Review - Scrambled Ink
“Scrambled Ink” seems like an obvious attempt to duplicate some of the beauties of the Flight series by utilizing some top animators for sequential art side projects of a charming variety and for the most part it works wonderfully. Animation and comics are finding equal ground as the elevated ghetto apart from the film world, finally getting their due with mainstream audiences, so it only makes sense that they would come together in such a form. Here, creators for DreamWorks animated division takes to the page.
There is some real beautiful work in here. David G. Derrick Jr.’s “Kadogo: The Next Big Thing” is a nice, old fashioned jungle tale about an elephant grappling with his embarrassing friendship to a bird, with art that, at times, recalls Don Freeman. David Pimentel’s “Burger Run” is a hilarious, retro-fueled crime tale, part O. Henry and part Friz Freleng, that has burger joint heist going sour. “Greedy Grizzly,” written by Keith Baxter and Ken Morrissey and drawn by Morrissey recalls a gentle but wacky Disney of old as a bear attempts to pretty much eat an entire forest and encounters a little girl who teaches him some respect. Don Freeman gets recalled yet again in the old-fashioned girl tale “Point and Shoot,” by Jenny Lerew, about a young girl’s job-related visit to Paris and the unlikely friend she meets.
The two remaining stories, though, create a real problem here and take the whole collection out of balance. Ennio Torresan’s “The Guy From Ipanema” is mildly crude, entirely over-the-top and mostly unfunny, while J.J. Villard’s “Dig, Dig, Die, Die” is like a lesser experimental work that might have appeared in RAW in the 1980s. Given the tone of the other stories in the book, these two are entirely out of place and mature enough that they really undo what seems like the logical market for the rest of the book — kids. Four out of six of the stories would not be out of place as standalone children’s books — in fact, three of those seem to be homages of some sort to old fashioned children’s books — but the Torresan and Villard’s stories make it a little hard to recommend buying the book for a kid. By the same token, the girth of the children’s stories makes it hard to recommend to an adult.
That’s too bad, because the children’s stories are refreshing, not jaded or sarcastic, and with a sweetness that is often lacking in the sometimes cloying children’s book market.
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