Weird Melvin is a gloriously weird comic. Creator Marc Hansen brings the weird to the art—not just the muscle-bound grotesques (Melvin and, later, a regular human) but also Melvin’s cyclops nemesis, Sy Cyclops. The comic starts from Sy’s perspective, as he nitrous ups his car and hits Weird Melvin full speed. Good thing Melvin’s almost indestructible. While Melvin crash lands in a kid’s bedroom, Sy goes about trying to figure out a weakness.
Luckily for everyone—though not really—there’s the in-world Weird Melvin comic, which retells his monster-hunting adventures. It’s how the kid knows about Weird Melvin but it’s also how Sy is able to figure out one of Melvin’s weaknesses.
Hansen plots it out gradually, revealing in the scenes between Melvin and the kid why the moon dust Sy is going after in the other story thread is so important. See, Weird Melvin used to be a monster, not a monster hunter. And he ate kids. Lots and lots of kids. So many kids it was hard for humans to have enough kids to keep Melvin fed, much less the other monsters.
So they teamed up and took Monster Melvin out, but then the souls of the kids he ate went to Heaven—or the Moon—and then moon rays brought Melvin back to life as a good guy monster hunter. What makes Melvin’s retelling even more engaging is his reassurances to his listener he no longer eats kids, though the kid (and the reader) can’t be sure….
Then there’s a big action finale.
Hansen sets it up like a done-in-one or a special, getting to a good conclusion, with a lot of funny moments. Not just the monster stuff either. Weird Melvin’s got a lot of jokes about comics collecting.
Like I said… it’s a weird comic; a weird, good comic. Hansen’s plotting—he does a bunch this issue in twenty pages—is excellent and his art is intricate, deliberate madness.
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