One of the many problems with smallpress is that this whole 'creator control' thingy means that no-one actually needs to listen to critiscism, its not like a bad review means they aren't allowed to write again or their story won't be bought, a handful of people might actually listen to my opinion and buy a comic i reccomend, but how will that affect the big budget sales of comics such as those produced by Blink Twice? Well from the quality of the production values i'd say 'not much'.

The problem with Malcolm Magic is that Robin Etherington seems to think he is writing for comics with an A3 page size, which he isn't, and as such i opened this stylish and fun looking issue only to be confronted with two pages of tiny, tiny pictures and some of the most dense text this side of a Penguin Classics David Copperfield preface. This made me put the comic straight down again until i had a couple of hours and a magnifying glass handy. So not really one for the casual readers.

The art (Lawrence Eytherington) is amazing, gorgeous, amusing and distinctive, as well as wonderfully coloured in places (different art styles and colour represent alternative universes) but too crowded and reduced to be appreciated, making it very difficult to know what is going on until after at least one re-read. This is not aided by the slightly off-pacing which is ambitiously cinematic but rarely pulls it off.

An then here's the kicker, turns out that after a hard slog through twenty pages, nothing actually happened.

The plot to #10 is 'Malcolm and his friends meet a crazy ballon lady.'

Like an episode of Lost, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere and dawdles on subplots that aren't very interesting. I can see what the creators are trying to do, they are trying to produce a rich Discworld-esque universe, but it's too cliched to be interesting and not funny enough to be parody, though i think they think that it is.

In the back of the comic is an advert for the guys' new comic series 'moon', and if they have tightened up the pace, and relaxed on the panel count per page, it could be pretty good. But i'm not that desperate to see if Malcolm really is the chosen-one in future issues...

Their snazzily presented site is www.studioblinktwice.com

and you can order it online for the pretty reasonable-for-colour-printing price of £3.00

PS. Douglas? Have you been fired from your day-job or something? Because the amount of comics you are reviewing isn't giving me a good feeling about the richness of your social-life.