Monday, August 26, 2013

365 Comics... 235: Max Zing (2013)

I'm a big fan of James Turner's vector-laced digital cartooning (I don't even know what that means)as well as his equally cerebral and geeky sense of humour.  His first effort, the amazing Nil: A Land Beyond belief was brilliant enough to make me a lifelong fan regardless of what would follow.  Thankfully he backed it up with the differently amazing warrior librarian series Rex Libris.  His third major effort, Warlord of IO took me two reads to warm to it likewise but its a much different adventure with an appeal to a younger audience (but definitely not exclusively). 

Max Zing is a collected edition of Turner's comic-strip serial that features Zing, the titular warlord of lO...you can tell in the early strips Turner is getting used to the form but it takes him very little time to fall into the rhythm of the format and he's at his most successful when he builds the Dodecahedron of Doom arc which fills about a third of the volume.  His Warlord of IO characters are perfect fits for the three and four panel template giving a quasi Peanuts-meets-Calvin and Hobbs-meets-Flash Gordon feel.  I'll have to try and pin down the strips on-line (the Drunk Duck address wasn't working at the time of this writing) to see if there's more... this SLG collection says Volume One so the inference is there is more (or will be... that would be a good thing).

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