Review by Frank Plowright
Set in the fictional seaside community of Las Brisas, Santos Sisters mercilessly extracts the lapses of logic in 1980s superhero comics and overlays them with the personal and ethical concerns of 21st century while also satirising teen romance comics. Brief stories are drawn in the timeless style of Archie comics. Other than crediting the writing to Fake and the art to Greg, you really don’t need to know anything more, as trying to describe the unique vibe Santos Sisters generates just diminishes the idea. They’re best just experienced as funny, dreamlike distortions of distant memories.
But if you really must know… Alana and Ambar are the Santos Sisters, who via the medallions they wear transform into costumed superheroes, but rarely do anything remotely heroic. Most of the time merely becoming their alteregos diffuses a situation. That perhaps suggests superhero activity is a primary purpose. It’s not. Absurdism is the order of the day for brief comedies that happen to feature superheroes, where the only predictable aspect is that if Alana’s boyfriend Todd somehow gets a job he’ll have lost it by the story’s end.
A serial about one such job features, starring a ridiculous huckster almost brainwashing Todd and inflating into an action thriller spectacular, and there are a selection of brief horror-themed stories. These feature characters from other series, with Cassie from Hack/Slash the best known guest star, and if anything the decorations supplying the Halloween theme result in the collection’s most appealing art. However those guest stars are forced into strips lacking the outright wackiness of the standard content. The same applies to a longish Gary Antzman strip, which has the prerequisite ridiculous moments, but with a different style of art it would read more like an early Robert Crumb underground strip.
Thankfully, the other regular guest strip hits the plot. ‘Boozy Bees’ lives up to its name with a drunken, unfaithful couple disgracing themselves in two page wordless strips. You could imagine it on the Simpsons’ TV before Itchy and Scratchy.
Despite the misgivings about some strips, laughs are hardly in short supply in the remainder, and Santos Sisters 2 supplies more of what you want.
