3 out of 5

The fact that Lloyd Kaufman appears in the Photo Special – which to my knowledge has been the last Flaming Carrot issue as of September 2013 – should be a fitting summary of the world into which Bob’s creation wandered: that of the mostly purposeful over-camp.  With all of the many fans of Carrot – Neil Gaiman gave his blessing to be mentioned in an issue, Kevin Eastman is supposedly in the photo issue though I can’t spot him (and of course there was that Turtles crossover…) – and not to mention his relative stardom in the B&W boom – I still have this mercurial vision of the comic being this wonderfully realized fusion of randomness and Golden Age gags, something I swear I spotted in my first legit exposure to Carrot in a short published in the A-1 anthologies… but haven’t really seen since, at least shown extending beyond one or two panels.  Alas, I still haven’t gotten to read the original run of FC prior to the Turtles appearance (which came late in the game), so my vision still burbles about.  It just gets cloudier every time I read this latter-era stuff.  Because, uh, I don’t think Bob is that smart.  The randomness is there and it’s almost blessedly inspired, but it starts to feel like Family Guy randomness a lot.  It’s a fine line, but it exists – genius plucked from the ether (like Johnny Ryan, mwah) or, to cop the South Park pitch of Family Guy – manatee ideas.  Bob might not be throwing darts at balloons with nouns and verbs, but sorta.  The jokes are disconnected in a way that doesn’t land quite as surely as I’d dream, and the Golden Age influence gets a little shaky because of that suspected lack of intelligence… Sorry, dude.  But reading Bob’s responses to letters and his ‘Bob Speaks’ columns where his sentence structure is piss-poor and he repeats ideas one sentence later like they’re new nuggets of wisdom…  I bet he’s a wonderfully nice guy to know and full of little chuckly jibs and jabs when you’re talking to him, but homages require more than just copying the bold and silly phrasing of eras gone by – there needs to be an understanding of the scope of what you’re doing and how it applies to the new, to give it that fun balance of cheekiness and identity.  On the gag side, you have Johnny Ryan, or Tony Millionaire, and on the hero side you have dudes like Mark Waid who have made that their speciality.  Bob Burden loves the era, but it just feels like he’s faking it when transporting his version to the page.  Much like Troma has moments of campy smarts, but otherwise just has movies that fit a particular mold.

The art doesn’t help, ’cause Burden is wildly inconsistent and just downright poor when drawing some perspectives.  Almost all of his profiles look Mongoloid-y, and his women are complete carbon copies, big hips and 60s boobs.  Still Mongoloid-y from the side.  When he takes his time – such as for pin-ups and frontispieces – you can tell that Bob is a great draftsman, with a good sense of packing his panels and capturing iconic shots.  These pin-ups are often springboards for his ideas and… maybe funnier than the extrapolations.  But whatever schedule he maintained when putting out this new volume of Carrot resulted in the same art shortcuts I would see in the previous issues I’d read – full panels in silhouette (fine), backgrounds that are just lines (sigh, fine), and then ‘finished’ details completely dropped when he thinks he’s got the general motion detailed in a panel (not fine, and where it looks unprofessional).

Issue 4 of this series actually was a step up in art quality, and issue 3 had a pretty amusing story of chasing a hot wing around town that spoke of the more linear randomness of which I’d dreamt… but then things ended, so who knows if those emerging (or re-emerging) traits would’ve evolved (…re-evolved…?) into something I’d want to re-read.  (re… yeah.)  The photo comic, I will say, is pretty pitch perfect in execution, but it can’t help but be full-on camp, so it was designed 100% around that and succeeded.  Would’ve been a nice cap to a more subversive and/or smarter series, but instead its just sort of another gag to add to the stack.

I’m not sure if this acts as an effective review or not.  Perhaps if and when I can experience the original Carrot, I can offer more comparisons.  But I’d say that if you collect the covers from this run, you’ve got everything you need.  The contents just toss things at the reader for 30 pages and then conclude.  Which makes it sound like I hate it, but I don’t.  I’m just disappointed.  The books are readable, and DO have some fun moments.  But I can’t enthuse about it much beyond that.