2 out of 5

I had mixed feelings toward the first Auteur arc.  What started out as a hilariously stupidly offensive attack on censorship shifted toward a not-so-hilarious and rather obvious inspection of the creative soul of an artist – through its twisted director lead, Nathan T. Rex – and also, somewhat annoyingly, a love story.  I… allowed that those elements had been seeded into the tale by Spears early on, and that the structure of the book could, after all, be a meta-commentary on the kind of generic, cliche-ridden art Rex would produce, but it still seemed so far away from where things had started, and the intentions to rattle us, the reader, as proclaimed in a letter to us from editor Charlie Chu in the first issue.  But whatever: bumpy ride, sure; still enough to actually see if we made it to a second arc, and to see if that second arc was any good.

Alas, we made it, but things aren’t so good.

In Sister Bambi, Rex is at wit’s end, trying to gather funds for an exploitation flick (starring his love whom he met in President’s Day – the first arc).  This process takes him to see questionable investors, who want to insert their own lead into things, which Rex agrees to but then neglects to tell his girlfriend.  Now, maybe ‘Sister Bambi’ will be the opposite of P.Day – starting with love and shrug-worthy pissing on creativity and then ramping up into something crazy, but I doubt it.  I think Spears is happy with tits and blood and drugs and then dropping some minor notes on… the dumb stuff love makes us do, or the reasons artists / writers / whatevers art / write / whatever,  And apparently artists James Callahan is similarly happy with the drawing style he’d adopted for the last half of P.Day (the less enjoyable half), where all of his backgrounds disappear and most panels are cartoonish outlines of his characters.  I’m sure the more excessively detailed opening issues were time consuming, but they contributed to the veritable impact the book had on first reading, and ‘Sister Bambi’ just can’t step to that.

So if you’re content to read self-indulgent antics with occasional pauses where Spears / Rex justifies his choices via “mind of the artist” explanatory mumbo jumbo, then maybe Sister Bambi is worth your time.  Me: I have no idea what the point is of the strip, and the first two issues of this arc simply don’t contain glimmers of anything that makes me want to wait around and find out.