Debacle #1-6

Posted: Tuesday, January 13, 2004
By: Darren Schroeder

Cover of Debacle #1-6

Creator: Barry Rodgers
Publisher: Big Beard Comics (Self Published)
Address: 3226 Thomas St, Irving, TX75061, USA.
Price: $1 each (US)

Anthology series of mini comics containing a variety of doodles and strange strips.

Making your own comics gives you the freedom to do anything you want. It might not all make sense to anyone else but you can never tell until you've tried. Barry takes full advantage of this freedom with these books, filling them with some amusing and strange strips.

Barry likes wordplay; so several stories follow quite ordinary activities where the characters speak in spoonerisms for comedic effect... I didn’t find many of them funny. The robot stories in #'s 4 and 5 got closer to my funny bone, with the powerful robots causing mayhem as they either make life to easy, or find life to illogical. The anything could happen aspect of Barry's storytelling works well in these sorts of tales, adding to the mystery.

The Larry and Bill cartoons that appear in several issues have a deadpan approach to the life of two cylinders on legs. The seem to kind of like each other, but take great pleasure in pointing out each others faults and mistakes.

By the sixth issue Barry's art has developed wit some refinement to the layouts and the use of a range of different gauge pens for the inking. The pancake search story has the best artwork. The Die cut cover of issue 6 is a nice touch as well.

These books are definitely for the more experimentally minded reader and might be more miss than hit, but no one ever said it was easy.

In a Word: Improving.



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