4 out of 5

Covers:

Axe Cop v.1 (collected online strips), Axe Cop v.2 (“Bad Guy Earth”) – 4 out of 5

Axe Cop v.4 (“President of the World”) – 3 out of 5

One joke pony?  Yyyeah, but it’s a pretty funny joke, most of the time, greatly enlivened by Ethan Nicolle’s expressive cartooning and sense of comic timing.  The joke is in the setup: Malachai – initially 5 at time of Axe Cop’s creation – comes up with the ideas (fed prodding “and then what happened?”s and “but how did that happen?”s by his brother) and 30-years-his-senior brother Ethan links the ideas to some sense and sketches it up.  Ethan has been very open with the process to show that this is something the brothers do for fun, and to keep himself honest as well, I imagine, as the charm of the series comes from the total kid-logic of the randomness – Axe Cop being exactly what he sounds like, a cop with an axe, solving crimes in a world where people are often killed by poison flowers, and someone biting someone else generally turns them in to whatever they were bitten by, and there are plenty of aliens and dinosaurs to go around, why not.  By being transparent with the creative process, Ethan forces things to stay on the level, because as soon as he’s driving the show, the joke’s over and it’s just as adult telling random jokes under a forced veil of childish enthusiasm… the charm would wear off pretty quick.

Volume 1 is all charm, collecting a lot of the single-strip work the duo started on their website.  AC works best in this format, probably, because it allows for isolated blips of strangeness, and gives Ethan a breather to create a sense of consistency in the background.  Admittedly it’s a bit much after however many pages, because the structure of the jokes do tend to repeat, but it’s one of those collections that benefits from being on a shelf, to be picked up and flipped through and laughed at at a strip you haven’t read in a while.

Volume 2 was the pair’s first attempt at a feature length story, for Dark Horse.  I believe it came out when Malachai was 6 or 7, and though the kid is in good company for a future in mind-freeing random chuckles (Ethan’s “Chumble Spuzz” books are amusing in their own right, and share pal Doug TenNapel’s ability to straddle the line between old school cartooning and an adult’s grasp of conceptual simplicity), there is absolutely something captured in the Axe Cop format, a weird world of kid stories that we understand but… well, we’re not 6 or 7 anymore.  And volume 2 is just on the cusp of Malachai becoming “aware” of himself in that way that kids do… it approaches genius, truly, over its 3 issues, if not for the need to come up with a conclusion, which just doesn’t work well in the Axe Cop world, since everything is about overkill, and rattling down to a “the end” feels off.

Volume 3 is a further collection of online material that I haven’t read yet.

Volume 4… well.  This was a collection of the second DH feature length series.  The creativity is there because of the basic formula that’s been established.  But I think the magic is gone.  I sense either more of Ethan’s presence or more of Malachai trying to be funny… some layer of absolute mayhem has somehow been removed.  The WHAT THE guffaws that I experienced in 1 and 2 turned in to chuckles.  And I don’t believe it’s just being worn out on the joke… If the first feature-length came about because Ethan wanted to see if they could string the impressive world of characters he and his brother had created into something a tad larger than 3 or 4 panels, then the challenge was met.  So what’s the motivation for series 2?  And thus the conundrum.  Because it requires an idea – some forethought – instead of capitalizing on existing inspiration.  Does that follow?

So.  I fear – or not fear, because it’s better to end things when they should end – that AC will outgrow itself fairly soon.  You can look at this as an experiment, but I think if you pick up volumes 1 and 2, you’ll find this massive world of creativity, not gimmickry, that couldn’t have come just from the brain of a child, or just from the brain of an adult, nor could it have come from two people without the bond of these brothers.  Regardless of how the series plays out, we’re lucky DH collected this stuff into easy packages for us to recall how cool it was, sometimes, to have the free imagination of a childhood.  And to laugh our bananas off at the same time.