3 out of 5

Yeah, I agree, it’s pretty dumb.  But if you just let it do its thing, Prime Slime Tales wears Basilicato’s history-with-Henson on its sleeve, as well as an obvious influence of classic Looney Tunes style whatever-goes plotting, and thus serves up 4 issues of breezy, stupid but sweet funny animal stuff.  It also has enough horrible WHY moments that make you wide-eyed with shame on behalf of the creator that it nudges the book into good ol’ B-grade reading material, so extra stars for that.

Zigbone the Cat lives in a junkyard and generally visits the research facility next door for food.  He pisses off the janitor, who throws some yogurt into some kinda reactor, and things naturally explode, leaving a crater… OF SLIME.  Out of which crawls ‘Booger,’ a slime copy of Zigbone, and later, when a slime-obsessed biker (damn those slime-obsessed bikers!) falls into the slime with a cockroach in tow, the monster Gorgonzola springs forth to wreak nonsensical havoc upon the graveyard and, like, eat Zigbone and Booger maybe?  In issue 3 there’s another explosion when Gorgonzola creates a nueclear powered cockroach terminator robot (spelling – nice and bolded – courtesy of the author) and so issue 4 we get a totally whaaaaat off topic dream sequence of Zigbone selling moonshine with his pops in a swamp.  This isn’t really worked in smoothly, as Ziggy just wakes up at the end and is all like ‘oh yeah that was a dream,’ so I’m sorta’ thinking that was a leftover ‘plot’ that Tony wanted to work in there.  When our cat does wake up, he’s in the Madness Dimension or something, and we’ll never know CLIFFHANGER OMG because no further issues of Prime Slime eva came outs.

Issue 1 and 2 are inked by Jim Lawson in the duo-tone Mirage method, so they have that dirty detailed look that was common to their early publications.  This does help to highlight Tony’s fun characters, but also slows the eye down to the rather atrocious writing that literally reminds us every few panels of what happened on the previous page and jumps back and forth between scenes for no rhyme or reason.  It sorta’ rings of not sketching the plot beats out ahead of time.  There’s also this odd habit to use wildly implausible and yet specific time measurements, such as the initial explosion knocking Zigbone unconscious for… 4 weeks.  Why 4 weeks?  Does it matter that it was a month?  No.  I know it’s a comic, but… 4 weeks?  Did he… eat?  Somehow?  And so sprinkle that sensibility (we’ll call it a beginner’s method of adding details to a story) across the pages and there’s your B-grade.

Issue 3 and 4 came out through NOW and are inked more traditionally, so the backgrounds are flatter and the characters more elastic.  It loses a bit of the grimy definition of the first two issues, but increases the reading speed (which, as mentioned, is a positive).

This is not a book to read for any particular reason, it’s just one of those funky independent book footnotes that’s charmingly black-and-white-boom era stuff that you seriously won’t find nowadays.  And one day, someone will wonder why I held on to them, and then they’ll realize that I also own ‘The Verdict’ on DVD because Bruce Willis has an uncredited cameo in it, and then they’ll stop wondering things.