3 out of 5

I am SO stuck on how I feel about Foglio.  My first exposure to the guy was through a Plastic Man mini he did that I still love, and that stands as evidence of his artistic mastery, his more bulbous-faced-characters in a lot of his other works a stylistic choice and not just the only way he can draw.  I also love his general path through comics.  He is, for all intents and purposes, a comic-book lookin’ dude – overweight, bearded, glasses (I think), but though he sticks to the genre of a lot of dorks with his sci-fi / fantasy, he doesn’t write it or draw it quite like sci-fi or fantasy – it has the hallmarks but is a few steps removed, a few steps above, and the same goes for his persona – he could be a dork, but his approach to his stories (and the types of tales he tells – including his erotica, which I need to get ahold of) takes that whole world into account and yet, again, manages to be just removed enough from it to make you realize he “gets” it… without having to be so stupid obvious as to make “I get it” jokes at fanboy expense.

All this hoobadoo being spat, I’m still stuck, because I haven’t read something else besides Plastic Man that really wows me.  Everything sounds about right for the Foglio touch – the youth sci-fi of Girl Genius, for example – but then when reading it I just don’t find myself grabbed by it, or… even enjoying it?  I’m not unenjoying it, I just know I can put it down and not thirst for more.  It’s frustrating, and it makes me wonder if I need to “discover” how to read his stuff through something other than Plastic Man (because that book has a very particular look and feel to it) and then re-visit his works.

Mythadventures! also has a couple of “stuck” things against it – that it’s based on a cult (?) series of sci-fi / fantasy novels by writer Robert Aspirin means that, during my reading, I’m continually wondering if I’m enjoying the story itself, in which case I should just read Asprin’s books, or if I’m enjoying Phil’s take on the story.  The second thing is that it ended after 8 issues under Phil’s pen, so it’s not quite enough to make up my mind one way or another, as this isn’t scripted like comic books with concise arcs or whatever, it’s an adaptation, so the story keeps going…

But I normally have no patience for fantasy, and I quite enjoyed the world of Mythadventures.  I was worried it would be your typical discworld / Peter David dry humor mixed with dumb puns, but instead it teeters on a nifty edge – taking the world seriously and finding humor within what develops.  There are funny names, but they seem to be, overall, constructed with purpose in mind and not just to drop a joke into the mix.  Again, I can’t say if this balance is Aspirin’s or Phil’s, but whether it’s created or maintained in the comic, it makes it very readable.  I liked these characters – a magician’s apprentice and the demon magician he – through story machinations – is traveling with to stop an insane magician from, yeah, taking over the world – and I liked the different environments they’re shuttled through.  This was published by WaRP at the time, publishers of Elfquest, and so it has a lovely high-contrast B&W over-sized magazine format to show off Phil’s lovely comical figures.  The art is interestingly disarming – as someone notes in the letters page, the writing itself is light-hearted but serious, and you’re expecting wackier antics with Foglio’s expressive characterizations.  But I think this imbalance is also what makes it more readable than if it were obnoxiously over-detailed and realistic.

All in all, I was still able to put Mythadventures! down, but I would buy more issues if they were coming, if anything to figure out how I feel about it.  The comic has also successfully made me want to read the book.  I got these in a dollar bin – if you dig fantasy, I don’t think there’s a new spin on the old stories here, but the presentation is perhaps different than what you’re used to, and certainly worth more than that buck I plonked down.  (TWO BUCKS, EVEN WHOOOAAAAA

…)