3 out of 5

Zack Soto’s first go at Secret Voice – a compendium of ongoing series, sketches, and shorts, now being published under his Study Group imprint – is a bit of a puzzle in its first Adhouse Books incarnation.  On the one hand you have Dr. Galapagos, our ongoing, with its DIY fantasy send-up of magicians vs. trools, done up in a fluid, sketchy style with wonderful gray-tone coloring / inks that brings to mind, for whatever reason, Bone’s balance of story and the absurd, but with that particular bland humor that guys like Jim Rugg are great at.  It’s an awesome opener.  On the other hand, there are one shots like Day 34 and Ghost Attack, which represent two general corners of the underground comics realm – the surreal tale and the crass tale – but neither one feels like it really owns its style.  Day 34 is interesting but wandering, and Ghost Attack is amusing but not hilarious.  Then there’s The Smog Emperor, which presumably follows up on a character created by Soto for another comic and unfortunately doesn’t have much impact on its own.

Galapagos definitely leaves you wanting more; the remainder of Secret Voice feels really scattershot, “here’s a whole bunch of other stuff!” that’s well made and you can get the gist, but how it might slot in to an ongoing anthology (and whether or not it ends up enhancing that anthology) remains to be seen, at least until I get my bearings with the current Secret Voice ongoing.