Strange Tales

One-sentence summary: Regardless if you like indies for their off-beat humor or their unflinching address of real themes, these stories will serve you well.

I wasn't sure what to make of Strange Tales when I heard it announced. So many indie creators have an anti-superhero passion that I wondered if it would be a self-loathing collection, but that was never the case. The closest you have to that are the direct parodies, like the Spider-Man redux in issue three, or the Kupperman story in issue one, but even these aren't done mockingly. Instead, you mostly have stories like Bagge's three-part Hulk story where Hulk is torn between two vastly different women who want bizarrely similar things (side note: Bagge did this story years ago, and Marvel just got around to finding a venue to publish it, deciding it was too racy for inclusion in an all-audience Hulk revue). I particularly liked the Hornschemeier Molecule Man story as far as the more serious stories are concerned. Though only two pages, Jeffrey Brown's Fantastic Four story probably had me laughing the most of any thing in the three issues.

All in all, it succeeded quite well at what it was going for: give general comic fans a different, generally humorous take on some beloved characters while introducing several indie creators to a larger crowd (some, like Sakai, most nerds at least peripherally know, but I had actually never heard of Hornschemeier prior to this, along with many of the others).

I unabashedly like revue books, at least when they're not just an excuse to dump some online-exclusive stories. I think it does a mind good to read comics (superhero and not) not written in either 22 or 110/132 page increments. For me, while I consider myself a fairly decent comic nerd, I really don't have a ton of knowledge of the indie scene due to various reasons, so this easy method of getting to know some names and styles was worth it for that alone.