Interesting Tymes
Staff: Dave McCluskey and Andrew Morrice
Overview:
Tales from the crypt meets 2000s Cartoon Network.
Review:
I gotta admit, Interesting Tymes is not the sort of comic that normally falls in my wheelhouse and didn’t particularly interest me. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place and that you won’t like it. It’s definitely got an appeal to a certain demographic, but that demographic isn’t mine so please keep that in mind as you read this and forgive me for the rather short review.
Interesting Tymes has a cartoony art style that kind of reminds me of Cartoon Network’s animation style in the early 2000s and it’s not bad per say (it is definitely not a “big name comic style” by any stretch of the imagination). It works for what it is going for and when it’s good it’s good.
The plot of this comic is kind of a “Tales from the Crypt” style collection of 6 stories. I honestly didn’t connect with any of the tales as they were rather simplistic in terms of the content they covered- but when you are aiming at a younger demographic (as the art style implies) it’s a good choice. They had a bad kid/santa bit, one at sea, one involving clowns, another with little red, and a kind of generic “haunted house” story. All the stories had kind of a darker theme so Tales from the Crypt is an appropriate comparison (On a weird sidenote, I still don’t know what they title had to do with the story).
The lettering on this comic was unfortunate. There were a number of clipping errors with the characters, there were some less than clear fonts applied, and a few other little things. While we are harping on technical aspects of it, lets just pull off the bandaid. The comic had this issue where clipped parts of a page would appear on the far edge of the next page. This should have easily been caught with a quick look over and is probably an export error related to the definition of page borders.
Overall, while it’s definitely not in my wheelhouse it just feels like someone just kind of wrote these with no heart. I know that’s a mean thing to say and I’m sure a lot of time was invested into it but it doesn’t bring anything new to the table. It’s just a rehashing of old characters, themes, and topics that doesn’t amount to anything really new. If you are looking for a comic for a little boy to read, you could do worse. Give it a read!
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