Customer Reviews

Book of Grickle

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Great looking hardcover book. The comics are funny and charming and the presentation is well done. Inspired to check this out from the artists computer game with a similar style, Puzzle Agent.

Don't expect to be lost in this book for hours, It probably won't take much more than an hour to read even if you take your time. It is very amusing and charming. I felt that some of the stories that fell a little flat while others were timeless. My favorite story was the one that ended with the word "Hero". You will know exactly what I mean if you read the book.

I have personally become a big fan of Graham Annable through the recent releases of the adventure game - Puzzle Agent. I found the art and sense of humor to be spot on. The same goes for this little treasure of a book. The main disappointment anyone can have with this is that there really isn't enough of it! There are a lot of frames where very little happens so it becomes a mega-quick read. Still, I found it very enjoyable and memorable while it lasted, and the book is made of high quality material. Buy it and have some fun! Support awesome artists!

Graham Annable's award-nominated decade long comic strip series "Grickle" gets a collected "best of" in this lovely hardback edition from Dark Horse.

Annable's day job is an animator and seeing the drawings of Grickle you can see that clearly. Varying from 6 to 12 panels a page, the one-step-up-from-stickmen characters in Annable's worlds move around fluidly and eye-catchingly.

The stories are fantastic and really funny. They range from pathos to humour and excel wonderfully at both. "Misery and his company" features two grandchildren pretending to be a policeman and a crack dealer in front of their sour faced grandpa with a great punchline from the grandpa at the end. "Decency" features two youngsters killing a frog with stones, while "Old Man River" enacts a real life event from 19th century America and gives death a magical, beautiful rendering.

While most of Annable's strips concern real life events he dares to dream and takes us onto space missions on distant moons, alien races invading other alien worlds only to be defeated by toothpaste, strange little people showing up, and a life lived under the sea.

My favourite was the longest story here "By Necessity" which deals with relationships brilliantly and features the funniest one liner about a dead wombat ever written.

I'd never heard of Annable but I'm glad I took a chance on this guy's work as it's amazingly funny and the stories are really well told. I highly recommend it to comics fans looking for a good read.

The story with the frog brought a tear to my eye, but the rest of Grickle features comic-strip level stories and pedestrian artwork. It may be the point that the drawings are completely 2-dimensional and unremarkable. but ultimately, this is a forgettable exercise.