Last Kiss (Shanda)

(Shanda, 2001)
™ and © Shanda

It’s an old baseball announcer’s cliché that a good pitcher can find ways to win even on days when he doesn’t have his best stuff. That certainly applies to Last Kiss #4, the latest in John Lustig’s occasional humor series. The issue is plagued with a number of obvious difficulties, from an uneven collection of material to personal and business issues that Lustig alludes to in the text pages, to the simple fact that the central premise of Last Kiss—the re-dialoguing of hoary old romance comics with modern-day jokes—is no longer as fresh as it used to be. Nevertheless, Lustig manages to raise it all to a level that will satisfy fans of the series, if not win a few new readers along the way.

The theme of Last Kiss #4 is “Women in Prison,” and the centerpiece is a new story of twisted romance behind bars with terrific art by Ernie Colon. There are also a few vintage splash pages from 1940s and ’50s love comics, (including ones by Everett Raymond Kinsler and Wally Wood) and a straight reprint from Charlton’s First Kiss #9 (1959) so goofy that it doesn’t need new dialogue to incite a good chuckle. Toss in remarkably good reader-contributed pages, reprints of the three-panel Last Kiss strip, a few offbeat text features, and pretty soon you have a pretty entertaining collection, notwithstanding the fact that much of it is clearly filler.

For a book with mainstream crossover potential like Last Kiss, the inconsistency and lack of focus of #4 is disconcerting. At the same time, there is enough here to enjoy that it merits a favorable recommendation.

— Rob Salkowitz

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