The girl who worked in my local comic shop has gone. I mention this only because it reduces the XX chromosome content of the shop whenever I’m in there by 50%. If the comics book industry really wants to widen its regular readership, it should work on making the shops less XY. Just saying. Free Comic Book Day is great way of showcasing new talent and allowing readers who don’t read the trade press to find new things to compulsively buy. But 52% of the population will like as not never get them. A shame, as there’s actually some very good female-friendly work around these days.

So, what about the actual comics given out? The comic book guys didn’t give me all the comics, just a selection of stuff they knew I’d be interested in (Oni, Alternative Comics, SLG) and some which I’m not even going to bother reading (Marvel’s ‘Ultimate X-Men’ and ‘Frank Miller’s Robocop’ with a back-up Stargate SG-1 strip). The latter may be great. I’m almost tempted by ‘Robocop’ because it’s by Frank Miller but, unlike ‘Batman’ which had an iconic value he could reinvent with ‘Dark Knight Returns’, ‘Robocop’ is an Americanised ‘Judge Dredd’. And, sacrilege I know, but Dredd was the one strip in ‘2000AD’ that I didn’t like. Might be that girl thing again.

Slave Labor Stories (SLG) has ‘Milk and Cheese’ on the cover! Milk and effing Cheese! It’s a two-page strip in which they object to the notion of free comics and beat up everyone in a comic shop with the traditional broken bottles and baseball bats. As ever, every frame is packed with insults, violence and asides. Full on nostalgia rush. The rest of the SLG anthology includes:
‘Halo and Sprocket’ by Kerry Callen – a slice of life about a girl, her angel and her robot with simple clean artwork. ‘Private Beach’ by David Hahn – an extract from a full issue and whilst the artwork is pleasant enough, the narrative lacks something – mainly context. ‘Hsu and Chan in ‘Business Trip!” by Norm Scott – funny and a well-drawn blend of manga and western artwork only let down by the too-faint lettering. ‘Tupelo’ by Matt DeGennaro and Phil Elliot – the artwork of which is very much in the Shaky Kane style and whose story didn’t appeal. ‘The Ghost With Black Fingers’ by J. Vasquez – bleak, beautiful ink-wash artwork, simple story. ‘My Monkey’s Name is Jennifer’ by Ken Knudtsen – wonderful monkey (both the art and words) but disliked the girl. ‘Comic Book Heaven’ by Scott Saavedra – doubtless much more interesting if, unlike me, you didn’t spend most of the last fifteen years reading ironic po-mo fanzines. ‘Bear in ‘Voodoo Adoodoo” by Jamie Smart – I am going to be buying ‘Bear’ when it comes out. Wonderful artwork, great concepts, cute asides. I’ve seen this guy’s work before (probably at the annual comics convention in Bristol) but wasn’t aware that he had a book coming. ‘Pandora’s Lunchbox’ by Ian Carney and Woodrow Phoenix – neat central conceit (Bunty style schoolgirl with lunchbox full of demons) but let down by an utterly unlikeable main character. The artwork for her was just not appealing. The ‘wry goth little girl’ is an entire sub-genre of comics, with Emily the Strange at the pinnacle, so getting it wrong is noticeable. Especially when immediately followed in the anthology by ‘The Day Mr Chippy Walked’ by Roman Dirge. In which a wry goth little girl with hairclips in the shape of skulls helps a stuffed chipmonk regain his mobility. This has artwork which works, somehow both cute and dark.

