Review by Frank Plowright

There’s a sublime brilliance to Eager Beaver, Ian Carney taking a now outdated phrase and creating a literal interpretation of a beaver keen to please in every respect, and so providing an intimidating form of ingratiation. That’s the beaver on the cover, seemingly acting out the old nonsense song ‘I’m a Little Teapot’.

We first encounter Eager Beaver along with the unfortunate Clem Clam, who sees a pitiful creature in an animal trap and frees it. The beaver’s gratitude is only natural, but rapidly escalates from awkward to overwhelming, and then to sinister hero worship. There’s nothing it won’t do for Clem, but wants Clem and Clem alone.

Woodrow Phoenix provides retro cool with simple, lively illustrations cunningly disguising Eager Beaver as a children’s story when it eventually invests the form with darkness. To readers of an older generation Clem will instantly be recognisable from the cartoon title sequence of The Phil Silvers Show, Phoenix using the caricature of Silvers, adding an extra layer of metatextual reference.

Despite the success of more informed animation aimed at adults since Carney and Phoenix produced Sugar Buzz back in the 1990s, anyone following the same path in comics has done so on licensed properties rather than creating their own. It’s a puzzling gap in the market, and seeing as no-one has stepped in to fill it, Carney might as well take a break from his day job writing conventional animation and produce a strip subverting those values. Eager Beaver is a joy.

Eager Beaver isn’t listed on mainstream book sites, but is available at https://sugarbuzz.bigcartel.com/

In the interests of transparency we should point out Woodrow Phoenix supplies reviews to the Slings and Arrows site. If we didn’t think Eager Beaver was worth recommending, though, we’d be fobbing him off with all sorts of lies about having lost the review copy (seven times).