All in the Family.

Turner Family Terrors

Part 3 of 4
Robert Krisch writer/creator
Aleksandar Bozic Ske
artist/letterer

Cover artist Easton Hawk

buy it HERE.

A Mom and Dad, brother and sister go off to see Grandpa. Sister is keeping a dazed monkey she found in the trunk of the car. On the way the Mom wants to hang out at Mom and Dad's old college Ithaca University, which is walking distance to Grandpa's large palatial estate/castle type building.

At a nearby lake they are being watched by a beautiful husky woman, Joe Stalin, a frog-man guy and a warty witch. They are the story's villains and are after the kids. The professor shows the kids some of his weird paraphernalia like a crystal, a big warrior's helmet. Dad got mad and went to the college bar to get drunk. The Mom is busy re-hashing her 'fighting training' she achieved from Grandpa (her father) back in the day by fighting the henchman.

Oh, and the daughter's a vampire.

Whew! There's a lot of parts here to keep track of. Most of it is silly and gross. There's definitely a not-for-kids level of sex and violence in TFT to warrant adults only.

Is there a story here?

Not really. Story as in readily understandable goals for the main characters -along with obstacles for them to overcome to reach those goals. Robert Krisch eschews that element entirely to simply lay out a number of features he keeps stuffing this thin comic with. TFT does have a slightly dark humor bend to its approach to make me forgive some of the overstuffing. If this were meant to be silly and gross and funny I could get all the heavy exposition and story details without a problem. It's just stuff to set up the next joke. But if you're going to write a comic that's telling the story about your characters you need to back off the details somewhat and get on with the story.

Aleksandar's artwork, while quirky and gross enough in its own right does have that distance-ness feeling you get with overseas collaboration. You can tell that he's missing something in the translation culturally. There was an opportunity to make fun of the nuclear family model so often the source of humor like in those Vacation movies with Chevy Chase, or one or two of those John Candy movies. That part got missed completely and I don't know if Robert is to blame or his artist.

Next Tuesday:

Cyberpunk time with:

In The Land of the Dragon

by Luca Frigerio