3 D Pete’s Big Orbit Comics #8

Posted: Wednesday, August 8, 2007
By: Darren Schroeder

Cover of 3 D Pete’s Big Orbit Comics #8 Creator(s): Mike Fisher
Publishers: Big Orbit Comics
From: USA
Price: US $4

Pete is an animator, well versed in the world of rendering, wire frame design, user manuals and short film festivals. All of these topics and more appear in this collection of short strips alongside the longer Invisible Master story. Fans of science fiction will appreciate Pete’s taste in subject matter, with the pop culture references coming thick and fast: King Kong, Star Wars, Starship trooper and a few others beside.

The tone of the book is comedic, as Pete voices opinions on the various topics through interactions with personifications of the subject matter. It is quick fire humour with amusing punch lines that are blog-like in tone, suggesting an autobiographical origin for the ideas.

A couple of stories diverge from this mode, such as a short pastiche of the science fiction cliché regarding spaceships that stop to investigate emergency beacons. It’s an amusing in-joke. The other is Invisible Master, a longer tale of a super soldier battling huge creatures in a war he doesn’t understand. It’s a good action story with a neat twist at the end.

Mike illustrates the book in a cheery cartoon style that is always clear. He crams a lot of dialogue into his short “I think this” and “a funny thing happened” strips which make them less appealing to the eye, whereas in Invisible Master the images have the room they need to drive the narrative along.

The subject matter here means the comic is squarely aimed at geeks who might make their own animated films and watch a lot of movies. I’m not one of those but I am geeky enough to enjoy the humour. Anyone can delight in the artwork. If he can focus on longer stories and let the artwork have decent sized panels I’m certain he can provide work that a wide range of readers will appreciate in their search for a light hearted read.

In a Word: Parody.



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