| Title: | Sluggy Freelance: Little Evils | |
| Author: | Pete Abrams | |
| Rating: |  |
I've reviewed a Sluggy Freelance book before. From that and the fact that I'm reviewing another one here you can probably guess that I love the strip, and that I'm going to review this one positively as well. You'd be right if you guessed that sort of thing.
For those living under an Internet rock, Sluggy Freelance is the name of an ongoing comic strip. It's one of the biggest and most popular comic strips on the web, and its author - Pete Abrams - has the unique distinction of being one of a very few people who can earn a living producing a web comic.
There are - I believe - 10 years of Sluggy available online. You can read them all for free at http://www.sluggy.com/, and you should do so. Just be prepared to be sucked into reading for a long, long time. There are something like a ten major characters, with a half dozen or so figuring most prominently. The subjects range from single strips with a gag at the end to story arcs that go on for months. There are even movie parodies - my favorite being the parody of The Matrix. The stories range from the positively silly to the semi-serious and include The Dimension of Pain, alternate dimensions, demons of various sorts, aliens, talking animals, vampires, and... well... you get the idea.
Little Evils is a compilation of (roughly) years four, five, and six of the online strip, and as such it reprints the contents of three earlier books. But that's OK with me - you can't buy at least some of those earlier books anymore anyway, and the new format is much nicer. Besides, whatever money Pete gets from these books helps keep him working on the strip, and that's worth it.
This volume includes The Storm Breaker Saga, more about Oasis (a mentally unstable gymnastic assassin in love with Torg - one of the main characters), Kitten (a great horror tale), more of Bun-bun's ongoing war with Santa, The Quatrix, and (my personal favorite here) The Bug, The Witch, and The Robot. That last is an amazingly well developed story about possession, evil, courage and friendship, with a healthy dose of silliness on the side.
If you've never read Sluggy Freelance - and if the above sounds at all interesting - now is definitely the time to start. And once you're hooked you can buy the books - and become a Defender Of The Nifty - to help support Pete's amazing creation.
As Pete would say, this one's Pretty Darn Nifty!
