[.ca] King Size Big Guy Rust (ISBN 1569711917)

Not your grandmother's Miller:
The first thing you'll notice is Geoff Darrow's knotty tight sublime hyper-etched artwork, lines running like veins into the architecture and broken glass that is Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot. This is not the Miller of Sin City or DK Returns et cetera,,,,watch him rip away the Chandler influence and dive into Japanese toy culture via Godzilla gggrraaaaaauu. This won't give you a typical Milleresque vision, whatever that means, but it's a cool trip through a world owned by toys and monsters. Great book for kids. Bedtime story and such.

Mass Destruction, H.O. scale:
Forget the animated series. It's heart is in the right place. But this came before the series; it's the real deal. An applecheeked, Bob's Big Boy-lookin' android teams up with a gigantic, old-school meca-robot to fight evil and save the world. MEANWHILE: the dry, tongue-in-cheek humor and ultra-violence of Frank Miller teams up with the painstaking, intricate artwork of Geof Darrow to create a buddy comedy of epic proportions. What's it like? It's a little like if "Tintin" author/artist Herge read a bunch of old Marvel comics and decided to do a "Godzilla" story. It's a little like Mutt and Jeff if they were nuclear powered crimefighters up against a bad guy from an anime adventure. But mostly it's like covering your old model airplanes with rubber cement and torching it good. Then doing the same thing to your H.O. scale train set and your Tyco racetrack. (which nobody should ever do -- read the book, it's better and safer)

I love Frank Miller...but:
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Frank Miller. I also love the illustrator Geoff Darrow. Together they produced Hard Boiled, a marveoulous, dark, confusing tale. The problems with Big Guy and Rusty...is that it's all flash and no substance. It's like that prom date you dreamed of all through high school. Pretty, shallow, and um...pretty. And it's short. It could be that this is what the artist and author were going for. It might be that it is built out of a reverence of Astro-boy, Manzinger-Z, and other popular "big-robot" old school cartoons. But for Frank Miller...I'd expect a bit more bite for my buck. In any case. Three stars. 'Cause it's pretty.

Better than a mouth full of honey bees!:
I saw the cartoon version of this on the telly the other day, and it dawned on me that I have the originals in my basement. I though I was going to strike it rich for sure, by selling them on Ebay, but no dice. There was another guy selling them, and it looked like he was only going to get about five bucks for them. This made me real sad for the other guy, so I bid a million dollars. I hoped this would make the market catch fire, like my aunts house did when I tried to fix her toaster. Someone told me later that you should always unplug a toaster when you try to fix it with a butter knife. They also told me that the toast is supposed to come out only a little, and not shoot across the room like in the cartoons where one guy shoots toast at another guy like it was a cannon or something. Okokok, so I found this comic book in my basement, but I don't think anyone would want it anyway, because my basement is really smelly and stuff, and nobody likes a thing that is really smelly, do they? Maybe a dog would. I don't like dogs much. Buy my comic book, your dog will love it!

Animated series:
Where is the animated series? Pokemon killed this show when it came out, I think it got more run time in Spain. Oh, Goef, come out of hiding in France. I know story board work is a lot more money but comic books need you. If a maligned by the network that owns it cartoon like Invader Zim can be in the top 25 at amazon so can Big Guy. How about a Moon Pig one shot?