‘Alternative Comics’ #1 is another showcase anthology. Don’t worry, I’ll get onto the single issue stuff after this! ‘Power Stone’ by James Kochalka – simple, well-drawn. For some reason it reminds me of Peanuts, possibly because it features a beagle dog. ‘Only in Oly’ by Tatiana Gill and David Lasky which contains the obligatory ‘indigo girls’ reference and is in the wry real-life tradition of ‘Love & Rockets’. ‘Aim to Dazzle’ by Dino which failed to appeal either in terms of story or artwork. Two untitled pieces by Sam Henderson and Matt Madden, both of which again failed to grab the attention. The latter is wordless, which would be an interesting way of forcing the reader to really look and take in the narrative clues in the artwork if the narrative he was telling was interesting. ‘Slice of life’ comics work best, in my opinion, when the narrator(s) are able to express in words experiences we all have but cannot express so neatly. Maybe I’m missing something, but if the central concept behind a comic doesn’t come over in the strip itself then I’m not going to think it’s a great comic. ‘He Stands By His Brand’ by Robert K Ullman is fine and based on a nice pun – rather let down by having the pun at the very start. ‘We’re All Gonna Crash Here Tonight’ by Joel Orff is my ‘must keep track off’ selection from this anthology – well-drawn and shaded, with a good central idea. ‘From the Asylum’ by Josh Neufeld is mainly memorable for mentioning ‘AfterMASH’ (don’t ask). ‘The Favor’ by Sara Varon and Graham Annable doesn’t really contain anything to grab either the eye or the brain. ‘Slowpoke’ by Jen Sorensen should replace ‘Doonesberry’ in the Guardian (although the similarity to Steve Bell might be a problem, I’d rather the American strip in the paper at least made sense to, well, anyone outside America). ‘I think of My Recently Deceased Father’ by Jeff Mason and Nick Bertozzi is well drawn and written but by this stage I am starting to tire of wry slice of life stuff. The last three stories (‘Trunktown’ by Shaenon Garrity and Tom Hart, ‘The Robot & The Bear’ by Greg Stump and ‘Birds in Cars’ and ‘Mad Moons’ by an unspecified author) all lose out to this whimsy overload. Enough!

‘Peanut Butter and Jeremy’ is an entire book by James Kochalka (published by Alternative Comics). Featuring a cat in a tie, and later on a bobble hat and mittens. This means I’m pretty much biased towards it straight away. Jeremy is a bird. The two are friends and seem to have some kind of bizarre belief that they work in offices (they don’t). But, frankly, it’s the drawing of the cat, the way in which expressions are caught with a couple of lines. When peanut butter looks worried or unhappy, I immediately empathise with him. I mentioned Kochalka’s similarity to Peanuts before and it comes over here perfectly. A Seinfeld of comics. The backup strip is six one-page Peanut Butter and Jeremy strips by other comics creators: Jeff Smith, Jeffrey Brown, Tom Devlin, jason, Brian Ralph and Neil Jam. Some of these work better than others. This is the best comic new to me in the bunch as will mean I add a new title to my orderbook at the shop.

The best existing title I knew about but don’t buy included was ‘Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things’ by Ted Naifeh. It’s from Oni Press, hence the fact I knew of its existence. I tend to think of Oni in terms of the classic punk/mod titles: ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Hopeless Savages’. Courtney is their entry in the ‘wry goth little girl’ genre and ‘…and the Night Things’ is her take on the classic ‘Goblin Market’ by Christiana Rossetti (for people with less pre-Raphaelite tastes, think of the film Labyrinth – Courtney even cries out “It’s not fair!”). Courtney is grumpy but eminently sensible. The changeling is the perfect evil elf, whilst the goblins are the stuff of comforting nightmares, all skritchety angles and tiny clawed hands. I’ve become an honorary auntie recently and am frequently looking through kids books in the hope of finding fairy tales with illustrations that aren’t twee, reassuring and very dull watercolours. I may give up and give my honorary niece Courtney instead.

So, all in all, there was a good haul of comics given away on Free Comic Book Day with some stuff I didn’t even bother to open, some stuff which was just so-so and seven titles and/or creators which I will now track down and willingly part money for (‘Hsu and Chan’, J. Vasquez, ‘Bear’ by Jamie Smart, Roman Dirge, Joel Orff, ‘Peanut Butter and Jeremy’ and Ted Naifeh). Now, if only they’d do something to change the perception of comics as a boy thing.