Writer: Bob Burden
Artist: Rick Geary
Publisher: Wildcard Ink
Price: $3.99
This is the first comic book I’d call “delightful”! Gumby and Pokey meet a new neighbor, a little girl named “Cuddles.” They take her on a tour of their town in the land of imagination and fancy. They run afoul of Gumby’s mean cousin Nimrod, pay a visit with superhero Invincible Man and Nifty Boy, do a Mexican hat dance (with Gumby as the hat), go to the circus, fight mean clowns, and have the first pangs of love. It’s a wonderfully fun story that takes you in surprising twists and turns through a world of utter whimsy!
Gumby, Pokey and his friends are clay creatures that can change shape at will. They live in a world of fantasy where anything is possible. In the original TV series, Gumby could enter books and their imaginary stories. There was also the unspoken feeling that the series took place in a child’s room. Books, toys, and models populated that world. The best episodes felt like a child’s dream come to life. Burden captures that feeling perfectly here. This is a world of innocent imagination. Buildings shaped like their business with pun names (much like Silver Age Gotham City) make up this town. Cuddles remarks how there aren’t any chain stores. Of course not! They have no place in a land of pure fancy.
And Bob Burden knows this. Burden is best known for his Flaming Carrot comics. His experience with odd and surreal humor makes him perfect for this series. He has created a world in Flaming Carrot and Mystery Men that strips away the normalcy and clutter of the real world and replaces it with absurdities that build into an internal dream logic. This is what children’s fantasies are: worlds where the rules change moment to moment, isolated from the real world, free from the commercialism of the real world. (At least they should be. My childhood daydreams all had Star Wars and Care Bears.) Burden has successfully recaptured the innocence and originality of childhood, something no one but Bill Watterson has ever done so well.
Rick Geary’s art conveys the otherworldly nature of this fantasy, while simultaneously conveying a feeling of gritty reality. It’s fanciful yet solid. There is also a subtle undercurrent of menace created by Geary’s thick inks and pock-marked people. This becomes clearer when we meet the evil clowns. Gumby’s world, like a child’s imagination, has a quiet darkness hidden just below the surface.
The only drawback to this comic is the $4 price tag. That’s much too expensive for a comic meant for children. I recommend you buy multiple copies and give them to children in your neighborhood. This comic is too wonderful not to share! It’s what Gumby would do.
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