Melusine: Volume 4 – Love Potions
by Gilson & Clarke
Back with Cinebook’s cute as a button Witch for the fourth volume of her adventures. Back in September I looked at Volume 1 and had this to say in conclusion…..
When it works, like the panels above, Melusine is a really great bit of all ages fun. And most of the time, it does work very well. Of course, the way to read Melusine is probably a few pages at a time, with each strip allowed to step up and get a laugh on it’s own merits rather than suffering slightly from familiarity.
Well, as usual I fear, I was talking rubbish. Whether I came to this volume in a lighter mood or whether the theme of this one; Melusine the witch decides to make love potions and spread some love around with disastrous yet comical effects, just worked better I don’t rightly know. All I do know is that I sat down with it, chuckled away at a fair proportion of the gags and finished the book rather wishing for more.
(The very first page of Melusine – starting on a real high – great gag, great art. From Melusine: Love Potions by Gilson and Clarke, published by Cinebook.)
I was almost tempted to write that I think Gilson and Clarke have taken a few volumes to get into the rhythm of the strip, but a quick peek at Wikipedia shows me this is actually an earlier volume than Hocus Pocus and Cinebook are just printing them out of order. So it’s not that. Maybe the creators ran out of enough funny material by the time Hocus Pocus came out?
Whatever it is, I’m pleased to be able to say that Melusine: Love Potions is very light, fun stuff, with most of the strips lasting just one or two pages, and here at least Gilson has really cracked the really difficult art of setting up a wonderfully stupid series of gags in a very short number of panels. Likewise, Clarke’s artwork is accomplished, spare and brilliantly comedic. The body language is near perfect, the timing of the gags a delight.
(Another favourite page – love the inventiveness of the gag and the little touches writer and artist work into the page to make the gag work better on a second reading. From Melusine: Love Potions by Gilson and Clarke, published by Cinebook.)
Even though there’s an awful lot of love potions going around, some of my favourite strips, including the couple you can see here, have little to do with love. But what they all share is a very funny gag, whether it’s Melusine gazing wistfully into a mirror admiring herself after another spell’s gone wrong, or the elaborate set up and repetition of the forgetful spell strip. They’re not all as funny as these, but with a book like this, one great indicator of it’s worth is the number of chuckles, smiles and laughs it raised. On that count, Melusine is doing very well indeed. That it’s artwork is so delightfully simple is a bonus.
It might be a short review, but sometimes everything you need to say comes from a couple of paragraphs and everything you need to see to work out for yourselves that Melusine is a great, fun, quick, little read is in the couple of pages of artwork you’ve seen.
Wed, Dec 23, 2009
Comics and cartoons, Propaganda, Reviews