2 out of 5

Ryan Alves’ thick-lined, loosely-drawn indie comics caught my eye due to a kind of minimalist / maximalist approach, in which zine-style drawings communicated quite a bit of story in very few panels. (Alongside the stuff often being very, very weird.)

The Adventures of B and OB pushes that concept to a bit of an extreme, and for me – it’s beyond the point of calling it a success. I’m gonna guess there was some framing idea here that might justify the approach – i.e. do a comic a day – but this collection essentially presents two panel “adventures” of our titular characters, who are inhuman blobs who hang out near a cactus.

There’s definitely stuff I enjoy here, such as the loosely linear plot of an alien abduction and rescue – the way this wanders in and out of story can be fun – and I don’t think you can not laugh at sentient plate punk rock Sid Dicious, but the linework (or its reproduction) is sometimes too mushy to get a sense of what you’re looking at, and the story wanders arguably too much. That leaves us without a narrative to really hang on, and inscrutable art at points, nudging the book more into that sensory of realm of the most ziney of zinesters, which admittedly is not my bag.