Juggling the regular lineup a bit this week, which delayed even further (farther?) my look at Cougar and Cub 1. Hey, it’s the week between Christmas and New Year’s, NO ONE works their regular schedule! Thanks to John for that sweet post about Stan the Man that went up in lieu of this. If all goes well, I’ll also be posting a very special post for New Year’s Eve…Day. Hopefully it’ll go up before the ball drops!
Anyway, it’s funny that it’s worked out that I’m reviewing Cougar and Cub 1 (from our pals at Action Lab Comics) less than a week before it comes out, on January 4. I’ve had the preview from our pal Nick Marino for most of the month, but I’m just now getting to posting a review. I’d tell Nick sorry, but it took him, like, 3 weeks to get the preview to me in the first place. So nyeah!
Anyway, is Cougar and Cub 1 any good? It is!
It’s about a crime fighting team (who are a little overenthusiastic about the kinds of crime they fight) who get bored out on patrol one night, and are also a little horny after seeing another couple getting busy, so they go back to their headquarters and shag like rabbits.
What they don’t know is that a villain, The Roach, has seen them and followed them home (and watched them going at it too, which is weird!). This does not bode well for our doin’ it duo, so we’re nicely set up with an external conflict for upcoming issues. The fact that the twosome is also facing each other the morning after with chagrin offers a different kind of conflict as well.
Our pal Nick Marino wrote the main story and lettered the whole shebang, and Daniel Arruda Massa does the art (as well as the colors, I presume — they are excellent, bright and colorful on the main story, and utilizing that Ben-Day dot look on the backup). Rosie Knight wrote the backup story, a look at the past of Cougar and Cub. She made the mistake happily married Nick earlier this year (congrats you crazy kids!), but for shame, Nick, if you told her she had to sleep with someone to get into the comics field!
The art is quite an improvement on what I remember from this team’s Holy F*ck, which was a pretty good series involving Jesus and Satan. Arruda Massa seems to have streamlined his cartoony artwork and is using bolder inklines and it looks pretty good. (Do I sound like I know what I’m talking about at all? For all I know, he’s drawing it all digitally and just uses a different stylus now!) Except for the creepiness of no one having a nose (like that Gourmets From Planet X strip by Chester Brown!).
The story uses an omniscient narrator who would be nicely voiced by Don Pardo or Gary Owens, but leans a bit too much on the nudge nudge wink wink of the “hey, they’re crimefighting partners and they’re gonna DOOOOOO it!” so far, but I have faith that this will wrap up nicely. The backup has a nice retro feel to it while still having a bit of a sleazy feel to it. It would benefit from being a bit longer than 2-plus pages, probably, though.
Oh, I was going to tell a story about what I remember about Nick at the old place. I believe he was commenting on a column by our pal Kelly Thompson, where she showed some early ’90s Jim Lee X art from the trading card set. Nick swore up and down he’d never gotten the cards but was familiar with the art, so I had to save the day and keep him from thinking he was insane by letting him know that there had been a 3 issue comics series collecting the artwork from the trading card set, so he might have seen the art there.
That’s it! he cried, and all was well in the world.
I told you it was a lame story, Nick!
But take a look at Cougar and Cub 1 if these panels look good to you. I was trade waiting this, to go with my Holy F*ck and Holy F*cked trades, but you might want the singles. There are 3 covers available!
I hope to be back Saturday with a post that’s very special to me, and I should be back next week at the regular Wednesday time with my New Year’s resolutions. We’ll see, though! Oh, yeah, and the new Flippin’ should be out at some point in the next few days (he says, fingers crossed!).
And a shoutout to our pals over at A Moment of Cerebus, who spotlighted my review of Cerebus in Hell? 0 the other day. (Whoa, the back and forth linkage freaks me out!) Thanks, Tim!
Travis, so stoked to read your thoughts on the first issue! Thanks 😀
I agree… Rosie’s backups should be MUCHHHHH LONGER!!! They were actually made as half pages to look super kickass on the web, so they kinda feel longer in their original digital format. But, ya know, comics book pages are tall and blah blah blah.
I think the release date for #1 slid to Jan 18 last I checked. Also looks like our publisher is scrapping the next four issues as printed singles and going straight to TPB (does it even count as a TPB if the issues never come out?) later this year (July release, maybe?). It’s a bit up in the air right now! But *I think* everything will be done as monthly singles on comiXology. Wish I had more concrete info to post but it’s still developing.
It counts as a TPB! Especially if they are out digitally!
Well, like I said, I was trade waiting anyway (so it’s my fault, obviously!), but I will definitely get the trade when it comes out.
And I look forward to more comics from you and Rosie!