Excepts from: Stephen's review of The Perhapanauts Annual 2008 (reprinted from "Insulin Funk")
Let me begin by saying that this comic book is not quite as awkward as its name, which I am unsure whether to pronounce “Perhap-OH-nauts” or “Perhap-UH-nauts,” I suppose it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that this comic book is actually pretty dern entertaining, if somewhat derivative of Hellboy and other such series…The events that transpire are quite in fitting with this sort of tale, charmingly using the real life quasi-urban myth of the Jersey Devil as the springboard for getting the Perhapanauts into all of their diverse action, as each uses his or her special ability to combat the monster, or otherwise deal with the situation…The members of the team are so diverse that it’s sometimes like watching a even more extreme version of the politically correct cartoons from the nineties (Captain Planet, anyone?). Do we really need a cute girl ghost, a chupacabra, a fairy, a Sasquatch, a telepath, AND someone who is maybe from the future or another dimension or something, as well as several other characters whose special abilities I have forgotten? ... I suppose that this sort of super specialization is fairly typical with superhero teams, but the attempted realism of the comic begins to get stretched a little thin when the main characters are each so idiosyncratic that it’s hard to imagine them getting anything practical done…the overall theme of other dimensions destabilizing our own has some potential, as long as those other dimensions aren’t all just variations on hell, and perhaps delve into some Lovecraftian themes as the series progresses.
Read the whole dern thing here: http://insulinfunk.net/2008/02/20/guest-review-perhapanauts-annual-2008/
