Somebody’s First Comic Book: Knights of the Dinner Table #105

Wondering what Somebody’s First Comic Book is all about? The explanation is on this page!

TITLE: The Incredible Hack

CREDITS:
Writers: Jolly R. Blackburn, Barb Blackburn, Noah J.D. Chinn & the Brothers Grinn
Artists: Jolly R. Blackburn, Bendon Fraim, Brian Fraim, Noah J.D. Chinn & the Brothers Grinn
Publisher: Kenzer and Company

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: Nothing. It looks like this comic is making fun of The Hulk or something.

IMPRESSIONS: Okay, definitely not a Hulk parody, at least not any deeper than the cover. This thick book is actually half comic book, half magazine full of articles and features for different roleplaying games. Since I’ve been asked to read a comic book, I’ll pass on those other features and just give you my impressions of the comic stories.

Raise Yer Sights kicks off the issue with six pages of people sitting around a table talking about playing a western game. In fact “people sitting around a table talking about playing a game” is pretty much the high concept of this entire comic. There are some funny tidbits, but a lot of the jokes are going straight over my head. You’ve got to be part of the gamer mindset, I suppose, to get this stuff… and I am not.

Celebrity Hack, both features, is a little better. It’s still people sitting around a table, but it’s people I recognize – Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Mr. Spock, and one guy I think they call the Flash. It’s still a lot of gaming jokes, but familiarity with these characters makes them a bit funnier. (Apparently Batman carries around Kryptonite dice for just such an occasion.)

Then there’s On the Count of Three, which is probably the easiest-to-read story in the book (except the Celebrity ones), because it’s all about a group of gamers essentially plotting to screw one of their friends. Anybody can relate to that.

The next story is Fuzzy Knights of the Dinner Table, a story that’s pretty much identical to the others except that instead of drawings of people sitting around playing a game, the artwork is a series of photographs of stuffed animals sitting around playing a game. That one’s… weird. The Brothers Grinn end the book with “wrapping up,” which appears to be the story of some of the characters the other characters have been pretending to be.

This book may kill in the gamer market, but the jokes here just flew right past me. It wasn’t my sort of thing at all.

GRADE: C-