Preview: Tozzer 2 #1
Written by Rob Dunlop
Drawn by Peter Lumby Comedy
usually comes down to the choice between two extremes: Throw
everything you’ve got at ‘em or reward the audience
for suffering through your pretensions with a joke now and
then. Either way, your story’s going to get sidetracked
by shoe-horning humor into any lengthy plotline, and it
will most likely go down in flames, but, hey, you wanna
make ‘em laugh, don’t ya’? (This also
answers the immortal questions of why humor books don’t
last and “funnies” are only four to eight panels
long).
Favoring
the former method, Tozzer 2 languidly crams a few
dozen movie references into a tale that would otherwise
be a day in the life of a Jerry Springer guest. When you
strip it down, Tozzer’s latest adventure is merely
an escape from adopted parents that allows him to head to
school (yeah, the kid’s pretty messed up, since he’s
escaping TO school). There’s an altercation with another
student and the principal trots out the new head of security.
And that’s it. Basically.
In actuality,
Tozzer’s ass is in grave danger of being tapped by
notorious pervert and monkey molester Mad Jax and his chimp
Bubs (Michael Jackson and his monkey playing road warriors,
natch). Tozz’s trailer-trash lesbian foster moms readily
sell him out while an Oreo Sales Rep (The Oracle sans Matrix)
foresees his imminent doom, but whether it’s at the
hands of Jax, fellow student Eminem, or head of security
Jules Winfield and his pal Yoda—who’s to say?
So,
yeah, this book is frickin’ weird.
It’s
also shameless, mean-spirited, occasionally crude, unabashedly
shallow, and offensive to pop sensibilities. Kinda fun,
too. The underlying Harry Potter plotline ties the random
gags down just enough to keep things from getting confusing,
and, while nothing really got me laughing out loud, the
creative team did manage to squeeze a few chuckles out of
some of the most tired clichés of our time (Matrix
parodies, Michael Jackson child molestation jokes, Star
Wars references, and jabs at Eminem and his uber-ego).
But
I still have some qualms. First off, the timing doesn’t
quite work. Of course, pacing is the greatest enemy of graphic
narrative, since you can’t control how fast the audience
reads, but there are panel mechanics that definitely could’ve
helped with gag delivery. However, I think the bigger problem
is the general format of the story. As a collection of gags,
there’s a lot of start/stop action. Dunlop chooses
not to write any chapter breaks or asides into the narrative,
and I can appreciate a creator avoiding that oft-taken crutch,
but it also puts a lot more pressure on him to make the
story flow, and it ultimately feels more like a collection
of scenes.
I think
what it comes down to is I’d rather see Tozzer
2 #1 as a collected series of comic strips than a single
issue. Its individual pages stand alone better than the
average episode of Megatokyo
and the jokes have more life to them than anything you’d
find in the “funnies”. But the best gags here
have painfully little to do with the story (my favorite
involves the KKK building a rope swing), which only makes
this issue struggle under the weight of trying to be both
an efficient, plot-forwarding machine AND a gag factory.
The
official Tozzer website.
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