The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1491: The Zaucer of Zilk #2, November 2012

Seriously. Look at that cover. That's got to be one of the best comics covers I've ever seen. And I want a pair of "fancy pants."

The Zaucer travels "behind the scenes" in his pants, exposing himself to ravenous consumers of content who float on clouds. I'm not sure there's a lot of social commentary in the story, but this part definitely is. The Zaucer must escape these creatures, who transform into a giant mouth, before they devour him.

And then he enters Dankendreer, Errol Raine's domain, and the McCarthy colours disappear. Pages and panels are streaked across with rain, bleeding from the panel borders right across our field of view. It's a lovely touch, to give us the impression that literally everything in this dimension is sodden and miserable. Such wonderful contrast to the psychedelic swirliness (that's the technical term) of the rest of the comic.

A nice thing that we see, and I like to these days call it The Squirrel (or Zquirrel?) Girl Effect, is that the Zaucer attempts to help the bad guy (who isn't who you might think), rather than simply defeating them. So much violence is born of fear and feeling powerless - if we can help people to not feel that way, we reduce the amount of violence in the world. I'm not trained in these sorts of things, but that seems pretty straightforward to me. Help people, don't hurt them = better world.

If only that were a majority sentiment.

"A thousand billion aeons of time burst from Charognae's every cell, to seep into the infinite mansion of Darkendreer --"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1490: The Zaucer of Zilk #1, October 2012

I don't know how it is for other comics fans, but I have a hard time walking past a Brendan McCarthy comic without at the very least having a flip through. He is, bar none, the most colourful and psychedelic artist working in mainstream comics, and everything he does looks amazing.

Today's comic could really be set in Pepperland (from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine). Both the tone of the series and the look of the series hearken back to that crazed wonderland. The Zaucer's realm is populated by bizarre and colourful characters, as you can see from the cover, and their adventures are, for the most part, exercises in randomness and chaos. At least, that's what it looks like to us. The Zaucer's realm is a very different place from ours, and all that randomness actually seems to work for the characters in the story, almost as if, from their perspective, it's not random at all.

My favourite scene in this issue is when the Zaucer has to get himself some "fancy pants" in order to walk between dimensions. He had to actually trap these free-roaming pants himself, jumping into them both legs at once, after luring a pair with a tasty piece of pocket lint.

And that right there tells you everything you need to know about the story. Its silly and weird and beautiful, and very much work a read.

"Merely a facilitator for those cosmic intelligences who've paid to watch your intrepid struggles."