4 out of 5

Is it a book?  Is it a comic?  …Strictly based on that notion that we have a lot of illustrations with word balloons… I’m going with the latter.  It’s important to get these things settled.

So: with Axe Cop, Ethan Niccole proved to us that his brother Malachai was a funny kid, and showed us that his illustration game was on point for delivering humor, and visualizing the most insane things ever.  He’s definitely of the TenNapel school, which I’m sure has a long precedent in classic cartooning, but he’s interestingly a bit cleaner, line-wise, and more grounded than TenNapel, which makes the outlandishness of some of his ideas that much funnier when juxtaposed against a baseline of ‘normal.’

With I Named My Toys Alex, solely credit to Ethan, I think he’s now also proven to us how much he either influenced Malachai or shaped his concepts into valid stories, because the man’s imagination seems to function just as crazily on its own.

The story is pretty much what it says: tasked with cleaning his room, Matty lands on a solution of taping all of his toys together, putting his hamster inside as a makeshift brain, and naming it Alex.  Lo, this works: Alex is born, and the two get to the rest of the chores, which mostly involves punching things into submission (or cleanliness).

It’s certainly silly and a little juvenile at times, and sort of just repeats its central jokes over and over, but Ethan edges this into awesomeness by following an old-school structure: there ain’t no moral here, and reality be damned.  I kept expecting this to be a dream, or for Alex to turn around and lay down a life lesson, but nope: there’s no comeuppance for kicking dogs into the sun (IT’S OKAY, I PROMISE) or installing a rocket toilet in the house.  I guess I could take the book to task for losing track of the hamster-brain thing at points, but… this is a book where there’s a hamster-brain thing, so we’re okay letting that by.

Anyhow, Ethan, I’m down for a series.  I’m down for anything else you want to work on.  Just keep this undistilled inspiration coming.