I don’t usually review comics, but since I had to do a review on Mark Tatulli‘s Silent But Deadly: Another Lio Collection for the Early Reviewers for LibraryThing.com I thought that I might as well share it with you.

I wasn’t familiar with Lio before reading Silent But Deadly. Our local paper doesn’t carry it (and I don’t actually read our local paper anyway, but it finds it’s way into the house and the comics are saved for me). I do have a Calvin and Hobbes collection and I’m fond of Pearls Before Swine, Non Sequitor, Dilbert, Bloom County and Farside to name a few.

Lio is a cross between Calvin and Hobbes and Farside. I’ll let you wrap your brain around that for a minute before I go on.

Instead of Hobbes, Lio has a pet squid. Lio is darker than Calvin and Hobbes: His father is generally unlikeable and Lio is a titch on the psychotic side. Like Farside and some of its descendants, there is very little dialogue in Lio, but the message is always clear and usually funny. I liked it.

My other half read it (a devout Calvin and Hobbes fan) and had this to say:

Well that was funny, but not as funny as Calvin and Hobbes. The kid’s a bit of a psychopath and the humour is more on the sick side. An awful lot of innocents get eaten for the amusement of the kid with the misspelled name. The father comes off as a very unsympathetic character, unlikeable.

Every tenth one is really funny. Whereas half of the Calvin and Hobbes strips were funny.

If you pick this up, my favourite strip is on page 96: The Ultimate Fighter Competition (Classic Pooh vs. Disney Pooh). That pretty much tells you all you need to know about both my and Mark Tatulli’s sense of humour.