ERIK LARSEN'S HERCULIAN

Erik Larsen's giant-sized 8x12-inch comic book one-shot, the 48-page Herculian, features a 24-hour comic that Larsen produced at a friend’s house during a single 24-hour period. The book also includes a smattering of bizarrely humorous pieces, both short and shorter. One is entitled “Mickey Maus,” wherein a pasty-faced Mickey shows up with a bunch of Spiegelman mice, all in the striped uniforms of WWI Nazi concentration camps; Mickey says, “I guess those Nazis aren’t all bad: at least they’re letting us have a shower.”

There are six one-page comics entitled “Reggie the Veggie,” starring a man with no legs who sits, throughout — all six pagers — on his wheeled cart, motionless, with virtually nothing happening. In one, a fly lands on his nose and then flies off; in another, Reggie is snowed on. Wonderful, sick nonsense.

The title piece, a 24-page epic, is entitled “Guy Talk” and takes place in a diner where two friends have met to have a cup of coffee. One of them tells the other that he plans to get married; the other guy, disparaging marriage, tries to talk him out of it. While this is earnestly transpiring, the superhero Herculian shows up and engages in a savage fist-fight with a buxom superheroine and her vicious dog. The guys continue their talk, oblivious to the property damage and all-out havoc being wrought all around them. The ending is another of the shaggy-dog endings that distinguish the rest of Larsen’s oeuvre in this tome. Aside from the dubious comedy (which I enthusiastically applaud), the book offers a generous display of Larsen’s best high-energy drawing, sample pages of which we append here.