Ralph Snart Adventures

Rating:
Summary: OH, PRECIOUS BEEER!
Review: I used to own a few issues of this offbeat comic back in the day, and enjoyed just about every noggin-warping, beer-bonging moment of insanity thrown at me. While the titular character's antics and less-than-exemplary behavior never got that much laughter from me, I reveled in the bizarre weirdness of his obnoxious, loutish head-trips that made Walter Mitty's 'secret life' look downright mundane. I also dug the renderings of RSA writer/illustrator Marc Hansen, whose cartoonish artwork here is very reminiscent of notable MAD magazine artists Duck Edwing and Tom Bunk, with a touch of John Caldwell thrown in for added absurdity. From adventures in space, to double-crossing alien neighbors inviting the main man and his date over to a house party, to the assistance of a six-foot-tall lizard in a couple issues, to a couple childhood interludes, to a self-righteous evangelist type trying to set him on the straight and narrow, there's rarely a dull moment in Ralphie's seemingly endless array of dreamscapes. My fave part of this collection is near the end, where Ralph quits NOW Comics in a monetary dispute, and goes to work in a soft, family-friendly daily syndicated comic strip, which eventually drives him to drink... even more than he usually does. A close second and third in the RSA faves department were his pair of run-ins with the aforementioned evangelist dude.

Sadly, I never got around to collecting any more of the Ralph Snart Adventures books, which was partly due to waning interest, and partly because I had a tough time finding back issues to fill in my collection. Fortunately, my interest was rekindled when I caught the first print-run edition of this on special at the local nerd-herd corral, and dug into its 400-plus pages of classic issues. While I found the psychotic stories and over-the-top cartoon artwork a real hoot, I was appalled by the book's poor print quality, out-of-sequence pages, and omitted pages. I was also disappointed by the fact that they decided to reprint in black and white a few adventures that were originally put out in color. Absolutely disgusted, I took the horrid waste of a perfectly good tree back to the shop I got it from, told the till-jockey workin' there the situation, and traded it for a couple Hitman TPBs. Meanwhile, I was hopin' NOW Comics (the publishers of Ralph Snart Adventures) would see the light one day, and correct the many horrid flaws that plagued the first run of this otherwise entertaining collection of kookiness...

... which, miracle of miracles, actually came to be! A sympathetic friend hooked me up with a new-and-improved second printing of this TPB that corrected just about all of the aforementioned mistakes and subpar print quality (thanks, big guy!). The only big disappointment carried over from the first printing were the B/W reprints of the color issues. Other than that, all pages are accounted for and in their proper places, and they're a lot more legible. Shweetah!

Fair warning: If you're planning to purchase this via an Amazon Marketplace vendor, e-mail him and ask him which print edition he's selling. If you're thinkin' of snappin' this up at the local brick-&-mortar comic shop, be sure to take a look at the back of the title page at the very front of the book. The second print edition will read, "Second Printing - June 2004" right below the TPB's ISBN number and date of first printing (October 2003, AKA the one to take a pass on).

'Late