1 out of 5

Wow, listen up: I hate Cholly & Flytrap.  This was one of those interesting reading experiences where you start off with no expectations and find yourself unmotivated one way or another… and then something occurs that kicks the book down a peg, but in the back of your mind you try to set it aside as a type of bias… until you can’t, really, and you’ve confirmed the lower rating, and now you’re facing even more evidence to push the quality down further, while you struggle to hold onto that already lessened opinion – because this is a classic, right?  And people like this, so give it some credit? – until, again, you just can’t manage the justifications anymore.  And then you hate Cholly & Flytrap.

“Zombie king” Arthur Suydam, to distill this to a point, should stick to art.  And even more specific: to pinups / covers.  This collection of 80s – 90s material of the two titular characters features some pretty awesome panels, especially in the early Heavy Metal-ish variations, but the lack of consistency in characterization and details when Suydam tries to serialize something doesn’t line up with the otherwise seemingly meticulous approach (which calls to mind, early on, Bisely, then later, Miller with a dash of Darrow).  The writing is acceptably random and amusingly over-violent at first, but then becomes downright dumb and offensive in its ignorance.  The collection itself also feels a little off: Titan stitched the binding really tightly to the cover, so the full bleed pages have text that comes to close to the crack and can’t easily be read; the introduction by Max Weinstein is full of empty ten-dollar words that result in an exhaustive battle through pages that really end up saying nothing; the ending retrospect on other creatives in the Suydam lineage feels sloppily written (not much focus), and seems to have some grammar issues and / or typos.  The end result is a pretty package that feels like its dressing up something we’re not fully convinced is of value, and yes, that same could be repeated about the comic’s construction itself.

Here is the main issue with Suydam’s writing: there are no characters.  Including the leads, Arthur clearly works in a visual mindset, and seems to believe that a funky visage automatically creates a personality that isn’t evident in the story or dialogue.  So Cholly has a cool jacket and gas mask and lots of guns and Flytrap is a fat, naked Asian dude.  Their early shorts have them traipsing through desolate landscapes littered with other interesting-looking-but-faceless characters; because these are shorts it works okay, although it has room to be a loooot more fun than it is.  But then we get into the four issue “Center City,” which has Flytrap shanghaied into a boxing match run by two warring gangsters – Big Wheel, he of ugly buck teeth and a wheelchair – and One-lunger, he of perpetual cigarette-smoking and a miniature Siamese-twin attached at his shoulder.  Here Suydam borrows Miller’s noxious Dark Knight square panels with excess text at moments, and slaps us with a completely jumbled narrative of constantly switching voices and tones and dead-ends and out-of-the-blue character revelations that are not only ineffective due to their lack of context but are, like, stock revelations to boot.  His busy art keeps churning in the foreground, but it’s amazing how boring this becomes to look at when, when turning the page and faced with endless word balloons, you’re dreading having to sift through such boring text to get to the next page.

Without characters, it’s hard to build a story, and fittingly, Center City just lurches from scene to scene.  You can almost sense the process of the amateur (writer) at work: “I’m in scene A, and I have scene B which I drew because I like drawing big muscley guys.  There’s no logical connection between A and B, so let me just exposition some shit in here and then add a “Meanwhile…” type lead-in.  Nice!  Only 150 more pages like that!”

But just to drive this into the dirt, let’s add some ridiculous racial stereotypes in there.  Initially, in the shorts, the Asian “ching chong” type dialogue seems flagrantly noxious, fitting with the Heavy Metal approach and the random absurd artistic touches like the flying boobs.  Later, though, when Arthur’s actually trying to write a story, the robots – who are an oppressed class in the vaguely defined world of C&F – are drawn with big lips and say things like “suckuh” and “mo’ fo’.”  …Ya get me?  At this point, it seems that Suydam either finds this funny and / or thinks he’s making some type of “point,” which is at best ignorant and at worst, well, offensive.  That there’s no overt sexualization – and that the only relationships are homosexual ones – is an interesting saving grace, but the couples are treated with a similarly stereotypical brush stroke that doesn’t give them any depth at all (except when it’s convenient for those “revelations.”)

This is also disregarding the complete lack of connection between the Cholly & Flytrap we see in the shorts and the ones in Center City.  I understand years passed between the projects and artists are certainly allowed to “reinvent” their own properties, but even within Center City there’s a distinct lack of any defining “rules” for how our heroes – or the laws in the city – operate.  There are thus no stakes.  …Though I guess this is part of that no character / no story problem.  Whatever.

If you like Suydam’s zombie art, the shorts are probably worth a read, though it’s possibly cheaper to hunt down the two-issue Image reprints of those instead of buying this $30 hardcover, dunno.  Otherwise, though, the problems in this book stack up from page to page until it becomes a reprehensible slog.