Friday - January 14, 2005:

I'm not sure Zatso qualifies as a comic. It is, first and foremost, the shortest of catalogs, filled with wonderous and myriad things. It is words and pictures working together, but order's not important and any story is implied, hints at an R&D department. But I've never been one to constrain the definition of comics. For my money, 90 percent of the world wide web is one big experimental comic, but Zatso meets a bigger requirement; this stuff is thoroughly entertaining. Oh, and I've got to own me some of that glorious product, a paleolithic comb, a trip beentsy bot, primordial alphabet soup, where do I sign?

It would be fun to carry the farce a few steps further and allow visitors to add things to their shopping carts, charge them outrageous amounts of fake money and send them off to paypal or bitpass. The art's nothing spectacular, but most of the pieces do the job. The ballistic toaster illustration, for example, is priceless. I'm not sure we can look forward to any new additions to the work as the copyright notice is from 2003. I for one would like to see a new one every year and for each season.

Thanks for the submission, comic or not. Hell, perhaps we should expand the review concept to include anything and everything, family photographs, DVd's, MP3's, the latest video game system, ipods. Please address product samples that you'd like the boys to review to Robert Stevenson 12 Lyon Avenue, Greenwich, Connecticut, 06830, or not. I'm pretty sure a couple of internet folk have already got a strangle-hold on this racket (Odd Todd being the more worthwhile of the two).

-Bob Stevenson