The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Flying Leaf Creature

By Rob Jackson

I do like Rob Jackson’s comics, their mix of absurdity and a knowing, sardonic sense of humour usually makes me smile a lot of the way through. Even when he’s telling a fairly serious story there’s something in the way he phrases things that brings a smile to my face.

Yes, his cartooning is raw and rough, but there’s a simplistic innocence within his art that makes it work and never more enjoyably so than with his last comic; “The Gods Must Be Bastards“, where he really distilled it all down to a perfect Pythonesque mix of surreal comedy and a straight adventure-fantasy story. It was his best work to date by far.

His latest sees both a change to full-colour and a move away from A5 comics to newspaper sized newsprint comics. You should all know by now I’m a fan of these newspaper comics, and the more I see, the greater my enjoyment, the sheer pleasure of settling down with a newspaper of comics is great.

But Flying Leaf Creature is newspaper format only – each page is composed of 4 complete A5 pages (he even gets a couple of story pages onto the front cover above). It suits Jackson’s style though, as he seems far more comfortable with working at a smalller scale rather than expanding his artwork to a bigger page.

(Simple yet effective and attractive artwork, and lovely use of colour from Rob Jackson)

So the presentation is very nice, Jackson’s art is simple but a little tighter here and certainly makes great use of full colour, with pages full of vivid greens, bright purples, oranges and pinks.

But despite all that I didn’t enjoy Flying Leaf Creature as much as some of his previous work. And the problem is that there seems a lot less in here of the cutting, cynical comedy that I’ve been talking about.

(When is a marauding group of giant caterpillars falls from the sky – it’s always going to be bad news!)

Certainly, with this tale of a group of men brought together through circumstance and finding their lives threatened by a sinister villain, a machine that breaks through to another dimension and a bizarre caterpillar creature brought forth from that black and white dimension, the surreality is there, but there’s not that much of the ridiculous, yet also sharply acidic dialogue that marked his work out thus far.

(A glimpse into another dimension – rather duller and bigger, but a nice twist from Jackson)

Instead he seems to be concentrating on the story here. And it’s a little too straight to really work. The invention in Jackson’s ideas make it a worthwhile read, just not his best. If he sticks with the format, sticks with the great colouring and adds back in some of what I really liked with “Gods”, I think I’ll be back next time talking about a really great comic.

Flying Leaf Creature is available from Rob Jackson’s webstore.