Gordon McAlpin’s “Multiplex”
reviewed by Anthony Cardno

Anyone who knows me will not be surprised that I like many of the jokes in this series. I’m a huge movie and pop culture geek after all. I never worked in a movie theater, and only briefly in a video store, but my mind works very much the way the character Kurt’s does: I don’t troll the internet for movie info as much as he does, but I do geek out over a lot of what I find. And like Jason, I am a fount of little bits of trivia that most people would rather not clutter their brains with. Of course, I’m a good twenty years older than most of the cast of Multiplex (okay, maybe I’m only ten years older than managers Neil and Allan), so I’m not sure if being able to identify with them is a good thing or not.

Multiplex’s major strength is also its’ greatest weakness. It is not one kind of story, but several. It’s pop culture referential comedy (most of the time the references are current as well), it’s teen dramedy, it’s situation comedy. Mix Dalton Ross’ snarky old “Hit List” Entertainment Weekly feature with “10 Things I Hate About You” and stir in a large heap of the workplace portions of Nickelodeon’s “Drake And Josh” and you come pretty close to Multiplex. The strength of this is that if you’re bored with a particular portion of the story you can rightfully assume that the focus will shift eventually. The weakness of this is that sometimes McAlpin lets the drama spin out a little too long and the comic starts to drag (for example, the sequence that starts here.)

The cast is well-rounded and all-inclusive: we have white movie geeks (Kurt and Jay, neither of whom are “creepy Tarantino wannabees”); we have Pan-Asian characters (Jason and Angie); we have black characters (Franklin and Calvin). We have Christians (goth girl Angie and bubbly blond Sunny); we have atheists (Jason). We have straights (most of the cast) and gays (Neil and Chase). And we have the girls who love the geeks (Melissa, Becky, Davi). If you start at the beginning and read through, almost every race, creed, and orientation is represented either among the main cast or the supporting cast. It’s nice to see a series that really does attempt to be representative of all of society. McAlpin occasionally gets bogged down in trying to dispel stereotypes, but most of the time that doesn’t get in the way.

McAlpin’s not afraid to go for the broad joke or the gross-out either. Plenty of the workplace practical jokes revolve around horror movies. Most of the really comedic bits come from the friendship between Kurt and Jason, who have that classic comedy team rapport. And of course he’s not afraid to poke fun at ye olde reviewers / bloggers either.

The art may be occasionally repetitive (especially when you scroll quickly through the archives looking for a particular page), but the characters are all distinguishable from each other and the consistent backgrounds become familiar enough after a while that you notice things like what movie posters are hanging in the background.

I give it 3.5 stars. I enjoyed it, I’ll keep reading it … and keep hoping that the comedy that was so prevalent in the early archives will assert itself and regain equal ground with the teen drama. Rating:

Multiplex

by Gordon McAlpin

http://www.multiplexcomic.com/

review by Anthony Cardno

(7 votes, average: 4.71 out of 5)

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