Tiny Town, USA – This startling image is straight from the LA Comics Convention last week! No wonder our site down for a while. (Sorry, we do not as a rule do "hooter" jokes).
But the woman pictured in the middle is a famous YouTube character who poses at such conventions holding copyrighted materials athwart her thorax. Our fact checkers are seeking her name as we write.
The important point to note is she's posing with tinytowntimes.com's publication of Aesop Cop Vol. 1, still available at Buffalo Street Books. The Berkeley Library recently purchased a copy of the book and we're ... umm ... pleased to see it making the rounds of national conventions. There was a copy at the RNC, found in the men's bathroom and another copy at the DNC, found in the women's bathroom. You tell us what that means.
Aesop Cop is a collaboration between Franklin Crawford, tinytowntimes.com administrator, who scans police logs around the world (mostly in his hometown of Ithaca, N.Y.) and writes Aesop-inspired morality poems ranging from simple rhymes to complicated vers libra about notable and ignoble crimes alike. Rigel Stuhmiller, a Berkeley, CA-based artist, illustrates the poems.
Duly recorded, these oddball transgressions are handled with a charmingly light touch. The verse are as absurd as many of the police reports.
The illustrations take the whole business into a mythical but real-time world where jealous men wearing dead weasels deliver frontier justice to their bewildered foes, fathers and sons seek revenge upon assailants in community ERs and Russian hairdressers turn armed robbers into sex slaves.
Aesop Cop has been in the thick of it before.
But you might say our protagonist got himself between a rack and a hard place this time!
Hyuck-hycuk. More outtakes from the LA Comics Convention and Aesop coming soon.
– C. Penbroke Handy, live from the dens of iniquity
Photo Credit: Belinda Cho
Aesop Cop
