Comic Related Reviews

DOSE

Indelible Comics

Dosing With Brendan McGinley

by Russell Burlingame

An anthology of comix from various independent creators--although not too independent, as they hold in their pages folks like DC Comics' own Alex Segura and Wizard Magazine alum Brendan McGinley--DOSE was a fun read with a lot of politics and not the usual preachiness that ordinarily accompanies such things (see our last Conscientious Sequentials). With only a few pages to each of them, one of the only weaknesses the book is that many of the stories end too quickly (not a bad problem to have in these days of "decompressed storytelling," wherein it can take an entire 12-issue run to put together a superhero team that's depicted as "together" on the cover of your first book.

The first two issues are currently available at some New York comics retailers presently, with a third to come sometime in the winter--as well as a website in development and a wider retail net being cast soon. Says DOSE editor McGinley, "Too many books try to hook you next month, and the next month, like they're Stan Lee, who was good enough to pull that off. Me, you're just going to see me at the convention or the book at your shop and maybe give it a chance. Why shouldn't you get a drop of entertainment with no further obligation? Beginning, middle, end. And something for everyone. Hence the title: DOSE."

For the sake of ease, we'll take a look here at the second issue of the series, although the first issue leaves readers with roughly the same impression--and has a couple of particularly notable stories including McGinley's own Planet of the Liberals and a one (very tightly-packed)-page story from Evan Dorkin. Also worth checking out for the hardcore comic geek is Solomon Fogg and Dave Marquez's 60-Second Warren Ellis, although one suspects that those creators may be taking their lives in their hands by sending up the self-proclaimed mad bastard.

Particularly fun in DOSE was the story--in issue two--of Ultra-Conservative (worth reading for the Falw-El joke alone), whose story is attributed to "Joe McCarthy and Jerry Goldwater." As the Jerry/Joe combination would suggest, it's a parody of a, er, well-known superhero character and the art and dialogue is largely done in the style of the 1930s, with tweaks to allow for more current issues to creep in. This reviewer will confess to a certain weakness for superhero parody (I myself wrote a strip for a while in college based on a Tick-like nincompoup called Cap'n Internet), and this played to the strengths of that particular subgenre, playing off well-established tics in the superhero genre in much the same way as the truly underrated Amazing Adventures of the Escapist stories from Dark Horse did.

Owing a lot of its style and tone to the strips of Chris Eliopoulous, Christopher Stetson Wilson's The Invisible Life of Poet is a fun, if brief, foray into something that feels like it might be slightly more at home as a strip or a webcomic, but which serves as an entertaining buffer between some of the longer works--kind of like commercials on television might give you the time and energy to face up the next breakless half-hour...if commercials were actually clever.

Michael Netzer's Party Girl story, which might have benefitted from being a little more sequential art and a bit less preachy narrative, was nevertheless an interesting concept--something to be further developed, one hopes--and it somewhat reminds of the old Phil Ochs line that while the only hope for America lie in revolution, "The only hope for revolution in America is to get Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara." A stripper-turned-film-promoter may be the best chance to truly engage a nation of people who can almost uniformly name Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's offspring sooner than they could the current leader of Iraq.

While some of the lighter pieces--such as Chuck Jick and Jorge Sobschak's The Call and Silas Feldstein and Harvey Wood's Li'l Sammy Swift--feel a bit out of place in the fairly regular, politically-charged and semi-arty environment of Dose, others--notably the aforementioned The Invisible Life of Poet and Segura and Mauro Vargas' A Dose of Reality--fit right in and really enhance the read. With a fair smidge of nudity and all sorts of political acrimony being tossed about in the pages, this is definitely not an all-ages book, but it's not the kind of quasi-pornographic, self-indulgent nonsense that has often been branded "art" by the indie comix crowd, simply for its lack of men in tights.

McGinley summarizes: "DOSE is just a place to play with different kinds of humor, irony, and as we've started to develop, more straight-up drama."