Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection: 1987-1991
Lowdown: Really liked it. A solid comic that starts out mostly fantasy and switches its last third to focus on the realistic lives and feelings of its characters. Solid art, solid characters, and solid storytelling.
I can’t think of much to say about Zot!, Scott McCloud’s super-hero/science fiction comic from the late eighties. People had always spoken very highly of it. This trade paperback collects issues 11 – 36 of the original series.
The art is great: clean and crisp. The characters, mostly teenagers, are varied and unique. The storytelling is great. This is just a great, solid comic. It reminded me a lot of Mike Allred’s Madman, one of my all time favorites. But, since Zot! came first, I must conclude it was part of Madman’s inspiration.
The first 2/3 of the book consists of straight-forward hero-saving-the-day stories. McCould does a good job of making the characters human and real, even though the villians and crises aren’t.
That last 1/3, however, is almost a different book. The characters are the same, but the amount of fantasy switches place with reality: the balance between the two get swapped. Because the character have already been defined, it isn’t a jarring switch, and actually makes the book better. We get a chance for things to slow down, and we learn a lot more about everybody involved. Part of me wonders if the book might have been better if the “Earth Stores” (as they’re called) had appeared more toward the middle of the arc.
My one critique is that there are two parts missing: the first 10 color issues of the original comic, and a two issue story arc not drawn by McCloud. Although the orginal comic was “rebooted” when it moved from color to black and white with issue #11, I still felt a little lost sometimes when a “new” character was introduced. They would have definite histories that all the characters knew about, but I didn’t. But, I never got completely lost, so it’s only a minor critque.
The missing story arc, however, I feel is a pretty big omission. McCloud’s original breakdowns for the story are included. Although hard to read, the story was one of my favorites in the book. I would have really liked to seen the one that ended up being published.
Overall, it’s a solid comic. Well done.
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