The Gigantic Robot by Tom Gauld
I’m not gonna fib at you: this was an impulse buy, and I regret spending money on it. I bought it from a table at this year’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival for ten dollars because it’s an impressive object. It’s thick, it’s large, and it’s published on weighty tagboard. Tom Gauld is a fabulous artist with a great sense of humor. None of that is present in The Gigantic Robot.
It’s based upon an interesting concept: the right leaf of each spread features what is essentially the same image ten times. The whole book is about a dozen pages long; its bulk owes to the tagboard. It takes four or five minutes to ingest. There’s nothing wrong with what it is, but it could easily have been presented as a stapled and photocopied zine to exactly the same effect, minus the price. Whatever. I’m not even upset at all.
