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From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma Rays, No.167

Annnnnnnnnnnndddddd WELCOME BACK! ‘Ello readers, it’s 2014 here at our all-ages column, From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma Rays, and after a holiday break we are back! 2014 could be a good year if it didn’t start like this:

That’s right, that’s a snap shot of my 2014 Where’s Waldo? calendar which started out with a search-in-find of nothing but Waldos! Come on guys! Jeez. That said, the cartooning skills of Britain’s Martin Handford who created Waldo (known as Where’s Wally? in his land of origin) are always impressive to just stare at and get lost in, and although not exactly a comic per-say, the cartooning here is extraordinary and holds up no matter how long ago you’ve last looked at one.
And with that, on to the review this week!

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Juice Squeezers #1
Publisher: Dark Horse
Story and Art: David Lapham
The first issue of this mini was released last week by Dark Horse, and I wrote a jingle about it that goes like this, ahem: “Juice Squeezers, it’s not really about juice but about a lot of big bugs!” But what about big bugs, you ask? Well here is the handy-dandy Dark Horse description:
“Tunnels made by a legion of giant bugs crisscross the fields below Weeville, and only one thing can stop them from overrunning this quaint California town: the Juice Squeezers. A covert group comprised of scrawny tweens, the Squeezers are the only ones who can fit into the cramped subterranean battlefield and fight the insects on the frontlines!”
Hey David Lapham! I like you! No, no, not in a stalker way–put the phone down! Lapham does a great job here with his art and his writing, totally fun stuff worth checking out! The best way to describe this is to children of the 90s, when we grew up playing with toys based on Aliens and Predator, and we wished secretly we could go out and splatter-fest it up against Aliens in real life. Well that’s what Juice Squeezers was to me, a secret self indulgence in things I wished I could do as a kid. Seeing these scrawny teens fight to save their town against a bug invasion: awesome! It’s great work if you’re into this genre, and a mini you don’t want to miss.
Dark Horse has done some great all-ages stuff, from Juice Squeezers here, to Itty Bitty Hellboy recently, to Snow Angel which was running in Dark Horse Presents. I like what Dark Horse is turning out these days, and in a perfect world I would love to see them try an all-ages anthology like they do with Dark Horse Presents (not an all-ages anthology for the unfamiliar, although it does have a few all-ages friendly stories tucked in). I have doubts I’ll ever see that, but come on Mike Richardson, if you’re reading this, me and you both love Little Lulu! Package together some titles like Juice Squeezers and Snow Angel with some Little Lulu reprints, do it bi-monthly as an experiment, it could work! I’ll be dreaming about it until you do, Mike.
Juice Squeezers rocked my socks off so much I walked around the hosue pretending to fight giant bugs all day (divorce papers from my wife are probably in the mail because of this). Check it out, it’ll be four issues, issue #1 out now in both print and digital!

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That’s it for this week! See you next!
Drew McCabe
drew@comicattack.net