I got hold of this pair at the Thing 2007 which just goes to show how powerful the extrapolatory abilities of Andy Luke must be that he was able to create a comic based on a new upcoming summer blockbuster and make it fairly similar to the end result using only the teaser trailer for references. The Transformers were created by Michael Bay and consist of robots in disguise, which would be a far better tagline in my opinion than the lame 'some will come to destroy, others will come to protect' or whatever it was on the posters. The comic begins with some pretty humorous stuff, mostly on the nature of the disguises the transformers assume and how you can't trust anything to be what it seems- satire. But god knows what happens after that, things are a bit of a mess and jump around alot, but there are some scenes that are funny, and would be more so had I known what exactly was happening. What I was really thinking about this one was 'what's the point?' It's a series of shorts that don't really go anywhere and don't really say anything. But in line with Monkeys Might Puke you get a feeling that there's something going on in there if only you can work it out.

His Jeremy Kyle comic is a far better beast, more focused and sense-making. But again I don't follow what Andy is trying to achieve, he gives JK an agenda so that he can interview american governement members, and that seems to be the agenda Andy agrees with. But the bullying, biased, rude and nasty methods JK uses in his interview don't exactly encourage agreement. I think this defeats the object of the comic, which on the back Andy explains is to encourage people to politley protest about their governments actions, but the reader is put off agreeing with that viewpoint because of the actions of the mascot in the comic.

At the end of the day, and I'm talking mostly about the JK comic here, Andy is doing something different by using comics as something other than entertainment, something which I don't think there is enough of in smallpress. He is taking advantage of creative control to it's fullest extent, in a way that people writing a noirish thriller with a less mainstream art style can only dream of. He should be lauded for that, but at the moment his work seems more to pursuade me that I should do a more coherent political comic myself, rather than follow Andys agenda.

But inspiring people to think about doing that at all is a success in itself is it not?

Pick his comics up for some money when you see him or visit his website:

http://andyluke.livejournal.com/profile