When Team Atrox was ready to publish its first collection of Atrox Comics, we asked Bigfoot to write the introduction.   He seemed well-suited for the task, considering his enthusiasm for cultural criticism as well as his key supporting role in the narrative.  This is what he gave us:

When they asked me to write the foreword to the first Atrox mini, my first thought was, “Have I been confused with someone else?” Was there no reclusive Irish funnybook author available? Had the staff writers for Freaks and Geeks gone missing? Had Kevin Smith choked on his own porcine face?

Shouldn’t the task of introducing a comic book fall to an actual comic book fan?

Truth be told, I’ve had little interest in sequential art since the death of Winsor McCay. On the other hand, it could hardly matter who should pen these meager paragraphs, since, regardless of authorship, their text-only format would only prompt the average comics reader to flip immediately to the nearest illustrated page. So, never one to shy away from a challenge, I decided to paw through the sample strips sent me in order to determine how I might best condemn them.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered, upon reading, that the Atrox’s adventures are, in fact … adequate.

I might actually recommend them to certain well-meaning readers, perhaps those who with age have become demented and easily disoriented, and thus require pictorial supplements to the printed word; or alternately, those whose wrists have become so brittle that they can no longer lift an actual book.

For these strips are not without their charm. Though the comic fan will be disappointed at its lack of spandex-bound idiot men and blinding Amazonian mammaries, I found Leslie Levings’s art quite appealing, not unlike the clumsy doodles of a dull but kindly child. Maybe you’ve found a similar scribble clasped behind a magnet on a neighbor’s “fridge.” And though there’s an absence of hipster twentysomethings pop-culture-referencing their way through stale sitcom romances whilst struggling to decide which scarf looks best with their tracksuit top, Jeff Stone’s pleasant scripts still capture something of the current zeitgeist, when awkward silence passes for a punchline, and when anything beyond an eighth-grade education seems to preclude one from appearing on television.

In short, there are worse ways to spend ten seconds out of one’s week.

Bigfoot
The HasBean Coffeeshop
Custer, South Dakota

 

Bigfoot lives in the forest and is an occasional contributor to The New Yorker, Slate Magazine, and Cryptozoology Insider.

Read more Classic Atrox Comics HERE.