It goes without saying that Eric Johnson is a guitar god from Austin, Tx tight end for the 49er’s talented young webcomic stripper. I met the arch-duke in 2004 when he answered a casting call for 24 Hour Comics alumni. His subsequent appearance in the blockbuster documentary 24 Hours Later earned him an Academy Award and launched his career into hyperdrive. Nowadays, he can seen hobnobbing with the likes of Bruce Vilanch and Joey Lawrence, and his hit animated sitcom about luminescent Oriental ursines has garnered him critical acclaim, worldwide celebrity, and seventy-four paternity suits.
Ok, so I’m not funny. But Eric Johnson’s Radioactive Panda is funny, and here’s 3 reasons you should read it:
1. It’s some of the best sci-fi comedy I’ve seen since Red Dwarf.
2. Young Master Johnson is a budding comics talent who deserves to be read.
3. It’s the most madcap genre-blending mayhem you’ll find that’s actually coherent and well-written.
Radioactive Panda Vol. 1 collects two years and three “versions” of the online strip (www.radioactivepanda.com). Right away, you’ll notice that the strip starts out in full color. This means that Johnson is either insane, the love-child of Will Eisner and Barry Allen, has a LOT of free time, or doesn’t publish all that frequently. Unfortunately (from a comedic perspective and other ways), it’s the last; a quick flip through the book shows that each strip is an obvious labor of love. Johnson’s art is thought-out, detailed, and meticulous, with scripting and punchlines that dance between needle-fine dryness and Mr. Creosote. It’s
not uncommon for Johnson to take a few weeks between updates, but it’s never for lack of effort.
Normally, it irritates me when artists wear their influences on their sleeves, but there’s something very charming about Johnson’s cracked-out pop-culture obsessions, which range from Zim! to Monty Python to Star Wars to any number of anime series. The main characters of the strip are mad scientists with a werewolf assistant, a lair in the basement of a Chinese restaurant, and zombie neighbors, and when the author’s head is ripped off by an angry mob in strip #4, you’ve got a good idea where the rest of the strip is heading. There are the standard jokes about Star Wars, international superspies, the day jobs of zombies, and mechanics of making a new monster out of Mommy and Daddy; and yet somehow, at the heart of the sci-fi weirdness and random TV-show references, the strip is just your average, ordinary, Man-Playing-God roommate comedy.
The strip itself is dry, witty, insane fun, but I do have one complaint about the book itself. Since the publication of Megatokyo Vol. 1, many webcomic compilations have followed Piro’s lead and included commentary on the bottom of each page. While this doesn’t interfere with the reading of each strip, it’s certainly unnecessary and, in the case of Radioactive Panda, doesn’t really add anything substantial. I realize it’s a sizing issue, and that empty space is worse than commentary; I just wish the books could be better-sized or that the space could be filled with something more entertaining.
