By Dustin Cabeal

I debate if I should review Adam + Gill’s Trivia Game. I didn’t particularly like it, but I think that’s because comedy is so subjective. Whereas I didn’t find Trivia Game funny, I’m hopefully that someone reading this review will check it out and find it funny and then subsequently hate my review for not heaping praise upon it. I can live with that if it means that I help someone find this book and enjoy it.

If you don’t like the humor, though, then I’m there with you.

It’s a book that is weird, and if you’ve read a lot of my reviews or visited the site a lot, then you know that I don’t need to quantify how much I like weird shit. I’ll say it one more time, though; I like weird shit. I thought I would like this after the first page, which attempted some humor in the characters it introduces, but alas… I didn’t. The character in question are a lamb (I think) named Barrold and a rabbit named Robert. Robert doesn’t talk or move, but Barrold cuts to him for a response and the comic gives Robert ample time to respond. Also, Barrold has a knife sticking out of his head.

After that the comic ranges from weird, too weird and make sense. For instance, two little girls take a piss somewhere that turns out to ruin two other kid’s day. It was okay, but the art on that story was some of the weakest of the issue. There’s also two stories involving a bear that end the same way. I found the ending strange and smirk-inducing, but I didn’t get the meaning behind it, and the comic offered me none.

There were a couple of stories that had a ton of dialogue and small thumbnails for the art. They were my least favorite to read because there was too much to read, it wasn’t enjoyable to read in the format it was in, and the art was equally difficult to enjoy. For the sake of the review I read them, but if I weren't reviewing these tales I would have skipped over them completely, and that’s what I recommend to anyone else that may read this issue.

The art was the weakest aspect of the comic. That might be why I didn’t like the comedy because the art wasn’t strong enough to support the gags and overall there wasn’t a single style that I enjoyed or wanted to see more of. A lot of it was rough around the corners, but hey, it could end up being your favorite new indie artist, and that’s fine. It wasn’t for me.

I’m not saying that I would never read another issue of Adam + Gill’s Trivia Game (or whatever subsequent issues would be called), but I would be hesitant unless there were massive changes. Hopefully, the creators find their audience and that audience is diehard; that’s my hope for them. As for me, I just didn’t enjoy reading it.

Keep making comics.

Score: 2/5

Adam + Gill’s Trivia Game
Creators: Gill Hatcher, Adam J. Smith
Self-Published