Jacob Alvarez sent me a copy of his comic book Hypnospiral in the mail the other week and I wanted to give it a mention. It’s a black and white book printed by Comixpress – the website has a few previews but otherwise is just a place to find out how to order the comic book. Alvarez is a competent artist and surely can continue to improve with more work. The book is full of short gag stories — ideally suited to the webcomic first, books later model (as in build the fan base and than sell them books) so I strongly advise Alvarez to go the webcomic route. He’s already got the website URL and it’s a no-brainer today to get going online. All of the material in the book can easily be put online and surely would get much more exposure than the much, much fewer people who will buy or borrow the book at this point without having any idea if they’ll like Hypnospiral or not.
As to the book itself, it shows promise although it was definitely a mixed bag in terms of its appeal to my sense of humor. My favorite of the book was the two-pager, "My Kingdom For A Theme Restaurant" and there was something funny about the monkey-staffed Civil War enactment at the end of the story "Ugly Pete: King of the Chimps". Maybe just seeing the simian charge on "Fort Sumner"? The only other thing to mention is that the cover makes the book seem like it’s a horror comic — it doesn’t really telegraph that it’s a gag comic.
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