Gobs 1

Some goblins build a pub. No, seriously, that’s it. That’s all that happens. In a way I approve of this minimal approach, but it does demand making that process fascinating or entertaining. William Golding went for the former in The Spire, a superb novel about building a spire, full of compelling detail and imagined architectural craft. Moore is I think going for entertainingly funny  – you can kind of tell that various lines are supposed to be jokes, unfortunately without any of them being remotely amusing. There are many pages of the construction work, largely wordless, and I couldn’t even tell what the goblins were doing in many of the panels: here they are cutting down big mushrooms from the top of the hill in which it’s built, but I missed what for; here a robot goblin is at a ‘magic dump’ grabbing something, but I don’t know what or why; here some of them are lifting a plank while another flinches for some reason. This is interspersed with crappy cheesecake shots of a hot blonde elf who is helping them for no obvious reason, since the reason they are making their own pub is racist banning from the local where she works. It’s not made obvious whether there are any goblins beyond these to be customers, no sense of a society or anything like that.

There are hints of a kind of energetic unruliness from the goblins, but all the extreme behaviour seems to happen off panel and just get reported afterwards, so this does little to add liveliness, and the group mostly don’t get distinct personalities. In fact the only focus is on two half-goblins who seem to be in charge, but that’s just a nice guy and cute girl with glasses, who is crazy about him but he just ogles the hot elf, as dull and cliched a setup as can be imagined. Dialogue is would-be cutesy with funny spellings, and dumb.

The pacing is very slow and clumsy, often using three panels where one would have been more effective. The page layouts are efficient and ordinary enough, but it’s hard to judge their success when the actual panels often don’t seem to mean much. The drawing isn’t bad, with some expression and occasional cartoony bounce, but few panels actually have any movement to showcase this.

I don’t know much about this publisher, though there are loads of house ads – The Last Zombie, The Littlest Zombie, Escape from the Planet of the Living Dead and many more – so I can’t say anything about their general quality control, but I am pretty puzzled as to where they think they’ll get an audience for a witless, slow comic like this one.