2 out of 5

An anthology put out by Oddgod Press, which looks to have been (is?) a small publisher that I’m… guessing originated out of head guy Patrick Godfrey’s comic shop.

As such, being a capture of a local scene – not to suggest that the contributors are all from Richmond, VA, where Godfrey is centered, but that the mentality of one / two-man acts tends to be more art-for-art’s-sake than getting something saleable – the majority of submissions in Big Dumb are pretty rough, and pretty amateurish.  Those that feel a bit more polished are by names you’ll have seen (eventually, as this was published in ’03) – James Callahan, Duc Nguyen, Dash Shaw, James Kochalka – but even these are only shades of ideas.  That’s one of the admirable things about the collection, is that it seemed to put no limits / expectations on page lengths or content, so it really feels like whatever the creator wanted, but obviously that also opens the floodgates to a fair amount of Meh, and there is, indeed, a fair amount of it.  The book is published as a flip book; one side, for whatever reason (featuring Callahan, Shaw and others) is much more solid than the other.  And to be fair, there are some promising contributions here that some internet searches on their creators (Jonathan Adams, Crawdad Jones) don’t provide much info on, which is unfortunate, but on the whole, the page count ratio of good to average to meh for Big Dumb Fun makes for the easy snipe that only two adjectives in its title really apply…