1991 / Ebook / 156 pages / UK
****
More weekday school than Sunday school, careful disclaimers are required before they feel free to present a neutrally-atheist analysis of the popular committee-composite classic as literature. It's a good summary for the length.
1994 / Ecomics / 48 pages / USA
**
Half the length of the standard Dark Horse serial, the clockwork plotting shows through more when it's compressed. Our hero getting emasculated by a spunky, pregnant dame is at least something different before the customary astounding supernatural denouement, brushed off like he sees that sort of thing every day, since he does.
Rhys Hughes, The Just Not So Stories
*****
A recurring theme of mythological figures from antiquity to the Apollo missions may have informed these selections, but that's as characteristic generally as the inspired inversions and pun traps (hopes that I'd built up an immunity were dashed when he sprung the "re-tail outlet"). He'd be taken a lot more seriously if he took himself seriously, but that wouldn't be anywhere near as good.
Fave: 'The Pastel Whimsy'
2014 / Ebook / 146 pages / USA
***
A robotically dry academic study isn't exactly in the spirit of the open-source enterprise, but it serves as a functional history and I'm always up for some wishful psychoanalysis and desperate dot connecting.
2015 / Ebook / 110 pages / UK
***
There's nothing fans won't know already about the inhumane production that's more interesting than the film itself, much of it repeated again across the chapters when he runs out of trivia, but it was a nostalgic trip back into the woods.
