I feel that too many times with new comic creators, they try too hard to emulate or hopefully match their influences. I don’t see a problem with that, but nine times out of ten, it’s futile. The best case scenario is taking those influences, and injecting them into your work and coming up with something new and exciting. Bryan Lee O’Malley did it with Scott Pilgrim, and now Lamar Abrams has done it with Remake.

Remake is a collection of stories starring Max Guy. He’s a combination of both Astro Boy and Mega Man but he’s quite different. While he is a hero and he fights the good fight, Max Guy is immature, hot tempered, and childish. He demands the world pay attention to him. Or at the very least his friends. He doesn’t sound like that great of a hero but Max Guy is pretty awesome. He also has another thing going for him. No matter how bleak the outcome may look, Max Guy always wins. Every story ends with him defeating the enemy. In the first story, Max accidentally kills a cop who he thought called him a “gay robot” when he actually said “nice robot”. It’s a complete misunderstanding due to Max believing he could read lips. How did Max know he could read lips? I guess he just thought he could. Not long after this it is revealed that the cop he killed was actually an alien planning to destroy the world. Having his plans ruined, the outed alien hops into his spaceship and flies away vowing to return.  Max is then lifted up into the air by the citizens of the city and celebrated as a hero. This is only a taste of the wackiness that happens in the rest of the book.

Lamar Abrams draws these stories in a way that many would look at and go “I could draw that”. That’s the deception of its simplicity. It’s simple but there’s a lot of care that went into it.  There’s also some amazing comedy bits that blend in perfectly with the action. In a story called “Vs The Cat Thing”, Max eats his favorite cereal called Marshmallow Kittens which is made of real marshmallow kittens. It’s adorable and disturbing watching Max chow down on marshmallow meowing cats. Not taking the advice of his roomate/best friend Cardigan, he gets terribly sick. When he throws up, his sick turns into the titular Cat Thing and they battle. In the middle of this fierce battle, there is a three panel sequence where Max and Cat Thing growl at each other trying to prove how vicious and angry they are. I never laughed as hard as I did when that happened.

Abrams can stage the action and the quiet moments (if you want to call them that) well, the pacing is quick and breezy, but he can throw these amazing random bits of comedy into the middle of a situation and it stops you in your tracks. You don’t expect certain things to happen, and they just do. Then after you finish laughing for a few minutes,  you get right back into the story not missing a beat.

As it stands, Remake is one of those amazing bits of comics gold that should be more well known. Lamar Abrams has created a very entertaining and hilarious universe and I hope he will continue to tell more adventures of Max Guy. I can’t wait. Definitely pick this book up if you can.

Lamar Abrams website