Comic Review: Riding The Stars With The Little White Mouse

Little White Mouse is the best comic book you're not reading. It's your fault Paul Sizer has to sling hash at the local McPerkins (the midnight shift too - for shame you people!) And it's your fault I could never find this book on the rack at my local comic shop when it first came out. Every month I had to pour over every page of Previews until my eyes bled in the futile hope that I'd catch LWM before it disappeared into the miasma of reorder hell. It sucked trying to track this comic down on a monthly basis. It was almost as if nobody but me (and possibly the gals over at Sequential Tart) ever read the damned thing, and worse, it had a microscopic publisher better suited to churning out Bristol board pages and sketchpads than putting out a regular comic book.

Fortunately for all of us, somebody at BLP thought it might be a good idea to let Paul Sizer work his magic on two of the best graphic collections to grace the comics reading public since Bendis' last spined edition of Powers. Not only that, but (gasp) they're keeping it in print. Now you have no excuse. Go out and buy this comic! Buy two and give one to your indigent friend who always borrows your mags, but never seems to have enough money to get his own. Read this comic. It will clear up your acne, babes will suddenly find you interesting, and people will start taking you seriously. Well, probably not, but you'll get a damned fine read out of the deal. And your indigent friend will definitely be interested enough to pick up the next collection for himself. Though he probably won't get one for you.

I discovered Paul Sizer and his creation Loo (the title character) at the 2001 Wizard Convention in Chicago. He was crammed into the artists' ghetto at the back of the Con with the other forgotten creators. You've seen them, the artists and writers published by small independent companies (and the even lower creatures who eke out their meager existence self-publishing). They're the ones who stare at you with haunted eyes as you breeze by them in your blissful shopping frenzy. If you look at them you'll see faces painted with equal parts quiet desperation and hope (it helps if you wear sunglasses and look down as you pass their tables). Blue Line Pro had just collected his first Little White Mouse mini-series into their inaugural Perfect Collection, and they'd obviously spent enough money on the man to set him up with a giant velveteen display screen. Nobody else had a divider that big, so it was enough to draw me in.

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. …

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