Nathan Ward is a cartoonist based in Cleveland, Ohio, and despite his 22 years he doesn't try to be up-to-date but draws dirty and round figures looking at the underground humorous tradition. The first name that comes to mind watching his mutant humanoids with heads similar to a pitbull, wide mouths and prominent teeth is Basil Wolverton, perhaps filtered through the art of Michael Roden, one of Wolverton's heirs in the indie scene, died prematurely in 2007. And if we also add the deliberately soft colors and the rough paper used to pack the 32 pages of this debut, you can well understand that Fun-O-Planet seems to come out at least from the Eighties. The story is set in space but it tells the adventures of three typical suburban losers, inhabitants of an unspecified planet quite similar to Earth. Tortured and abducted by a tentacular alien, they're brought on Fun-O-Planet, where another monstrous being awaits to take possession of their brains, necessary to the survival of its species.
Ward's art is full of funny jokes and bizarre details: the three losers are lobotomized with a tongue penetrating into their eyes, break the TV with headshots and then, completely dazed, spend time looking at the shattered screen, talk to each other using cell phones popping out of their craniums. The second part is the most visually rich, so that the space travel has a lot of visionary moments recalling the musical interludes of the old Disney cartoons, including amusement parks, clapping hands and spaghetti. And the second issue promises great things too, because at the end of this first chapter the three fools, by now without their brains, get on a bus to take a ride in the toxic and devastated lands of Fun-O-Planet.
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