BOP! More Box Office Poison
- Posted by Johanna on September 3, 2006 at 8:20 am
- Category: Graphic Novel Reviews
- CREDITS: by Alex Robinson
- PUBLISHER: Top Shelf, $9.95 US
This slim volume is a great companion to the Box Office Poison phonebook. It reprints Alex Robinson’s short stories from the SPX anthologies (there was a piece in each volume from 1997-2001), Private Beach #4, and the color special published by Antarctic. It also contains Robinson’s 24-hour comic and a new story showing how Caprice’s friends deal with her ex-boyfriend.
Since most of these were written as stand-alone stories instead of chapters in the bigger graphic novel, they have a purity of insight and characterization that’s a pleasure to read. Some of the stories jump into the future, showing what happened to Caprice or Sherman, while others illustrate how Jane and Ed became the people they did. I’ve missed these characters; it’s nice to briefly catch up with them.
If you’ve heard about Box Office Poison but haven’t wanted to commit to the whole large book, you could give this a try as a taste. More information is available at the artist’s website.
September 3, 2006 at 12:07 pm
The “Jane in high school” story was all kinds of wonderful, and possibly my favorite of any of the Box Office Poison-related stories. It could be because that was the very first one I read, back when it was printed in one of the SPX books, but even after having read the entire BOP story, it’s still an amazing story. And Caprice may be my favorite of any of Robinson’s characters so far, so any chance to revisit her is greatly appreciated.
September 3, 2006 at 10:08 pm
I hope the book has the one-page fillers where a question would be posed to a random sampling of the characters. They provided some of my favorite BOP moments, and of course the series’ graphic novel version had to leave them out.
September 12, 2006 at 9:22 pm
I don’t know if all of them are included, but at least some of the one-page question sessions are in this volume.
October 30, 2007 at 6:50 am
[...] when we’ve all seen these stereotypes ourselves? And done better, in comics like Dork! or Box Office Poison? What insight is this book showing us about these character types? “I know people like [...]