REVIEW: "Mine All Mine", edited by David Hopkins

MINE ALL MINE
written by David Hopkins, illustrated by various
www.antiherocomics.com

This is a unique anthology. It's one of those comix where one person, in this case David Hopkins, has written all the stories, which a roster of artists have illustrated. All of the tales are about some form of graft, from smash & grab to Nigerian e-mail scams to mere bed sheet thieving in the dead of night. Each story is exactly one page long.

Hopkins writes very well. He avoids stuffing his pages with text for the most part: there are a couple of stories that lecture, like the piece about the thief as Promethian antihero -- but these are well balanced by stories that are nicely word-free. Theft is a compelling subject, and each of the stories is interesting.

And -- very nice -- his seventeen artists are a diverse bunch of stylists, adding strong variety to the tales. Hopkins has some heavy friends; there is a helpful index of their websites and blogs in the back, so you can check out more of their work. Realists like Jake Ekiss and Chad Sell stand in contrast to ZeeS's funk blast, Cal Slayton's animation-slick abstraction, David DeGrand's bigfoot rotundity. Only one page doesn't work -- I still haven't figured out what happens in Ryan Cody's page, did the big screen TV decapitate the guy or what?

A collection as well put together as this one should be read.