5 out of 5

A mini-comic from JHS, featuring his ‘The Bat’ Batman proxy, refigured as an abusive parent to Robyn, punishing her after a bad day at school. And no, conceptually that’s not funny, as Josh’s work is rarely directly funny – existing peripherally to rude-humor comix, but crossing over into counter-culture ziney stuff, and then forays into experimental works of horror or surreality – but it’s the juxtaposition of some noir aesthetics with Looney Tunes figurework and serious subject matter mapped to a pulp icon that makes it of this brilliantly uncomfortably funny type of funny… nearly as brilliantly concstructed as that overlong sentence.

Printed on textured off-white paper, this is a fantastic slice of the way Josh’s work can slam dunk us from goofy harmlessness (Bats Adam West smile in the bat-car as he picks Robyn up) into troubling realities (the sudden, angular, expressionless look of The Bat when Robyn confesses to his day’s err) and then propping up Batman’s “crime doesn’t pay” trivialities against what life – cartoon life – could actually look like in that parent / child relationship.

Yeah, it’s a lot in 6 pages, or it’s just silly stuff. I love it either way, and the artwork and design well exceeds what one might expect for a mini priced at two bucks.