Amazing Rain

Rating:
Summary: WOW!
Review: A very good book, strang, and too short but its worth all the money.

Rating:
Summary: Simply Amazing!
Review: I suspect that there are two types of people in the world: those who love Sam Brown's www.explodingdog.com and those who haven't discovered it yet!

I fall squarely into the first category. I am always thrilled when new work appears on the site. Why? Because Exploding Dog is a unique art concept. It is a semi-collaborative art project where visitors are invited to submit phrases, ideas, or titles, and drawings are created to fit. Well, kind of. Sam Brown has a unique vision. Quite often, the drawings he creates take a radically different approach to what might seem like a straightforward subject. Many truly defy explanation... yet are still wonderfully interesting.

The world that Sam has created for his art is one inhabited by stick figure people, robots, rockets, and various small creatures. All are drawn in a minimalistic linear style, which at first glance may seem unsophisticated. Spend a little time really looking, though, and you'll be quite surprised. These drawings can convey a huge amount with only simple lines and (generally) flat areas of color.

In addition to the drawings featured on the site, there are also Exploding Dog shirts, prints, and books available. These items help many people get their Exploding Dog "fix" during the occasionally lengthy periods between updates to the site. Soon to be added to this collection is Amazing Rain. 116 full color pages, fantastic from beginning to end. In this somewhat dark, odd tale, Sam "weaves a story within a story, a fable intertwined in a narrative of urban disenchantment and pastoral escape." I won't even begin to try to explain or capture the essence of it. Trying to do so would not only be impossible, but never stand up to actually seeing, reading, and absorbing this book.

More interesting than any illustrated novel and vastly more sophisticated than any comic, this book is a literary and visual art piece. One of the greatest strengths of Amazing Rain is that, although this is a continuous story, each page works on its own in the same way that the single panel drawings featured on Exploding Dog do. I can think of no other work that stands up in this way.

All in all, I have nothing but the highest praise for Sam and his most recent effort. My only complaint is that there aren't a couple hundred more pages!