By: Rob Durham (story & art)
The Story: Meriem’s adopted hometown of Marshville is having a nasty winter.
What’s Good: Cavewoman comics are kind of a guilty pleasure. There isn’t a lot of complex story, but the comics are what they are: A sequential tale about a pin-up cavewoman character named Meriem. But, what makes Cavewoman comics special is that both series creator Budd Root and the gentleman who has taken the baton from Budd, Rob Durham, work very hard to keep the comic from being too pornographic.
There’s actually a lot of restraint that goes into a comic that features a cavewoman character who has come to live in modern society, but still wears nothing but her leopard-print bikini. It’s an easy temptation with this sort of comic to have each successive issue be a little raunchier than the one before it. Sometimes that isn’t even intentional, it is just that the creators what to give the readers something “new” that they haven’t seen before, but in doing so, they can kinda ruin the sweet “innocence” of the book they started with.
That isn’t to say that Cavewoman Snow is without it’s mature themes. Meriem is topless in a few panels of the comic and there is implied sexual activity, but it is never explicit either in terms of what is shown or in terms of the dialog. And, it uses Meriem to poke fun at all sorts of things we like to make fun of in superhero comics. For example, to “bundle up” to go outside in the snow, she puts on leopard-print leggings and a fur hood to go with her leopard-print bikini, so she still has a LOT of exposed skin. In doing so, Durham is kinda making fun of just how silly it is what female superheroes are always wearing these thong-based outfits to fight crime. Another frequent complaint with those silly superhero outfits is how a woman could run around in them without her breasts falling out of the top, well, Durham has tongue-in-cheek fun with that notion in a great little sequence in this comic where Meriem get’s jostled and everything spills out. It’s just great to read a comic that can show what would really happen if a woman really were jiggled when wearing such an impractical garment. Superhero comics just have to exist on the notion that we should suspend disbelief.
The art is really the calling card for Cavewoman. Even though there is a bigger story going on here, this comic really does exist to be cheesecake or a sequential pin-up. The art is all black and white, so you can really appreciate Durham’s heavy Art Adams influences. Beyond the pretty pictures of Meriem, Durham also does a nice job with the sequential story-telling and doesn’t fall into the pin-up artist trap of having his panels be lifelessly posed images.
What’s Not So Good: Well, this simply isn’t going to be a comic for everyone. For those who don’t care for this type of comic, I’d imagine the most common refrain is, “What do you need that for when you can find porn on the internet?” I think those people are kinda missing the point and probably just don’t appreciate the pin-up girl as a long-standing artistic tradition. But, if you’ve ever heard yourself saying that, this might not be the comic for you.
Conclusion: Of the comics that play around with the mature themes of the pin-up girl, Cavewoman is probably the truest to in intent of the art form where it is all about the tease.
Grade: B
-Dean Stell
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Filed under: Other Tagged: Amryl Press, Budd Root, Cavewoman, Cavewoman Snow, Cavewoman Snow #2, Cavewoman Snow #2 review, Rob Durham
