Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got five new comics plus a three hard cover collections. Yeah, it was a big week:

Sigil – 4

Batman: Gates of Gotham – 2

All Nighter – 1

Dark Horse Presents – 2

Flashpoint: Lois Lane – 1

“Captain Easy – Volume 2

“Dr. Strange: Into The Dark Dimension”

“Metal Hurlant Collection Vol. 1”

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

“Reid Fleming: World’s Toughest Milkman” by David Boswell

This is a book that I wasn’t sure if I was interested in buying. I purchased a couple of Reid Fleming issues back in the mid Eighties but I don’t remember much about them except that they were mildly amusing but left me confused. It was a hard book to find back then and I never took the time to track all the issues down. But one week things were slow at my local comic shop and they had this in so I decided to get it.

I can see now why I was confused way back when. Characters come and go and are never given much of a reintroduction when they show up again. Since it was somewhere around issue three that I read this back in the Eighties I might not have understood the nature of his relationship with his boss, his supervisor, or some of his random lady friends. Reading the story all as one it’s clear but not so much if you only read part three.

Reid Fleming, as the title says, is a milkman. I’m guessing that even way back in the Eighties that was a job that didn’t exist anymore but that is part of the joke. Reid is a hell-raising milkman who drives fast, wrecks milk trucks often, and gets into fights at the drop of a hat. He doesn’t seem to be motivated by anything beyond what is in front of him at any given moment. He has a supervisor who hates him but the owner of the company gives Reid the benefit of the doubt whenever trouble happens. Of course the supervisor is right as the reader knows.

The artwork is not exceptionally well drawn but is filled with hatching and cross hatching to make it interesting. The storytelling is good but it’s a little stiff in the beginning. Overall I think Boswell does as much with the style as he can and it’s generally pretty endearing.

There is a pointlessness to “Reid Fleming” overall. The stories have no plots to speak of besides what is immediately happening and I never got the sense that there was any type of a story moving forward. Everybody just exists and everything just happens. This is echoed in Reid sometimes watching his favorite TV show, “Dangers of Ivan”. The show’s main character was in a coma. Reid watched every week to see if he’d wake up. After five years Ivan finally woke up.

“Reid Flemming” embraces pointlessness but throws in sight gags, violence, romance, revenge, car crashes, and weirdos. It’s not for every one but is an interesting book anyway.