Action Philosophers and America

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death.



I've certainly got spare time for Ryan Dunlavey, who was very encouraging and helpful back when I was doing GMS Legion and he was doing Tommy Atomic, even going so far as to send me a sketch of my two-panel character Head Pop-Off Boy. Action Philosophers is a very silly comic he does with Fred van Lente, telling the tales of various great thinkers and their idiosyncrasies and hypocrasies, in little biographies, sort of like those great Big Book Ofs that DC put out in the nineties. It's nice to see icons deconstructed in such a loving, silly way. The definition of "undergraduate humor," this is recommended for anybody who likes Monty Python.



One of the most acclaimed series in either 2000 AD or the Megazine, America explored the concepts of freedom and liberty in Mega-City One, from the perspective of Bennett Beeny, a songwriter, and America, the daughter of immigrant parents who finds the underground talk of violent revolution too persuasive to ignore. The original 62-page story was expanded over time as the characters were revisited. This is genuinely some of the very best work on Dredd, with Wagner and MacNeil focussing on how normal people are impacted by the totalitarian world of the judges, and it is completely brilliant, from start to finish. Certainly on the short list for reprint book of the year, this is highly recommended.

(Originally posted April 26, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)