Ok, first of all, is this supposed to be Marion Barry? I know it’s quoting Dr. King, but that’s who it looks more like. Why is Marion Barry a talking orange penis? I just started this review and already I’m a little scared.
I kid, but the alien designs in Jonathan Rosenberg’s Scenes From A Multiverse are all pretty unique and clever. His art style is cartoonish and expressive but droll, bringing to mind a lot of old school underground comics.
The real draw though is the writing, as he uses his alien characters as a sounding board for whatever is in the news, relevant to modern culture or anything generally on his mind.
While there are a small handful of recurring characters in the Multiverse, including but not limited to a group of incompetent treasure hunters named the Dungeon Divers and a marauding group of bunnies (shades of Sluggy Freelance?), most of the strips are in the gag-a-day format. Occasionally we get a short story that runs for a few strips, my favorite so far being a spy drama starring a Hitler clone. No, the “clone of Hitler” thing isn’t new, but this one worked for me.
Rosenberg has a wide net for subject matter, tackling politics, social issues, religion in the form of its deity the Corn God, the occasional parody, a dash of bathroom here and there, or something conceived just for the sake of being weird. The political strips aren’t particularly subtle and are among the most biting, so let that be a warning depending on where your ideology lies.
There’s a good deal of Futurama in the tone of Multiverse, what with at least more than half of the population portrayed as being either out of their mind or blissfully stupid, and its various societies and governments as deeply corrupt and/or dysfunctional. The alien worlds are well developed with a number of allusions (both vague and blatant) to real world affairs, mixed in with nods to various science fiction tropes.
Since most of the characters are essentially one-shots, many of them admittedly are strawmen for the points the author hopes to make. Rosenberg sort of works like a comedian in this sense, as most stand-up routines don’t have seriously developed characters. You’re not going to find any mood shifts or traces of Cerebus Syndrome here, this is a strip purely meant for laughs and maybe the occasional opinion. Some of the punch lines will depend on your viewpoints, but I think Multiverse (you can find it here) has sharp enough material to keep most readers happy.