Okay, it’s not really a “book”, per se, but the fine men and women of the Postal Service placed a copy of the digest-sized The Case of the Missile Crisis by Jeff Rowland in my mailbox sometime yesterday forenoon. It came packed with stickers, a sketch of a wholly disinterested-looking Topato (which, one would imagine, is his natural reaction to woefully inadequate beings such as you and me), ads both real and fake, and 24 full pages of Wigu goodness. That’s more fulfilling than most indy comics that I read.

It’s been a long time since we’ve had any Wigu installments, so any adventure with the Tinkle family is welcome — no surprises there. Also not surprising is what readers of the earlier Wigu books know — as good as Wigu is in daily doses (it’s made of a 50/50 mix of pixels and heroin), it’s even better in larger amounts. While Rowland is an ascended master of putting a solid punchline on the screen every day, it’s sometimes easy to forget that he knows how to pace a story over multiple pages.

Given the room to focus on a story designed to be read at one sitting (and not having to have a specific laugh line on each page), he’s free to let Wigu, Paisley, Quincy and Romy express themselves in ways that we haven’t necessarily seen before. Add to the mix Quincy’s genius brother, conspiracies straight out of late-night AM radio, and a stray ICBM, there’s only one place left to take the story: Atlantis! (Is it just me that hears Ike Willis as Thing-Fish every time the word Atlantis! appears?) Thus, a cliffhanger, and a promise from Jeff to get the next issue out as quickly as possible. On a scale of one to awesome, TCOTMC scores 9.5, with bonus points for the Snakes Flying A Plane stickers.