5 out of 5

Culled from some strips from his site – plus some material, minus some panels – Eric Haven’s UR is unified in its seeming obsession with Golden Age / Silver Age comic book tropes and the charming juxtaposition of taking everything to an endpoint of death.  So we get pastiches of heroes, or sci-fi hijinks, and then heads explode or penises turn into lasers that destroy the Earth.  Standing apart from some of his contemporaries – Sammy Harkham, Jordan Crane – Haven, who maybe appears as ‘Race Murdock’ in the several half-page strips that comprise the book’s latter half, chooses to not use his material to wanderingly explore slice of life (and thus “reveal” something about the creator), but rather uses the dark humor of gore and strangeness to translate an outlook that’s perhaps caught in a perpetual state of amazement and terror, where we can become super heroes in floating beds one moment and then flying squirrels can blast holes in our chests the next.  To me, this is not only infinitely more amusing, but oddly more relate-able: Haven’s comic book self is an average Joe who just happens to live in a bat-shit random world.  Can’t you relate?

Haven’s art finds the same blend of styles as the tone, with a flat frankness and monster design that absolutely harkens back to classic comics but with the more detailed linework of the underground.  Coupled with some great color production and wonderful page stock from AdHouse books, ‘UR’ looks and feels perfect, the oddball dust cover with its bright colors just what’s needed to announce the originality of the book.

Haven has precious little printed output on this planet, and all of it is off-kilter genius, Kirby / Ditko fantasies retold with a perpetually damned optimism.  Even if you’ve read some of these strips on Haven’s site, having them purposefully packaged together under a strange title adds a new dimension to the experience, visiting the world of ‘UR’ where things are maybe sorta’ like here but, well, with more rocket poops and limbs getting ripped off by creepos.  Ain’t that description worth five stars alone?