Leeroy and Popo

Like the lives of its eponymous heroes, The  Adventures of Leeroy and Popo  is an engaging yet directionless story of twenty-something boys not getting much done. The boys, two best friends, are an anthropomorphic bear and dinosaur, and the other characters all seem human. It’s hard to say if there’s any special significance in that.

They also live somewhere called Rambo City, which is I think, fictitious, but otherwise things are very much like the mundane world, and they spend their time honoring a predictable set of indie slacker clichés, like playing Nintendo, mooning after girls, being a nerd, drawing, etc.

Very, very little happens but it’s executed with a certain amount of charm and panache and at 52 pages doesn’t outstay its welcome; though it didn’t leave me hungry for more.

On the plus side Louis Roskosch is a very talented illustrator and an excellent colourist ­ – Nobrow’s usual superlative production values bringing a lovely luster to well-designed pages and disciplined colour palettes. Roskosch has been an animator as well and there’s a lot of movement in his wiry, slightly scraggy, line style. The figures have nice consistency and weight too.

But, surprisingly for an animator, body language and facial expressions are weak (which isn’t helped by the bear and dinosaur thing), and that, coupled with stilted dialogue and mild, low key personalities at the fore, ultimately lets the comic down and relegates it to the nice but unremarkable category (a bit like Leeroy and Popo themselves).

Leeroy and Popo’s very attractive rendering should be enough to keep people turning the pages but if it’s to continue to find itself an audience (and Nobrow says this is the first of a continuing series) then its leading characters are going to need a bit more oomph about them.