Hey, it's another comic I received in the mail! As always, I love getting these and giving them some publicity, so let's check it out!

Brandon Lehmann sent me a copy of his comic The Wizard, as he's running a Kickstarter for it to get a printed version. You can check out the Kickstarter right here, if you're so inclined.

Lehmann has been doing comics starring his evil wizard for a few years, and they're all collected here. It's kind of a hard comic to review, because it's not a narrative, just a series of gag strips. Lehmann does tell a few very short stories, but even those are just frames on which to hang jokes. Your enjoyment of the comic will rely on whether you like the jokes. It's as simple as that. Now, Lehmann does create an interesting character - the wizard is pure evil who just loves to torment children. That's it. So ... yeah.

See, the problem with gag strips is that I don't want to give away any of the jokes, but then it becomes a problem because that's all there is to it. The wizard is bored, so he goes out and does evil. He might lie to a boy by telling him that he can become king by pulling a sword from a stone even though the sword is super-glued into the stone and there's no way the boy is going to be able to pull it out. He might apply for a job as a bikini inspector. He might steal Christmas. He might steal a crazy lady's cat. He's ... you know, evil.

Not all of the jokes were to my taste, but overall, this is a pretty amusing comic. The wizard is so gleefully evil that you just have to love him, and Lehmann has no problem making him thoroughly irredeemable. He breaks the "stories" up with old-style advertisements parodying the ones you used to find in comics, which are always fun to see. Lehmann's art is interesting - the work looks fairly crude, but it works well with the tone of the book. It makes the wizard's land even more absurdist, so that the dragons living in caves seem to fit alongside the boring office workplace. Lehmann creates some interesting characters, and it's clear from some of the parodic elements - his rendition of Harry Potter and Jennifer Connelly, for instance - that he can be a very detailed draughtsman, but the more cartoonish work he does on the rest of the book is fun because it sells the craziness of the evil wizard much more.

There's not much more to say about The Wizard, because of its nature, but I'll still show you some examples from it to give you a better idea of what kind of comic it is. Here you go!

I wish I could write more about the book, but it really is better if you experience the jokes cold. If these pages fit your sense of humor, you'll probably really like The Wizard, so I encourage you to head on over to Lehmann's Kickstarter and check it out!