Strypll – Girl Cartoonist: Mystery Waves

 Strypll – Girl Cartoonist: Mystery Waves

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a pencil sharpener and wondering if rogue frequencies from a nearby government building were the reason it just won’t work, Ronald Hicks has written the comic for you. Strypll – Girl Cartoonist: Mystery Waves, published by Alt-Town Media, is a 20-page, black-and-white digest size comic that feels like a fever dream you’d actually want to stay in. It’s a brisk, surreal tour through Alt-Town, a place where the laws of physics and culinary arts are merely polite suggestions.

The narrative flows like a series of quick-fire transmissions from a dimension that is much more interesting than our own. One moment, you’re witnessing the sheer carbohydrate-heavy glory of a Donut Deluge, where the sky opens up with fried dough, and the next, you’re learning about the Subliminal Bagel rewards program, which finally gives us a reason to track our daily mileage. Hicks excels at finding the humor in the hyper-specific, like a submersible breaking down upside-down and underground in the middle of a desert, or the sudden, tragic disappearance of tartar sauce from a bar’s booths once the beer runs out.

The characters are just as wonderfully skewed as their environment. We follow Jinx through the prestigious halls of surfboard waxing school and into the lucrative, if slightly pungent, world of the cat food business alongside Taco Bill. Bill himself is a man of many talents, whether he’s sharing chips with his cousin Burrito Bob or accidentally playing his fiddle so intensely that he vibrates into another place and time entirely. The town’s obsession with "cat food sushi" provides a recurring, gag-inducing charm, especially when it evolves into the "Sushi To Go" variety featuring wet food.

By the time you reach the segment on edible, cricket-based surfboard wax—which is thankfully non-GMO and zero sugar—you realize that Alt-Town is a masterpiece of low-stakes absurdity. Whether it’s the mystery waves of Building 11 or the specialized professionals providing upside-down lawn services, every page of this comic offers a witty, refreshing break from reality. Strypll – Girl Cartoonist: Mystery Waves is a bite-sized triumph of indie creativity that proves you don’t need a hundred pages to build a world; you just need a few good jokes and a very strange imagination.

Check out Strypll – Girl Cartoonist and other works by Ron Hicks at https://arfgraf.substack.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/ArfGraf and https://www.instagram.com/arfgraf/