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Publication Date: February 3, 2009 Publisher: Planet Saturday Comics Author: · Monty S. Kane Related Sites: · Official Site Grade: B+

As a forty-year-old father who was only ten yesterday (swear on a stack of bibles!), it's easy to relate to Monty Kane's Planet Saturday Comics, collected and self published in this slender first volume.

Within just a few strips, I had two immediate feelings. One was that Kane had tapped into that wistful nostalgia that Bill Watterson had, and that his adult character might very easily be viewed as the man Watterson's Calvin might have grown up to become. The second feeling was that these penciled and shaded comics, still in their formative stages, reminded me very much of Frank Cho's beginnings with "University²" before Liberty Meadows took off. The humor's different, to be sure, but the essence is nonetheless the same.

Even the title -- Planet Saturday -- draws out those warm and sepia-toned recollections of childhood, where adventure was everywhere if you chose to make it so, and a copse of trees in the backyard on the edge of town might very well hide bobcats, buried treasure, and an indiginous tribe of savages.

The strips revolve around forty-year-old Emory (who now goes by M, and should no way at all be confused with Mr. Kane himself, so he says), whose visions reveal a longing for the past, even while outings with his young daughter, Dot, shows him that the same childhood world still exists -- he just cannot be a part of it in the same way he was before; his body just won't let him.

"The comic is loosely based on my life experiences, or on what I was daydreaming about while I should have been paying attention to my life experiences," says Kane, who produces Planet Saturday Comics online with his wife Kelli. "I'm gonna let my daughter maintain plausible deniability about her appearances in the comic, but the little boy is definitely me as a kid, and the dad is me as an adult."

The couple are selling this first volume of collected strips at their website (see link above), with $1 from each book sold going to fund health care for uninsured children at Metro Family Practice, Inc. in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, where Kelli volunteers as board president.