Pages

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Book Review: Silent But Deadly


Silent But Deadly: Another Lio Collection
by Mark Tatulli

This was the second collection of – and my first introduction to – Lio comics and Mark Tatulli. According to the publisher, Lio is a “morbidly mirthful pantomime comic strip.” It is the exploits – told mostly in illustrations, with little dialogue – of a strange little boy and his friends, including a squid and his Undead Bunny (think Uglydoll). Basically, imagine Calvin and Hobbes on drugs. And I mean that nicely.

I thought the illustrations, especially the full color Sunday strips, were well done. (My husband was less kind; he thought they were somewhat average.) My favorite strips were the one-off’s – Lio discovering a sunken ship at the bottom of his inflatable pool or setting a restaurant’s lobsters free. The longer storylines and arcs were just okay in comparison. I didn’t get Lio’s adoration of Eva Rose, the mean girl in his class, and the comics with his clueless father fell flat for me. In general, too, I would say that, for me, many of the strips were sweet or amusing but that very few of the strips were laugh out loud funny. I think, though, that fans of Emily the Strange will feel right at home in Lio’s world.

1 comment:

  1. Nice review. And that really WAS fast turnaround for LT, wasn't it!

    ReplyDelete

I love to get comments and welcome them on any of my posts. There is comment moderation on posts older than 14 days, but your comments will appear immediately on current posts.

Due to th eabsolutely insane number of spam comments I have been getting recently, I have unfortunately had to turn on word verification. Please email me if you have problems posting a comment.