Weapon Brown written and drawn by Jason Yungbluth

Every once in a while you find something that is so creative and awesomely simple that you really want to hate the person that had that flash of brilliance.  Jason Yungbluth is one of those people that I want to hate.  Weapon Brown is a crazy combination of post apocalyptic survival story and classic comic strip (look at the cover and guess which one). 

The story here is about a loner named Weapon Brown that is looking for some payback for a life of frustration.  There is a long list of people that screwed him over turning him into more of a machine than a man, and they are all going to pay.  He finds them one at a time while looking for the man who kidnapped his girlfriend and drug her into some sort of crazed end of the world cult.  Along the way he runs into his sister, who betrayed him, and the woman that tortured him while experimenting on his body.  None of them will ever forget it when Weapon Brown and his dog Snoopy visit them on their way to finding the cult leader, Linus (oh come on now you have to know!). 

Lets talk about the story here.  I love how Yungbluth has woven the whole Peanuts universe into Weapon Brown, while keeping to the spirit of the post-apocalyptic world.  Honestly if this was a straightforward run of the mill story in this genre I wouldn’t be all that interested in it.  But the clever ways that the characters are twisted and then inserted into Weapon Brown makes the comic so much more unique and fun to read.  The first time I sat down and read this I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to come up with next.  Not only that but when I got to the end of the comic I did something that I almost never do, which is flip back to the first page and read the whole thing again!  The best part is that the second time thru I caught even more that I had missed the first time thru. 

Of course being a comic book we have to talk about the art.  You can have the greatest story ever committed to the panels of a comic book, but if your art sucks no one is going to read it.  Yungbluth is both the author and the artist for Weapon Brown, and is equally good at both jobs.  The comic is black and white, and has an underground feel to it.  The characters are well drawn and there is a lot of detail in most all of the panels.  Not only that but Yungbluth does a great job of putting things in the background so that every time I flip thru the comic I see something that I didn’t notice before.  Really top notch work.

Bottom line here is that Weapon Brown works as both a straight end of the world story and as a satire of a classic comic strip.  It is very entertaining and is one of those rare comics that I can’t help picking up again and again.  I highly recommend this one to everyone.  For more information about Weapon Brown check them out on the web at http://www.whatisdeepfried.com/

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2009 John Shatzer