Miss Medusa's Monstrous Menagerie No. 2

By Unlikely Heroes Studios (Paul Hanley and Matt Frank)
Buy it HERE.

This was an entertaining rollicking, confusing ball of densely packed detail. A smashed circus train has the performers standing amidst the wreckage, their leader a magician/medusa character with a top hat, snake hair and cane scolding a centaur/horned troll guy goading a gigantic insect back into its cage. All other weird freakish carnival people in various colors run around naked. There's a badly loud talking Sasquatch in a necktie and shirt. There's a midway with a boy trying to get a ball in a big mouth Teddy Roosevelt. Nearby a pack of evil faeries laugh and one shoots a tiny bit of food in the boy's mother's mouth, who turns into a donkey.

There's a man selling Miss Medusa a monster in a box, who looks like an ordinary woman but can quickly change into a hideous fanged thing. There's a goat-dog creature negotiating the legality of the sideshow's level of nudity to a local policeman. The boy who had his mother changed runs franticly away from the evil faerie and then poofs into nothing after walking into a circle of mushrooms. He re-appears in the last page, but after studying the panels for a few minutes it looks like he's in a state of existence where time has stopped.

-Whew- or, being from Minnesota I might say -Uff da!- That's a lot of stuff packed into 28 pages! MMMM is definitely a comic where the story is buried in the details, the reader is only witnessing the outermost layer.

The characters are acting according to their situations, and are fully aware of their world. There's never a sense of aimless wandering. Still, it would be nice to be given some direction. I should have started with part 1.

There's a rich, full flavored attention to detail that never lets up. Where MMMM drops the ball is in the story. I don't have clear sense of a perilous or dangerous situation when I reached the last page. It's for that reason -lavish artwork notwithstanding- that it's unlikely I'd reach out and purchase the next installment.

Next Tuesday:

G.I.L.T.
or, the Guild of Independent Lady Temporalists