Adventures with an Amoeba

I've recently been reading the Amoeba Adventures collection of mini-comics by Nik Dirga, and they're a lot of fun in a very specific way, with a sense of proper ambition that feels like it has faded away from cheap and cheerful superhero comics in recent years.

Nik is a pal of mine who reads this godforsaken blog, so I'm not about to be publicly mean to him here (I'll do that in person when he visits next month), but even without that real-life connection, I would recommend his comics. 

Nik has been publishing his Amoebea Adventure mini-comics for more than three decades, and after a long hiatus, has been pumping out the issues on recent years. 

And they're just hugely ambitious for a small press comic-  not just a lot of dumb jokes, but a proper mythology, a sense of trying to get the most of out of the format. They remind me a lot of Scott McCloud's wonderful Zot! comics, grounding crazy sci-fi ideas in rich characterization, (and some proper laughs). 

Nik has gone back to his idiosyncratic world and fleshed it out in the recent comics, getting some proper middle-aged angst into his story of an immortal protoplasm - I'm still slightly haunted by one segment where a major villain drops dead of a heart attack at a bus stop. But he's also put out a print collection of his favourite issues, which you can find here. You can also read a bunch of them for free here.

I'm just so proud to have a pal who doesn't just sit there and moan about how useless most comics are, and actually walks the walk and does his own. We could all learn something from that.