Broken Frontier

Evil Twin Comics has announced that its multiple-award-winning, best-selling, kid-tested, mother-approved non-fiction comedy series ACTION PHILOSOPHERS! will conclude in July 2007 with #9: The Lightning Round.

"In a nutshell, we’ve basically done philosophy in comics form," explained ETC co-founder, co-owner, and co-janitor Fred Van Lente. "The history of philosophy is a finite thing, and when faced with the options of ending the series and continuing indefinitely, perhaps by profiling thinkers that Ryan and I felt weren’t quite up to snuff to what we had done in the past, we chose the former. Leave ‘em beggin’ for more, I always say."

Reaction from the historical philosophical community ranged from shocked disbelief to hyperbolic doubt as to whether the series ever actually existed in the first place.

Eighteenth-century Scottish empiricist David Hume stated that without the comic book series’ continuously published existence as an object in the senses, it was not possible to say definitively whether or not the series actually existed in the world, as opposed to being a transcendental figment of imperfect memory.

Immanuel Kant immediately issued a counter-statement from 1790 that read, "I remind my esteemed colleague Mr. Hume that while we cannot actually prove that Action Philosophers did exist, we cannot prove definitively that it did not exist, either."

Ludwig Wittgenstein told us from the early 20th century that he did not agree with our use of the term "exist."

St. Thomas Aquinas said he was waiting for the trade.

And though Action Philosophers now passes into the halls of sequential art immortality, the AP team, and Evil Twin Comics itself, continues to linger like a bad odor. Already for 2008 Fred and Ryan have two new series planned:

COMIC BOOK COMICS - the definitive (and irreverent) history of the comic book medium in comic book form; and

ACTION PRESIDENTS - which subjects the first executives of the United States to the Action Philosophers treatment.

Comic Book Comics, in fact, sees its premiere this October in the pages of Awesome, ETC’s anthology of brand-new indy comics to benefit the popular podcast Indie Spinner Rack and James Sturm’s Center for Cartoon Studies.

Before then, however, ACTION PHILOSOPHERS goes out with a bang: in the final issue, the well-named "Lightning Round", writer Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey cram the lives and thoughts of as many thinkers as they can into one 32-page comic. The thinkers included were determined by fan voting on series’ mostly porn-free web site, actionphilosophers.com . The candidates included Lao Tzu, Michel Foucault, Diogenes the Cynic, Mary Wollstonecraft, Baruch Spinoza, and many more.

To find out who made the final cut, though, readers will just have to pick up the issue when it hits the stands. ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #9: THE LIGHTNING ROUND (Diamond Order code: MAY07 3442) is written by Fred Van Lente and drawn by Ryan Dunlavey, a 32-page B&W comic shipping in July 2007 for $2.95.