Was it me, or did "4 Kids..." end abruptly?

When I first read a write up of Tyler Boss, Thomas Mauer, and Matt Rosenberg's "4 Kids Walk into a Bank" back in April of 2016 (or thereabouts) I thought it sounded fun and different and would be something I wanted to check out. I like the idea of sequential art being used to tell different kinds of stories.

The miniseries covers

My son wasn't even born yet. When the second issue came out, the possibilities, while known mostly from the outset, were going to be teased out with a kind of artistic judiciousness that speaks to great art.

My excitement hadn't cooled exactly by having to wait months for the third issue, and once we readers found out there had been a family health emergency with the writer, Matthew Rosenberg's, father, the delay made sense, but I was left wanting maybe more than could be delivered.

Another few months went by waiting for the fourth issue, and by the time it ended, it seemed like if we ever got to the fifth and final issue, TONS of work would have to be done to wrap up the story.

But that's not to say I wasn't enjoying the hell out of it. Double negatives aside, it was fantastic and exciting and all I wanted from Out There storytelling. The art was beautiful if a touch anachronistic and the colors were that wonderful marriage of dazzling and muted that is almost never even attempted these days.

The last issue arrived a few more months later, much to my surprise at my LCS, and my son is walking and babbling and getting into all sorts of shit. It's only after he goes to bed that I ever get anytime to read anything, colorful comics especially, and I devoured the last issue like a starving person.

Only it came and went quicker than its forty pages of heft would suggest.

The characters all seemed to be older and more mature, but that's probably my own projection of the time between issues, but that alone seems weird. It's not like years passed.

Anyway, the opening scene, instead of the kids' game setting the scene, it's the finale of the robbery. The story backs up and the robbery goes down, and the scene is essentially an action movie montage, but that's all any comic is, right? It goes by, Berg is shot, Paige shoots a cop, and in the last panel years have gone by and she's being released form prison and being greeted by two of her pals and her father. "I'm so sorry, dad." The end.

I guess it couldn't have ended any other way, and I guess I'm really just bummed out by my own reaction. It's silly to be disappointed in the ending, because, really, that's the only way it could have ever ended.

Maybe I just expected more because of the cleverness from earlier in the series, and that would be a me problem.

READ IT if you haven't yet...you won't be disappointed...or maybe you will be, but who's counting?

Hot Jazz: November 2017

Something I'm very excited about come November is a newly translated from the French classic "Niourk":

The sample pages are stunning, and Stefan Wul is a writer I've been interested in since seeing his animated collaboration with Rene Laloux "Fantastic Planet":

Looks like they liked "Fantastic Planet" more than "Savage Planet" for the translation?

Stefan Wul wrote the stories that both of these are based upon, and since he died a while back, I'm not sure he was involved with the graphic novel Niourk.

The last few Hot Jazz posts have been about either ongoing series (Grass Kings) or miniseries (Eleanor and the Egret), but this is a longer and denser offering, and one I'm excited to get into.

Weird side note: I came across Fantastic Planet while researching Rene Laloux, and I learned about Laloux from a short animated piece he made called "Les Escargots (The Snails)", and that short was buried on a DVD of hundreds of animated shorts from the thirties and forties, all of which were public domain and after the government put the kibosh on the racier items in animated shorts (which means they were crushingly boring). It was fully out of place among the dreck; it was in color, and lovingly made, and French, and looked thirty years newer than anything else on the DVD. How I even saw it while cleaning the house or making dinner in between gin and tonics is still a mystery to me...