I’ve seen collections of Frank Cho’s Liberty Meadows in the comic store I frequent. I had never heard of it before, so I asked the clerk about it. You’d thought the entire world revolved around this strip by the way he gushed about it. Rather than cough up the few bucks for the collection, I found the strip online at Ucomics. I’ve been reading it for about a month and I’m still waiting for it to stop being unfunny.
I remember it being a lot funnier when I first read it 20 years ago and it was called Bloom County.
Nope. Liberty Meadows is a particularly dull strip, only interesting because of the bizarre stylistic choice of cartoonish animals and soap opera realistic humans.
He stopped doing the daily strip to make a comic book instead, RealityChuck.
I’ve never read the comic book, but I remember the strip as the single dumbest, least funny strip on the page when it was out there.
And it doesn’t help that Frank Cho himself is an ass: the year he was a judge for the Ignatz Awards at Small Press Expo, he voted for himself and Liberty Meadows in every category he was eligible for.
Ehhh, people tend either to love Liberty Meadows to excess, or hate it with the venom of a thousand suns (pardon the mixed metaphor). I like it. I think the art is magnificent. The writing IS a little weak in my opinion. I think people who really go for Liberty Meadows go for the artwork.
Oh, just thought of something pertaining to that love-hate thing. Liberty Meadows was in the Washington Post, where it appeared to be wildly unpopular. I think they ran letters pleading with them to stop running the strip. After a comics poll said it was the least popular, they dropped it.
Then, a “massive” campaign arose from people who liked the strip (which the Post reported on). They persuaded the Post to put the strip back in, where it once again finished last in the polls.
My memory is a little hazy on this, but I think that was the general gist. Just thought it was kind of interesting.
I love Cho’s “good girl” art, like the lead character Brandy. Cho’s dark-haired fantasy girls all seem to be inspired by Jennifer Connelly and Bettie Page, two of the most gorgeous women ever (IMHO).
But a friend described Liberty Meadows to me as “as funny as a fart in a crowded elevator.”
I always read it more as a serial than as a gag strip.
The New York Daily News ran it while it existed; I still remember the sequence when the doctor and the pig and the frog-thing almost froze to death in a tent in a snowstorm, and Brandy had to use the warmth of her pulsating nude body to bring the doctor back to life.
I also liked the episode where Brandy had the pretentious artiste boyfriend that the doctor hated immediately, as he was tall and handsome and wore a goatee.