As a boutique publisher, AdHouse Books doesn’t put out a ton of comics each year, but what they may lack in quantity they certainly make up for in quality—I just read two of their recent releases, and they were among the best comics I’ve read so far this year.

The first was Fred Chao’s Johnny Hiro Vol. 1, a trade paperback collecting the first three issues of the serially published comic, plus two more stories that would have been published serially as comic books, if that were still feasible in today’s comics market (Plus a bunch of one-page gag strips).

I spoke at length about the considerable virtues of Chao’s Johnny Hiro in this space before, specifically on how Diamond’s changing minimum standards might affect a great comic like this that was being created specifically as a serial comic book, so I’ll try not to repeat myself.

If you’ve yet to heed my recommendation, Johnny Hiro is about a young man by that name and his girlfriend Mayumi Murakami, and their struggle to make it in New York City, while plagued by unusual problems, like a Godzilla-like monster, 47 Ronin Businessmen, a knife-wielding cooking staff, and a $50,000 lawsuit seeking damages for the hole in their apartment caused by the kaiju attack. These are on top of their normal people problems, mostly dealing with bills, money, work and, in Mayumi’s case, some discrimination at her place of employment.

It’s a slice-of-life drama that effortlessly weaves in the more fantastic elements for the absurd humor they offer, and to explore what such occurrences might reveal about the characters and their relationship, which remains the focus of the storyline, no matter what else comes up.

Oh, and other characters include Mayor Michael Bloomberg, David Byrne, Gwen Stefani, LL Cool J, Grand Puba, Akon, Judge Judy and the cast (well, the characters) of TV’s Night Court.

The tales hold up remarkably well all grouped together between the same covers like this. What were once episodes now read like episodic chapters in a novel, as a collection of serial comics with aspirations of telling an ongoing story should. The fourth and fifth installments, those original to the trade, work to wrap the story up well enough that one wonders if there will be a Vol. 2 or not; there certainly doesn’t have to be, as the young couple get out from under their most crushing financial problem, and take another step toward being a more permanent sort of couple.

It’s not often I find a comic that makes me snicker on one page and then touches me right there on the next, but Johnny Hiro is one such comic, and its hard to imagine a comics audience that its mixture of silly humor and serious storytelling—and the light, airy art and strong sense of location that serves it—wouldn’t win over.

Speaking of snickering, the other great AdHouse book I’ve recently read is Remake, which is probably the funniest comic I’ve had the pleasure of reading since…well, when was the last time a volume of Scott Pilgrim came out?

The rather artsy cover design of Lamar Abrams’ book doesn’t give a great indication of the contents, as nice a cover design as it is (I look at it and think Giant Robot magazine).

The interior pages host panel-filled, black and white grids, with twelve-panel pages being the most common lay out. The design and images within the panels are heavily manga-influenced, evne if the story-telling approach isn’t so much. The result is a book that reads a little like a small-press or self-published artist drawing a strip inspired by anime rather than manga, if that makes any sense. Like, it looks like a simplified, abstracted, rougher version of manga, but isn’t designed to work like manga; it’s like Jeffrey Brown inking Brian Ralph drawing Astro Boy with Watchmen lay-outs, only not really like that at all (Man, sometimes reviewing comics is a lot harder than it looks).

The protagonist is Max Guy, a robot that looks like a little kid (that’s him on the cover) who has jet engines in his back, and a “Max Blaster” gun that turns things into other things (Example: to stop a baby from crying, he shoots it in the face, turning its baby saliva into honey; a stray blast hits a woman’s pet dog, but turns it into a pair of shoes she really likes, and so on).

The book collects 144-pages worth of Max Guy’s adventures, from the more heroic—getting his ass kicked by a villain who stretches, fighting a particularly Tezuka-esque bad robot for the honor of a nice waitress with a nice butt—to the more mundane, like getting to know his roommate Cardigan’s new girlfriend, who has drills for hands for some reason, having difficulty trying to spin a non-spinning rack at a comic store, hanging out with his friends.

Of course, the mundane and the fantastic are constantly intersecting in Max Guy’s world, which is the sort of cartoon world where someone can say “Hello, honey bunny,” and the greeting might be mistaken for the use of sweet pet name—were there not a large anthropomorphic rabbit dripping with honey seated at a booth over in the corner.

It’s a rather hard book to talk about without simply resorting to rattling off gags, or pointing to pages and saying, “See how funny this is? That’s funny, right?” And since I hate to work hard, I won’t knock myself out trying. Let me just reiterate: Remake is hilarious, one of the best books I’ve read this year, and one of the funniest I’ve read in a while.

*Sorry.

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RELATED: You can download previews of the first three issues of Johnny Hiro here, and you can see more of Chao’s work here. You can download a preview of Remake here, you can see more of it at Abrams’ Remake page here and you can check out more of Abrams’ art here.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 11:48 am and is filed under Caleb's reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.