Weird! ( )

I remember reading this when it first came out, and I remember liking it then. But such is a comic miniseries that it's easy to forget the nuances of the story during the slow progression of each new issue's release. When I went back to read Stray Toasters collected in the graphic novel format, I found that I was a bit annoyed with the story. What seemed surreal and shocking the first time out now struck me as merely gratuitous, and the story that was being told lacked sufficient meaning to support or justify its mayhem. I still enjoyed Bill Sienkiewicz's art as much as I ever did. It is strange, dreamlike, idiosyncratic. His gifts as a wordsmith are not quite so striking, and his vision as a storyteller in the long form is diffuse. Any single page or spread in the book might appear brilliant, but it adds up to very little. I'm afraid that, after a while, I declined to take this journey all the way to the end a second time. ( )

Stray Toasters is a mixed bag, combining the stunning artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz with a somewhat humdrum story by the same creator. There's no doubt that every page of this work is a visual feast - the range of design approaches and styles is staggering, and most of it succeeds brilliantly. The rather convoluted plot is something else. The range of characters and the situations they find themselves in are no great shakes, but in the end, the point of this work is the visuals. Sienkiewicz has allowed himself total freedom in envisioning the presentation of every page of Stray Toasters, and that endless clash of bold colors and layouts is reward enough by itself. ( )