4 out of 5

This is some wild stuff.  Once in a blue the world churns out inventive, crazy, sick geniuses whose work can make you laugh just from glancing at the page.  Prior to Yungbluth it was Ryan Browne, and prior to him it was Johnny Ryan… but it’s a cold, humorless valley inbetween.  Yungbluth’s mash-up of Mark Martin elasticity with dashes of Eric Powell’s sense of detailing and, of course, a wonderful range of parodying winks at Kirby, Trudeau, and more is simply a delight to look at, and honestly majestically colored and lettered (also rather Martin-ish) like a champ.  Looking at the cover of a Watcher riff, sitting in a La-Z-Boy in space, eating popcorn, I prayed prayed prayed that the contents wouldn’t end up letting me down in the way most humor books do – by being overly reliant on gross-out gags or by just being, uh, stupid.  I realize you could say both things about Johnny Ryan, but there’s some element of innocence to his work – which is why he’s flexible enough to work for Nickelodeon – that sells it, and Yungbluth has a similarly unleashed, zany sensibility that elevates Peek! above the pack.

The setup is to have that Watcher character “peek” in on various universes, and so we get short jabs at different comic cliches or characters.  Some of this stuff is so mixed up in Jason’s head, though, that the jokes don’t always track with the visuals – rare within these pages, but it happens – and the latter half of the book dumps the format to focus on one of Jason’s characters, Clarissa – an oddball outcast little girl with a hilariously skewed vision of the world.  The strip is fun, and interesting, but since it feels like it falls outside of “Peek!”s setup, the strip seems out of place.

So: while audience demand might merit an issue #2, there’s no telling on the wait, so figured I’d get this review out here now.  In the meantime, I’ll be dipping into them reserves to buy up the rest of Jason’s work…