Mauled! True Tales of Tragedy At Sea #3 / $4.50 / :15 / 64M / http://www.manualcomics.com / [email protected] /
This is a compilation zine that has a bevy of comics, as one can probably guess, about tragedies at sea. A number of them feel as if the artists just went and grabbed something for the AP newswire and then just put pen to paper – specifically “One More Reason to Hate Staten Island†and “Turtle Soupâ€. A equal number of the comics in Mauled! really have a feeling of incompleteness – I’m not sure if previous installments were present in past Mauled! but for the reader that just picked up this issue, some of the comics seem a little useless. Other pieces are at the stylistic frontier in the use of two very different styles; the gritty feel of the beginning of “Black Tuesday†gradually gives way to the Mission Hill/Eightball style that predominates the later section of the comic. The punny nature of “Turtle Soupâ€, which was criticized earlier by the lack of an original story, has humor enough to cover over that minor lack of originality; one just needs to see a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle for the comic to be made. The differences in artistic styles through Mauled! is enough that one will never tire of the zine; while the quality of writing does fluctuate depending on the writer, the rich images that fill this issue make it nearly worth $4.50. The rest of the worth of this comic comes in the incredibly funny chock-full-of-testicle “Peanut-Sized Jellyfish Kills Englishmanâ€, where some hot testicle lovin’ becomes a recipe for disaster.
Rating: 6.3/10