Comics Review - Look at the colours edition

SPIDER-MAN: FEVER #1 (of 3)
Written by BRENDAN MCCARTHY
Pencils & Cover by BRENDAN MCCARTHY

This is the book to get if you want to see Spiderman tripping balls on magically contaminated bug-spray in Doctor Strange's bathtub.

McCarthy channels Ditko at his pop-art insanity - rather than his equally prodigious Objectivist, Ayn Rand worshiping insanity - peak. Featuring the non-linear, drug-trip dimensions of Ditko but with some P. Craig Russell gloss and a nod to Frank Brunner on the faces and torsos. It's an artistic tribute to the entire history of Doctor Strange.

Plus it goes well with mushrooms. Holy crap is this ever blatantly a druggy Spiderman and Doctor Strange Comic.

Lots of Burroughsian demonic spiders speaking in cut up poetry while Spiderman has tub seizures and Doctor Strange monologues about Aleister Crowley Albion Crawley.

Trippiness level: Hangin' with the Machine Elves.


Doctor Who
Classics Series 3
Issue #2
Steve Parkhouse & John Ridgeway

Colorizing and reprinting 25 year old black and white stories from the Doctor Who magazine, from the fraught sixth Doctor era no less, traveling with a talking penguin as his companion.

I know it doesn't sound promising but this is a grand mal 70's disco science fiction concept album of a comic book flip out. There's a plot in there about rogue Time Lords and a highly symbolic lighthouse tower that may be a Tardis.

It's part three of a story about mysterious black ships on metaphoric oceans, Cthulian monstrosities from the deep and running about energetically in the classic Doctor Who style. It really doesn't matter though, just roll with it and let the story come up without worrying about anything so prosaic as whats or whys.

Trippiness Level: Altered States, breaking into the monkey cage at the zoo.



Philip K. Dick's Electric Ant
Written by David Mack
Art by Pascal Alixe
Cover by Paul Pope

Philip K. Dick used to throat cheap speed like cheerios and write for twenty hours straight churning out dozens of novels in the course of a few paranoid twitchy years.

The signature Dick style of a glassy speed freak existential paranoia about the nature of consciousness and reality has become standard fare in movies, cyberpunk SF, and video-games post Matrix, it's all the fruit of the Philip K. Dick tree.

Electric Ant successfully captures the jittery amphetamine dread of Dick, but it's not bugs under the skin its nuts and bolts. Garrison Poole wakes up in a hospital to discover his blissful life as a corporate prince is an illusion. He's actually an android programmed not to realize he's an android. Hilarity and existential crisis ensue.

Trippiness Level: The tinfoil protects me from the rays.