The Original Adventures of Cholly and Flytrap (Graphic Novel)

by Arthur Suydam

Publisher: Epic Comics (1991)

Softcover 56 pages

    Here’s another comic character (or pair of characters) that have been around for awhile. Cholly and Flytrap are a pair of humans trapped on an alien world, trying to survive in bizarre circumstances. The stories are surreal and always tongue-in-cheek, with a bizarre societal structure on top of bleak landscapes filled with pollution and corruption. It is a series of vignettes, half the time the protagonists are blown up at the end and then somehow manage to stitch themselves back together in time for the next story. Initially published in the old Epic magazine (Marvel's answer to Heavy Metal magazine), the characters appeared sporadically in various other magazines over the next few decades.

    Cholly is a violent, gun toting, crack-shot at war with seemingly everything else on the planet. Flytrap (apparently not his real name, but he can’t remember the actual one) is his human pack mule and transportation. He is large enough to be a sumo wrestler. The world is populated with aggressive snail headed creatures referred to as “gooks”,  huge bats, what look like flying disembodied breasts that can be harness to pulled airships and so forth, and huge monsters with two heads that chop each other to bits in esoteric arguments. Now, this is only a sampling of the entire material, the collected series is available here.

    The author, Arthur Suydam, is recently best known for his brilliant covers for the Marvel Zombies comics (probably the best part of the series) and its undead take on classic Marvel covers. If you liked those, the art inside this book is on par with them. Apparently the character, Cholly, was initially supposed to be for the cover art for the movie  Heavy Metal.  The original art had him riding a giant bat, this eventually morphed into a half-naked Taarna on top of some sort of pterodactyl creature. C’est la vie.

           For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.