Broken Frontier

Melanie needs to learn that if she’s going to have friends visiting from out of town, it’s going to have to start happening on the weekend.

Melanie is just like a lot of us nearly 30 year old professionals – stuck in a rut. She despises her job, but is crazily (and, odd enough, understandably) committed to it, which has caused a significant lacking of any love life. But at least she’s got her girls. Amanda is coming back into town from LA for a few days and she’s got Violet all ready to have some fun too. And everyone knows that when you bring together three old friends and mix alcohol, there are a few things you’re guaranteed to get: someone doing something stupid, a bar fight, some odd characters somehow latching on, and of course, sing-a-longs.

Let me just say, that for a story that is this short in length, Jim Dougan certainly packs a lot of story in. And to his credit, the story never feels crowded, even when the panels are overflowing. His dialogue is (at times) brilliant, the best segment one in which two characters are talking on panel while another one holds one with a character off panel. The characters are well defined, even if, at times, they still succumb to some cliché. In fact, most times Dougan knows how to properly take advantage of the clichés and has a whole lot of fun. The one instance where his script falls short is in Violet’s characterization. Early on, she is discussed as being somewhat promiscuous, yet it never at all shows. Not that we needed her to sleep around throughout the book, it might have been even better to not even mention it at all. But considering all that he’s got here, for that to be Jim Dougan’s one slipup is rather impressive. His sense of pacing and timing lend perfectly to the comedy of the book.

But the comedic pacing of the book would not be complete without Dougan’s comrade in arms, Danielle Corsetto. Corsetto proves herself to be an incredibly talented cartoonist, and does everything to accentuate Dougan’s script with her pacing and timing. The storytelling is clear and her facial expressions are wonderfully rendered; exaggerating the emotions so that the reader knows what’s going on and can easily laugh at and with the characters. Some of them are so impressive that they make you wonder how many standup comedians Corsetto has studied. One thing that was worrisome initially was that with Danielle’s art style (that leans heavily into iconic and cartoonist) and the plethora of characters in the story, it would have been very easy for her to allow too many similarities in the characters. Yet once again she comes through as each of the characters is easily identifiable.

Crazy Papers is one of those books that could easily fly under the radar. It has no superheroes and it is independently published. But this is a book that is worth looking for, it’s very rare that a book will wink and smile at you like this one will.

Crazy Papers is the first book published by Chatterbox Comix (www.chatterboxcomix.com). It can be purchased online at www.girlswithslingshots.com or www.marsimport.com and in New York at Jim Hanley’s Universe and Big Planet Comics in D.C.