Wednesday, February 20, 2013

The Last Call Vol. 2

by Vasilis Lolos

The first volume of Vasilis Lolos's Last Call was published in 2007.  I think, taking that into account, I can be forgiven for being utterly lost when I started to read the second volume, which was published last week.

Lolos is an artist who first came on my radar for his excellent work on Rick Spear's Pirates of Coney Island series, which started around the time that I came to realize how great Image Comics were in the last 00s.  I know that Lolos has had his problems over the last few years, so I'm not surprised that it took almost six years for this manga-sized book to be completed, and I'm happy to see that the artist is working again.  (Again, for contrast, Pirates of Coney Island has still not been finished).

In this volume, young Sam is still on the strange extra-dimensional train that he and his friend Alec boarded in the first volume.  Alec had fallen off, and much of this volume follows him through his adventures, which involve him becoming a cop on some planet where there is only one other human - his superior officer.

Now Alec is back on the train, and his old friend Sam is the same age as when Alec last saw him (Alec is now an adult).  There are train-based hijinks involving Sam avoiding the ticket-taking monster of a conductor, and really, the story doesn't make a lot of sense.

What Lolos is going for here is more of a kinetic, fast-paced surrealist adventure, and on those terms it works well.  Lolos is an exciting artist, and has plenty of strange ideas to cram into this book.  It is nowhere near being a very notable book (other than for its scheduling problems), but it's a fun, diverting read.

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