This is a really cool comic, if you can abide a hero with a cute girlfriend, a kooky professor friend, and a large alien, who wants to avoid being married and eaten, as a sidekick. You know, the old cliches. The nicest thing about this book, in fact, is that although it is undeniably strange, the strangeness always feels natural, never forced. If you like Flaming Carrot, you'll like this. If you've never heard of Flaming Carrot, give this a try. The art, on the other hand, has no qualifiers. It's simply wonderful. Clean, well drawn and colored, just a pleasure to look at. And fanmail from Alex Toth in the back. Way cool.
Andrew
Madman Comics favours a superhero story in a flat 50s style of artwork, neatly complementing the B-movie style obsessions (aliens, mad scientists, robots on the loose) and postwar period window dressing like beatniks and Levittown style housing. It has the feel of a comic still in development - although there is plenty of action and Allred is trying hard to make his comic something out of the ordinary, this effort is stymied by the indistinct characters and the the fact that the story is not strange enough to be compelling. Maybe in a few issues it will be a good buy but at the moment it fails the acid test for surreal comics - itıs nowhere near as good as Flaming Carrot.
Eoghan
Yet again I feel the stymying hand of rabid fan-boy reaching for my throat and frontal lobes and screaming at me to denounce the wretched review above me. I'm all gushed out when it comes to describing this. It's fantastic. Go out and buy anything that you can find with the name Madman Comics. Well, alright, you can skip that overpriced Hero Preview ashcan comic and if you buy the Trade paberback you don't have to ruin your prestige format issues with the super-dooper flip action corners.
Madman comics is another one of the blatant pop-culture too hip to be allowed to live works of towering genius that seem to pop out of nowhere on high-falutin' indy labels (Tundra in this case) and just build and build and build until you become addicted and then feel yourself compelled to run away at the keyboard as if you have had too much sugar-coated cereal goodness while saving up the tokens to buy a mini-disc pop-gun.
Or whatever.
Anyway, I haven't seen a Flaming Carrot in far too long.
Simon