scribbles and lies - It is at this point that we recommend Tom Manning's RUNOFF

11:42 am - It is at this point that we recommend Tom Manning's RUNOFF

APE was this past weekend and I went up on Saturday. As always, there was much seeing of friends and a great deal of lovely artistic content to behold - the presence of Brandon Bird a pleasant surprise - but all of that is not what I want to talk about. I meandered the concourse and picked up a couple of little things here and there but it was not until I reached the end of my circuitous route - quite literally the last table of the last row for me to see - that my APE hunger was satiated. At that table was Tom Manning, and he had with him the third and final volume of RUNOFF.

I started reading RUNOFF with, mm, issues #2 and 3, a good six years ago, and was immediately hooked. He no longer had #1's so I couldn't see the very start of the story until the first collection was done. He's missed a couple of APEs because the book was taking longer than expected, but eventually volume 2 came out... and then finally, this year, it's done. And now that it's done, and you can get the whole thing and read it all and not have to wait to find out what happens, I am telling you that RUNOFF is the best thing I have ever bought at APE - and I've bought a whole lot of terrific stuff at APE over the years.

It's an odd book. RUNOFF is the best bits of TWIN PEAKS and BLAIR WITCH PROJECT smashed upon a DOONESBURY cliff. Laugh out loud funny turns into jaw-dropping gore-drenched horror on the turn of a dime, then wheels right back around again. What starts as a somewhat freakish "small, quirky Pacific Northwestern town" mystery mutates into something really, really different as the body count begins to climb. A psychotic pirate, talking animals, the politics of ghosts, a living room full of esoteric electronics, FBI agents vs. wolves, cops vs. cannons, old fogeys sitting around the coffee shop making small talk while everything falls apart around them, 4D spatial phenomena, the most useless mayor ever to retain office for more than fifty years, dark ritual magic, a mysterious secret society from England, and the creepy smiling floating glowing Japanese-toy-looking alien what-the-hell-is-that-thing thing collide in a sleepy backwater wilderness town that anyone can enter, but nobody can leave. Be warned: nobody is safe. Not cops, not kids, not animals, not the innocent or the guilty, not the smart or the dumb or the nice or the funny.

It all starts with a roadkilled body on a highway - the body they call "Mister Teeth".

Your local comics shop should be able to order RUNOFF through Diamond, or you can order it yourself directly off Manning's site, http://www.robotsandmonkeys.com/.

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For consideration: re-reading from the start