40 pgs. full color | $6.99
If the foibles of modern society have got you down, Grayson Bear’s Al Dente is ready to take revenge against them on your behalf. A character very much in the spirit of ‘90s misanthropes like Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese, Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and Johnny Ryan’s Loady McGee, Al Dente is a vampire dog with a hair trigger temper prepared to scream insults or smash things at a moment’s notice. The interesting twist here is that he isn’t just perpetually furious—he kind of wants to be liked and is even a little willing to put himself out there, but when the inevitable disappointment comes, the fact that he saw it coming just makes his anger all the greater and his vengeance all the sweeter.
Al Dente as published by Silver Sprocket collects seven vignettes into one folded-and-stapled minicomic. (The actual comics take up a little more than half of the page count; the rest of the book contains title pages, spot illustrations, and blank pages between each story.) Though each story takes place over a few pages, the setup/punchline rhythm and consistent six-panel grid gives the reading experience a comic strip sort of feel. We follow Al as he goes on an awkward first date, stresses over his lack of social media likes, and calls a suicide hotline—for recommendations, not for help. At first blush, the plots seem kind of simplistic and crass, but Bear manages to balance the in-your-face humor (in one case, literally farting in a restaurant patron’s face and telling them “if you’re all so hungry then why don’t you EAT MY ASS!!!”) with witty jabs (“Wow a phone call instead of a DM that’s very…artisanal of you.”) and twists that find surprising insight into this seemingly one-note fury machine (the entire “Al Dente Literally Goes to Therapy” chapter, my personal favorite). To paraphrase The Simpsons, the humor works on three levels: subliminal, liminal, and superliminal. It’s the subtler stuff that makes Al Dente work a bit better than, say, Johnny Ryan’s constant, purposeful abrasiveness in Angry Christ Comix.
Bear’s artwork has a classic cartoony feel to it, simple characters with circular heads, boxy bodies, and rubbery arms drawn with a consistent, thick ink line. The colors do a great job at drawing in the eye even though they, too, are simple, just flat blues and purples and pinks. The most thoroughly modern element is the lettering, which has the feel of text messages with its simple sans serif font (is that Arial?!), lack of capitalization, and choice to take commas as only an occasional suggestion.
Al Dente isn’t presented as a character to be emulated, but Bear manages to make us feel empathy for him all the same. We’ve all wanted to lash out like Al Dente, and knowing that under the surface he’s just another insecure dude like the rest of us makes our enjoyment of when he flies off the handle just a little bit less of a guilty pleasure. | Jason Green
To order Al Dente or to check out a 4-page preview, visit SilverSprocket.net!
