Broken Frontier

Halo’s an angel, Sprocket’s a robot and they both live with a girl named Katie. You think life is weird? Wait till you see it through their eyes.

Kerry Callan’s series is quirky and difficult to classify, which makes it a perfect fit for SLG Publishing. The series consists of short bits that are sometimes stories and sometimes extended gags and sometimes extended metaphors. No matter how you slice it, though, Halo and Sprocket is not quite like anything else.

In this volume Halo and Sprocket continue to strive to understand human nature while Katie tries to help – sometimes she succeeds and sometimes she fails. In the course of this she sees her own life through the eyes of these outsiders as well. Along the way there are lessons like: why practical jokes don’t work on angels, why no one smashes giant spiders, and how angels’ flaming swords are good for cook-outs.

Most of Callan’s stories are only a couple of pages long and each little vignette stands on its own. There is no overarching theme here although, while most of the stories are quite humorous, many of them are also thought-provoking. For the most part, however, Callan takes inspiration from the ordinary events of daily human life and views them through the lens of characters that are out-of-the-ordinary. As such, the ordinary not only becomes funny, it also provides the reader with a chance to really look at what we do as humans and ponder why we do them.

The artwork is a perfect match for the stories. There is a kind of cartoony look that puts one in mind of newspaper comic strips – the good ones where you’re as likely to get a message along with your joke as not. The art overall has a warm, welcoming quality and the look of the characters helps to immediately endear them to readers.

Halo and Sprocket Vol. 2: Natural Creatures truly has something for everyone and comic book fans could even feel comfortable putting this in the hands of someone who does not really read comic books.