THREE FINGERS (Top Shelf)
Written and drawn by Rich Koslowski
Collects nothing, this is a legit OGN!!!
After espousing the awesomeness of Rich Koslowski’s 3 Geeks comic and being pleasantly and violently surprised by his mostly prose The List, I was honestly a little worried that I wouldn’t like his original graphic novel Three Fingers. It’s not that I didn’t think the book would be good, just that it might be a little out of the geeky wheelhouse I had build for him in my head. Thankfully, my worries were unfounded and this book turned out to be highly enjoyable, even though it wasn’t really what I thought it would be. I assumed the book would be about a hard-luck Mickey type character, but I didn’t really think beyond that part. I was sort of right, but mostly completely off base.

The book is written and drawn like a documentary, which is actually pretty fun. See, the idea is that cartoon characters or Toons, as they’re dubbed in the book, are actual living creatures. They’re used as a metaphor for minorities, which is kind of interesting and potentially off putting. The movie still jumps off from the Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney archetypes, but this time the Disney character discovered Mickey instead of inventing him. There are plenty of other Toon analogs for characters like Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig, Sylvester and plenty of others, but the main thrust of the story is a conspiracy that said many Toons were having a surgery done to remove a finger on each hand so they’d be more like Mickey (in this case Rickey the Rat). It goes from being a race/cartoon mash-up to being something of a mystery-thriller still told through the documentary format.

It might seem like mixing the static nature of comics with the flowing nature of documentaries wouldn’t work so well but I was surprised at how much I got into this story. It’s like watching a particularly interesting episode of a History Channel show you know nothing about. How will it end? Will the criminals be tried? What the hell is really going on? Those questions get asked and some get answered between the book’s 134+ pages. This makes me even more excited to check the recently released BB Wolf & The 3 LPs which he drew and also helped make a CD for! Sounds like lots of fun.