Official solicit and preview material:

ARCHIBALD SAVES CHRISTMAS 1-Shot
story DWIGHT L. MACPHERSON
art & cover GRANT BOND

32 pg
Two-Color
NOVEMBER 28
$3.50

Archibald Aardvark went insane after the brutal murders of his brother and friends. After spending five delirious years chewing on his tongue in a mental hospital, Archibald finds himself back on the spiraling streets of Tinsel Town. Desperate and alone, Archibald has two choices: catch a psychopathic murderer or blow his brains on a wall at the Hopeless Hotel. The only problem is… he may have to do one to accomplish the other.

Retailer Warning: Mature Readers only.

Preview art from Shadowline Comicspace page

As an homage to pulp, noir and early animated romps, with I would imagine a none-too-downplayed tip of the hat to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Archibald Saves Christmas was a 32 page one-shot that had been on my radar of THINGS TO BUY for awhile, until I was lucky enough to finally got a copy as a Christmas present.

It tells the story of Archibald Aardvark, a character very similar in vein to the “Steamboat Willy” era Mickey Mouse, who’s just finished a stint in the crazy bin after having supposedly killed his own brother and several co-workers. The world in which Archibald lives, with the tip of that hat, is not unlike Toon Town from Roger Rabbit - in that all of the cartoons are just movies, and the toons themselves are just actors working on them, and who also then have lives (and personalities) very much different from that portrayed on-screen. Lives filled with many of the everyday vices that go along with being “real”.

Smoking. Drinking. Cursing. Drugs. Lust. Greed. Murder.

As Archibald returns to the world of freedom, struggling with the memories of his dead brother, he tries to get his old life back as much as possible - he wants to work again. However, just as in real life, the doors opened to a convicted killer (insane or not) are few and far between.

The first few preview pages I saw for Archibald were sometime late last year, and played mostly the largest factor in my desire to read the book - a point that remains even after, and while I write this review now. I cannot stress how great a book it is to look at, artist Grant Bond did an absolutely amazing job here. The animated style and color choices make it so spot on - the only real drawbacks visually for me would be the repetition of whatever photoshop brush used to achieve the “grainy film” effect, as well as the ever exclusive club of people who saw that low-budget indie movie Schindler’s List and have since used the color red against B&W backdrops for a highlight effect - and while I imagine that’s more of a palette choice to keep printing costs lower etc while still giving the book some POP, it’s still an effect I think maybe we’ve seen enough of.

Those however, are minor (and personal) gripes, and probably wouldn’t affect 99% of readers enjoyment of the material, or certainly take anything away from how great the book really does look otherwise.

In preparing this review, I ended up stumbling into a series of email conversations about it with the writer, Dwight MacPherson. Very forthcoming, MacPherson talked with me about some of the points of the book which bothered me, points which I had trouble encapsulating as to why the reading of the book kept me from liking it as much as I wanted, or thought I should. Because after my first read I felt let down, and on some level even cheated from the story. One of those “Wow, that’s it?” moments that we’ve all had.

And let me explain why.

Sure, coming in, it’s a 30+ page one-off, you know it’s not going to be The Lords of the Rings trilogy here - we’re getting a finite space to tell a complete story. Still, in reading it, there was something I couldn’t put my finger on, something missing, and that either what we had was a story that was too long, OR too short. In that, either this was an idea that MacPherson and Bond had for a short, which ended up being padded to fill out 32 pages, OR, that it was a much larger story in scope and feel, but was cut down to fill a one-shot, to be able to get it out there in time for the Holidays and not drag out some mini-series over the course of months etc, especially with an essentially unknown property as it is.

During our conversations though, MacPherson let me know the idea was padded out from an originally 22 page script, but added that he and Bond will be exploring Archibald and the world he lives in further in future one-shots (an Easter special as well as one later in the year for Halloween). MacPherson also went on to say:

It’s a tall order to write a book about a schizophrenic character and relay all that that illness entails in a 22-page comic while fleshing out the character and creating an engaging murder mystery. In the end, I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. It is what it is–you know?

And somehow for me, that makes it all a little better. The problems with the book I thought I’d had, some of the pacing issues, and even maybe the conclusion, I was judging them against projections from my own head that were due (unfairly or by proxy) by how authentic Archibalds tale felt. The look, again thanks to Bond, was so right that I believed at any second Archibald could be standing there with Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, that Archibald wasn’t just some plot device for this book but really was a creation of that time. The circumstances in the story, against the backdrop of real sorts of human foibles and downfalls, being felt and mouthed by these cartoons who seemed so very similar to the Warner and Disney ‘toons of my youth - there was a greed I felt weighing it down and I just couldn’t let it go. The greed of wanting to see more, to see the whole world and have more, that it needed more stuff to make me happy - and yet somehow my feelings of it not having enough of whatever that elusive “stuff” was, fooled me into thinking I didn’t like the book. When in reality those feelings were spawned because of the exact opposite; I liked it so much that I was mad we only got to see it for as short as we had.

I wanted to see the characters fleshed out more. I wanted more nuance to some of the scenes. I wanted the conclusion to not seem so abrupt. I wanted MORE of this world, and these characters, and the story, all of it!

That however, is never a fair way to review or look at anything. Holding it up against things that it isn’t or doesn’t have, that aren’t based on the quality of what we do get, simply because I want them to be there? It’s not fair to the product, the creators, not even fair to me as the consumer of the material to view it that way. Of course there will always be things that I want different in a story, things I would have done differently, and in my ego most certainly those changes would be what made it the best book there ever was(!!). But that’s just silly, especially in the case of a story like this.

There’s essentially nothing wrong with this book, other than the promise of so much potential that there is but only getting a taste of it, which leaves you wanting at the end. And really, I can’t think of much more a high compliment to give a book like this, than that.

Archibald isn’t the first comic to put cartoonish characters into real-life situations, and it’s probably not even the best comic to do so either. It is the most recent one I’ve read that has done so, and for what it is - a stylized one-shot - it’s pretty damn good.

So now let’s see what Archibald saves next.