It's New Year's Eve and our hero, a Nick Cage look-alike named Larry, has decided to end his life but just as he's swallowed the pills and put the finishing touches on his suicide note, his girlfriend knocks on the door. Apparently, she's not leaving him after all. Now Larry has to find the antidote before midnight without alerting Muriel that's he's psychologically unstable and thus not good boyfriend material.
Baker has an interesting, almost retro rendering style and he uses silhouette and soft focus pretty liberally here. The resultant effect is something like what might happen if Walt Disney took a swing at animating P.G. Wodehouse and Hitchcock directed. Kinda. Anyway, Baker prints his dialogue outside the panel box, like subtitles on a foreign film. We get an uninterrupted image and the writing's so solid you never have to think about which line is attributed to whom. And for a good giggle, check out the movie posters in Baker's fictitious Times Square.
Kelly Sue DeConnick relocated from Brooklyn, New York to Kansas City, MO, where she lives with her husband and artbomb.net colleague, Matt Fraction. Kelly Sue writes the English adaptations of several manga titles published by Tokyopop and Viz. She can be found on the web at kellysue.com.
