COMBAT COLIN 3 REVIEW!

Title: COMBAT COLIN 3
Format: AMERICAN COMIC SIZED. COLOUR COVERS B/W INTERIORS
Length: 40 pages Price: £3.50
Publisher: LEW STRINGER COMICS
Creators: PLOTTED, SCRIPTED, PENCILLED, INKED, LETTERED & COLOURED BY LEW STRINGER
Available from: http://lewstringer.com/page7.htm 
Review: Colin and his sidekick (Semi-Automatic Steve) are back for a third issue! This time it’s reprinting many of the full-page comic strips from UK Marvel’s ‘Transformers’ weekly between 1989 and 1990.
No-longer hemmed in by the half-page format Lew’s imagination soars on these strips. In fact he uses that full range of his talents by letting some of the stories unfold over multi-issue story arcs. This let’s Colin visit Venus and even get kidnapped to a village in North Wales in a wonderful spoof of 1960’s TV show ‘The Prisoner’!
There’s a wonderful daftness to these tales… For example, Colin’s rocket-ship sits with a stick in a giant milk bottle… A Colin drills to the Earth’s core at one point with “A very long drill bit”!
And there’s also lovely subversions of storytelling norms and the format of the strip… One strip has some key balloons written in ‘Combat code’ (along with a key for cracking it)… Another strip is taken over by Colin and Steve’s girlfriends in ‘The Giggly Sisters’ Nice Page’ (Next week – How to knit a B-52 bomber!)
This is a masterclass in humour strip writing (and illustration.) It makes me wish that Lew would write something book length!
 Not only that but there’s a lovely feature about Odham’s 1960s comics line – Wham! Pow! Smash! Terrific and Fantastic – in the back of the issue.
So put on your combat trousers… grab your atomic underpants… and settle down in the combat shed for a damn good read!

John A. Short