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Friday, 08 January 2010 00:00

Eddie Argos' brain has finally recovered from the latest Art Brut tour, so he's back and ready to start digging through his stack of comics. Up first, a look at Under Pressure, the first collection of the nerd humor/superhero parody webcomic Let's Be Friends Again.

I've not written one of these in ages. I was going to make a joke that it is because I started writing Pow! To The People solely to get free comics from Playback:stl, and that since Art Brut vs. Satan came out with its song about DC Comics, I've no longer needed their patronage as people now know how much I like comics and consequently have been giving them to me at gigs as presents. And while that is partially true, it is not the reason I stopped writing. I stopped writing because I had gone fully mad from touring. We toured nearly solidly for about a year and by the end all I was capable of doing was drinking booze, playing shows and reading comics. So I have read a lot of comics but have been incapable of writing about them, which is a shame, as there have been some that I loved and would have liked to have written about. This year my aim is to learn to multi-task—and by that I mean I intend to learn how to booze heavily on tour and still be able to write about comics the next day (because you can never have too many free comics).

People really have been bringing me comics to shows, though. Great big piles of them. It's been brilliant. I got a big stack of ‘80s Batman comics from one person, lots of various independent comics posted to me by another and a whole backpack full of comics brought to me at a show in San Francisco. Now that I am returning to being a fully-functioning person again, I've started working my way through them all.

The first book I've taken a look at is Lets Be Friends Again: Under Pressure which I pulled out of the aforementioned backpack on my most recent flight back to the UK, just before Christmas.

Under Pressure is a collection of strips by Chris Haley and Curt Franklin originally posted online at letsbefriendsagain.com. It made me laugh out loud through most of my flight home. My laughing must have been annoying for all the passengers sat around me on that flight, but it would have definitely been infinitely more annoying for them if they had asked me what I was laughing at. As to let them know I would have needed to launch into a very long explanation of what Cosplay, Blackest Night and Speed Force are, or why Batman farting down a phone to Spider-Man and Spider-Man reacting to it in the same manner Batman reacted to his parents being murdered was very, very funny.

You see, the frames of reference in Under Pressure are sometimes so narrow that I had to check the front cover halfway through reading it to make sure I didn't actually know the two people responsible for it. With comic books becoming more and more fashionable these days, it seems publishers are always on the lookout for comic books they can put a sticker on the front of saying something along the lines of "this book is not just for nerdy geeks, normal people can read this book, too." Under Pressure is not one of those books. Under Pressure is a book for people who find Batman farting down a phone at Spider-Man funny. Thankfully, though, I think there are more of us about these days. So I have no shame in strongly suggesting that you go out and buy this book. | Eddie Argos

In this edition:

Let's Be Friends Again (CreateSpace)

64 pgs. full color; $12.99

(W: Curt Franklin; A: Chris Haley)

Read Let's Be Friends Again for free at www.letsbefriendsagain.com