Lord of the Rings Trilogy
By Marc Bell and Peter Thompson

Thompson and Bell will eat your heart out, Peter Jackson

I have no intention of ever doing work for one of the super hero publishers (I'm not saying I wouldn't, just that it's not my intention), but let's just say that I become an editor at Marvel tomorrow with one mandate: show the world that you are the greatest editorial genious in the history of comics. The first thing I do is grab a great big green money sack emblazoned with a single giant dollar sign full of Loonnies and make my way to Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm sure the trip will involve bribing some mercenary water plane pilot, a native guide that refuses to take me past the McDonalds on Main Street ("Cursed, eh! Cursed, eh!" Don't go aboot dose parts, eh!") and an Indian burial tomb booby trapped with flying, razor-sharp moose antlers. It will be worth it, though. Because I will finally find the Colonel Kurtz of Canada, the mad Marc Bell, and I will offer him the bulging money sack ("There's more where that came from") and beg him to take over "The Fantastic Four." Mine will be hailed as the greatest mind to work in super hero comics. Ever.

Okay, the metric tonnage of hatemail we'd recieve would be incalculable, but posterity—posterity would fete our memories like pharoahs.

Until then, I'll have to be satisfied with discovering new comics by my absolute favorite cartoonist working today as they appear in anthologies, Fantagraphics comics, gallery shows and minicomics like the ones I picked up at APE.

I feel so underqualified reviewing Bell's work, and the few reviews I've read seem to run into the same problem. If ever there was an artist that better exemplified the maxim of the problem of 'dancing about architecture', I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a name.

What do we have here? First, the fundamentals. Bell's "Lord of the Rings" "adaptations" (oy, there's gonna be a lot of quotation marks in this review, aren't there?) are three 8-page minis printed on a sweet, cream-colored heavy-stock paper done in conjunction with Peter Thompson. I guess I shouldn't give all the credit to Bell, but I'm less familiar with Thompson's work (mental note: fix that. Stiney! Get me Thopson's comics! And a danish!).

Anyway, this collaboration is perfect. These are two guys that work seemlessly together.

I feel like I'm cleaning my bedroom instead of doing my math homework. There HAS to be a way to get into this.

There's a mini for each of the three "Lord of the Rings" books/movies (live action and animated)—there seems to be a comentary on both.
"The Fellowship of The Ring's" cover features an elephant with an unshaven muzzle. And a sort of "nubby" trunk. With a ringed human hand growing out of it, the overlaps "invisibled" out "Sue Storm style." He's a "self-satisfied" elephant with "man lips." I suppose. His skull extends upwards and terminates in a sort of "nubby" volcano formation. Growing out is an "invisibled" man with a fortissimo tattoo, a three-fingered hand inner ear, a "patched shoe" nose and "peanut ameobas" in his brain. Also, the title is decorated in a variety of personal iconagraphy that probably represents something important to the artists—or is just decorative. The shading on the trunk skull is delicately hatched, just like the linework itself is delicate.

I don't know if I can do this for every page.

If Gandlaf isn't bursting out of your head, than maybe this hamburger should beat you.

These guys live in a world where a personmight have a nose filled with popsicle sticks. Or a man with a tie. Or runny snot. Or blowing bubbles. Or plumbing. Or wires. Or porches. Or clusters. Or mathematical equations. Or condos. Or faces. Or... I can't hopefully describe the nose of (possibly?) Gandalf on the next to last page of "Return of the King." These are just SOME of the noses. And just the noses. And mostly just the labeled ones (the artists love labels).

Bell and Thompson are working on a level that defies traditional "comics speak." Each page is one splash panel/meta panel. Your eye is going all over the place, being draw to this detail, then that one. Then that one. There's no real pacing or storytelling to speak of. There's just individual pieces you have to wrestle on their own before moving on. And then re-read each book. I suggest hundreds of times if you've got nothing else to do. Everything is just beautiful, from the more "simplified" pages: "wicked 'stache," to the insanely complex: a "relaxed" "hamburger monster" carrying a club with a nail in it. Standing on a lightly populated "landscape" of "ghost men", crackers and a "witch." Except the landscape is another "hamburger monster" of a different species ( "lucky" one). There's another sort of "deli meat" monster on top. Maybe? Another little "man." And a two-faced (one head is "detachable"), long sideburned, bipolar monster that wants you to "Mix it up" and "Pile it up" (but he whispers the last part!).

If there was a drug that had the same effect I get from a close read of these books, every zombie movie ever made would come true. Someone would pipe it into the water and all our brains would melt. You know how people shrooming narate what they are doing (or what they think they're doing) and have to tell you what things are or mean (or they think they are and mean)? This is shrooming exploded from the mind onto the page.

Except its mixed with a couple of other substances I couldn't begin to identify.

There's a child's approach to the way things are just built on top of each other and within each other. To stretch an earlier metaphor, these guys ARE architects. They are planning constructs for a theme park that Disneyworld would go to and never return from. If Disneyworld had the mobility and personality to get there.

When I was younger, my parents had a number of of atlases, dictionaries and encyclopedias. It was the rare family dinner when at least ONE of these weren't opened for reference (to settle some argument or answer a question). And no, you wouldn't be the first person to make fun of my family for this. Well, these guys are also cartographers and lexographers all for a world that can't exist, but should. It really should. Like J.R.R. Tolkein—except replacing the Victorian love of unnecessarily flowery exposition with a visual vocabulary designed to fight back over a couple of malteds. This stuff is like a secret physics book that giggles with you.

—Justin J Fox