may not be trying to take over the world. While this is a fun read it is not a terribly original plot and not very developed.
The art in
Tales of Fantasy is good. Larry Johnson has a clean and simple style reminisent of golden age comics. It is too bad that he doesn't print the book in color because the color pictures he has on the cover are great. They have a depth and presence that his black and white line art doesn't achieve. While he's no Dave McKean the multimedia image on the cover is quite striking and definitely draws one to the comic.
One thing that I disliked about this comic was its inclusion of not one but three "it was all a dream, oh no it wasn't" twist endings. The twist ending is very overdone and has been beaten into the ground. So a lot of times one is too many, but when you get to three it starts to seem like a waste of space. Now I'm not saying that any part of the comic was a waste I just wished that Larry Johnson had spent those twist ending pages talking about the Oculans. I wanted to know more about why they landed on our planet, why they need or want to bond with humans and what their goals were. I know this is an ongoing series and it may be discussed in a later issue so I should just keep reading and find out.
Something that did make me interested in continuing the series was the gigantic letters column. I personally found some of it hard to read and didn't really finish all the letters, but I was impressed by the depth of the philosophical and psychological discussions the readers and Mr. Johnson engaged in through the letters. It made me feel that there was a deeper meaning behind the stories; I didn't get it as far as this one was concerned, but it was there nonetheless. His readers did seem overly concerned about the use of nudity in the comic though.
The last part of the book was "Every Saturday", one page where Mr. Johnson reprinted two short articles from the 1800s. While they were completely unrelated to the story they were a fun read and a nice ending to the comic.
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