BOOM! studios is debuting a new comic series written and drawn by Roger Landridge called Snarked! (Landridge also does The Muppet Show comic for BOOM! as well as The Mighty Thor for Marvel.) In a review on the Geeks of Doom website, Henchman21 describes the premise:
Snarked centers on two characters, Wilberforce J Walrus and Clyde McDunk, also known as the Carpenter. If you’re familiar with Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, you may recognize the names of those characters. Snarked takes the characters from Carroll’s poem, and puts them in their own little universe. In this introductory issue, we meet the two main characters and get a good sense of their personalities. Walrus is a grifter, a cheat, a smooth talker, and a layabout. The Carpenter is stupid. He is a dupe, a rube, and a simpleton. There is a Laurel and Hardy feel to their relationship that is perfectly expressed within the first few pages. We’ve all read these types of characters before, but there is still humor to be mined from them by a skilled writer.
What I liked most about Snarked is something that I also enjoy about books like The Unwritten or Kill Shakespeare, which is that they are stories based on literary works, but I don’t feel like I have to have read those base stories before reading the new interpretations. There are a lot of Lewis Carroll in-jokes that I do recognize: the newspaper for the town that Walrus and Carpenter live in is called the Jabberwock; the King of the town is the Red King, and a few others.
Snarked #0 (“it’s very easy to have more than nothing”) will be released August 2011 for $1.00.
UPDATE: PopMatters website had some more interesting information in their review, adding that “the original version of ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ is included in its entirety in the bonus pages of the comic, along with Langridge’s own parody version.” And some more pictures of inside:
