Word: fishings
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This weekend marks Memorial Day in the U.S. and the official beginning of summer leisure. A quartet of marine-themed comix, one about a whale, one about octopi and two about fish, are hitting comic and bookstore shelves at the same time. As catch of the day, some are better than others. TIME.comix acts as you professional taster, or, uh, reader...
Oddly reminiscent of "Leviathan," both Dan James' "The Octopi and the Ocean," (Top Shelf Productions; 52pp.; $6.95) and Peter Kielland's "Fish" (Kim-Rehr Productions; 72pp.; $8.95) use pantomime and free-associative storylines, but to much sillier ends. "The Octopi" imagines the brainy encepholopods as being at constant war with the brawny sharks. In order to retrieve an important talisman from the sharks, the octopi kidnap a boy by substituting his school bus with an amphibious vehicle driven by a disguised octopus. After bringing back the talisman the boy gets folded into the shape of an envelope and returned...
Peter Kielland's "Fish" combines the absurdity of "The Octopi" with the sweep of "Leviathan." The title character, a fish with feet, wanders through the ages, mostly in terror and under pursuit. He begins at the dawn of man and witnesses the arrival of aliens who zap the dumb apes with higher consciousness. Uninterested in such goings on he goes to sleep and somehow wakes up in the early twenty-first century. Soon he goes from barroom oddity to household pet to valuable commodity. Escaping it all, he falls asleep and wakes up during the apocalypse where he soon becomes...
...fish story you will never forget, try as you might, is Junji Ito's "Gyo" (Viz; 200 pp.; $12.95). Ito specializes in horror comix, a genre virtually wiped out in America since EC comics had to stop publishing "Tales from the Crypt" and its sister titles in the early 1950s. Ito's chilling stories have some of the oddest premises in the genre. "Uzumaki," published in the U.S. by Viz in 2002, featured a town visited by a plague of spirals. "Gyo" starts out with Tadashi and his girlfriend Kaori on vacation at the coastal city of Okinawa...
Over the coming days more of these weird, dead-yet-alive fish come rushing out of the ocean, overwhelming the city. Killer sharks roam the streets. Back home in Tokyo Tadashi's scientist uncle recalls hearing of a military experiment that went down at sea - a mutated germ that turned living creatures into noxious gasbags. These were attached to mechanical legs powered by the gas, and the two halves formed a symbiotic relationship. Soon the creatures find their way to Tokyo in search of new hosts, including Kaori, now infected by the germ. Her body slowly becomes a paralyzed, pustulated...