2 out of 5

I don’t really like early Rich Tommaso so much… but, as someone trying to read through his body of work, I ‘don’t really like’ it in a satisfying way: I can see where he started, and appreciate that’s grown.

Sometimes, when digging back through the past of a particular creative, you find a gold vein… and it’s temporary.  Maybe their first efforts had a verve that was lost, or they built up to a peak and never recovered; so, on occasion, when I do these kinds of dives, it can actually ruin the person’s current work to a certain degree, as I’ll suddenly have a comparison point that seems better.

With Tommaso, though, after some early growing pains – which I’d include Clover Honey as part of – Rich has hit upon a style that’s more truly his own, and adapted the more indulgent comix habits to an oddball tone that’s also become particular to his tales.  And once he’d found that rhythm, he’s been iterating off of it via different genres, allowing him to continue to perfect it and expand his skills at the same time.

But that comix stuff?  The random cutaways to relatively pointless scenery; the day-in-the-life go-nowhere story-telling – yeah, that’s in Rollercoaster.  This also, like Cannibal Porn, is proto-Rich style: his big-headed humans and finer-lined backgrounds look like a composite of others’ works.  I do kinda like the general gist of the issue – a pizza delivery girl is called back in for the night shift, and, exhausted, gets lost and sick during her route – the characters err too far on the side of obnoxious to want to read about them for long.  The issue is padded out with a further strip about a father and son that tries hard for something deep about sins-of-the-father, but – comix again – is trying too hard, and then some newspaper-y type three-panel strips that would probably play better if we had a whole bunch of  ’em to read and follow the “adventures” of its ho-hum protagonist.