Broken Frontier

What happens when the most debauched and despicable fraternity on campus is hit by a magical meteor from the stars? Why, they become Super Frat!

Writer Tony DiGerolamo and artist Chris Moreno are the legendary (and by "legendary" I mean "unknown") comic duo that brought fans the unforgettable (for all three of its readers, this reviewer counted amongst them) fantasy humor book The Travelers. As much as I miss that series, I was thrilled to discover that the two had teamed-up once again to produce the hit web-strip Super Frat. The strip follows the exploits of all the key players inside a college fraternity, whose members were lucky enough to accrue super-powers due to a freak meteor strike. The strip has been a surprise hit on the web and, in fact, has done so well that it’s gotten the royal and much sought-after print treatment by publisher Silent Devil. The printed publication in question – the 48-page Super Frat: The Rush Week Collection culls the first story-arc of the web strip together as well as placing it next to a brand new, full-length, standard comic book feature story.

I’ll start off by saying that I’m not the biggest fan of comic-strip format; a two-to-three panel set-up followed by a hopefully laugh-inducing zinger at the end is simply not the richest of sequential storytelling venues. That said, the first half of Rush Week I found – naturally – to be only mildly amusing. The characters held bushels of promise in their conception (most notably Ira, the invisible-when-naked boy; Rubber, the stretchy womanizer; Mistah Sh*t, the ubiquitously stoned plant-talker; Dick, the super-farter/super-pooper; and finally Bitter, the bulbous-headed, foul-mouthed brainiac), though beyond this, I didn’t find the strip-format adventure a terribly thrilling one and, oddly (for DiGerolamo, who I know can make with the mega guffaws), it was only occasionally funny. The strip had its definite moments – such as the two young blond Jewish girls who change their names to German variations thereof and unleash a giant white supremacist robot upon the unsuspecting campus – yet more often than not the humor was reliant upon being the filthiest potty of the most disgracefully grime-encrusted porcelain thrones. The problem this engenders isn’t even that the humor’s offensive (can immature language and toilet jokes honestly be such?) but rather that its over-the-top qualities color the book until it seems to be trying way too hard to outdo some ephemeral, arbitrary line of clean humor, thus missing its chances for any other range of subtlety or otherwise tongue-in-cheek varietals. Basically, the strip is quickly revealed to be a one-trick pony and the trick not even thrilling enough to entertain beyond its initial handful of outings.

The good news, however, is the full-length feature tale, "Operation CIA," in which Mssrs. DiGerolamo and Moreno step into familiar (Travelers) format-territory and deliver the goods in heaping spade-fulls. DiGerolamo has a greater affinity for humor the looser his allowed approach; the more wandering and interwoven his sequences, the more hysterical his situational and character mismanagements become, each moment having continually built upon the last with a devil-may-care glee, until the end result is emphatically every bit as whirlwind as the best of humor often needs to be. In standard comic book form Moreno also shines, his layouts and visual deliveries allowed the fluid movement necessary to heighten the impact of DiGerolamo’s scripting. Honestly, all the potential the concept retained in the strip is brought to the fore and exploited to the fullest degree in the comic half, and on this alone I have to give the book a hearty recommendation.

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of witnessing DiGerolamo and Moreno at work, you will be in for nothing less than a treat should you pick up Super Frat: The Rush Week Collection. For those who are familiar (yeah – both of you!) the collected strips are interesting to read as a comparison to the comic work of their past, and at least the funny book section lives up to its name and is indeed as funny as anything they’ve published before. For those who might suspect that the book would be better just as the comic section alone without the comparatively lackluster strips, at least this way readers get the whole story in one book, plus the second half can only benefit by being paired side-by-side with its lesser brother strip-counterpart. Super Frat will hopefully find a willing audience in the comic book community and eventually be allowed to drop the Peanuts routine and just be a damn funny comic.