Book Review: Where's It At Sugar Kat? The Thin Of The Land by Ian Carney and Woodrow Phoenix - Page 2

Flash forward to later in the day. The cashier at my comics store gave me a funny look. "But you love Micronauts. You're always on about them, about how cool the toys were and how much you miss buying them off the shelf. I've even heard you wishing you'd been a Japanese kid so that you could have bought those..." He fumbled for the word so I filled in the blank for him. "Microman." "Yeah, " He thumped his index finger on the cash wrap a few times for emphasis. "You love all that stuff. Why wouldn't you want the new comic book too?"

I stared back at him, blinking slowly and doing a passable impression of the video store clerk earlier that morning. "Look," I said resolutely. "I just can't... okay. I can't support this comic. If it were any good at all I would but... Look, I read your preview copy and it was just... just bad."

He shrugged, "Whatever man. I don't know what's up your ass, but this baby is gonna sell like hotcakes."

My hands were balled into fists, and I was shaking badly. I was ready to come over the counter at him and wrap my hands around his swill-merchant's neck. Fortunately, my girlfriend, who'd been pawing through the Indy graphic novels in the hope of finding something she'd missed by Ted Naifeh, and praying to the God of slightly psycho boyfriends that I wouldn't make another scene, chimed in, "What about this one? It's kind of cool, and it looks like Saturday morning cartoons."

My girlfriend, (who is much smarter than I) stepped between me and the cash wrap, and put the book in my hands. At first glance it wasn't all that impressive. The artwork was decent, clean lines but fairly cartoony. The cover was the most obnoxious shade of orange. It didn't look like much, but I have always trusted her judgment. So I bought Where's It At Sugar Kat? The Thin Of The Land and that evening I forgot all about my day spent dealing with the retail elite. I was transported away, back to a time where the entire world was laid out in front of me for a six-hour stretch every Saturday morning.

Ian Carney and Woodrow Phoenix get it. With Where's It At Sugar Kat? they have distilled the physical essence of Saturday morning cartoons and bottled it up in 100 pages of story. This is nostalgia the way it should be; homage, not hype. They have given us a complete, multi-layered cartoon in the form of a black and white graphic novel. Where's it at Sugar Kat? hearkens back to when we were kids and between seven in the morning and one in the afternoon, once every week, we were all transported to other lands. It reminds me of simpler days when all we needed was a television, a good sugar buzz and some milk.

Article Author: Dan Traeger

Dan Traeger has been a sporadically published short story writer and essayist for longer than he cares to admit. After finally caving in to external pressures he finally broke his long running and quite comfortable writers block and started his own blog. …

Visit Dan Traeger's author page — Dan Traeger's Blog