Starred Review An experiment born of utter lunacy bears fruit in the hands of Eisner-nominee Ethan Nicolle (Chumble Spuzz), who collated and illustrated stories dictated by his five-year-old brother, Malachai. To say that Axe Cop is an axe-wielding policeman who sometimes chops off bad guys' heads and sometimes sneaks into their houses at night (dressed in a black cat suit) and punches them in their faces while they sleep; who can tell if you're evil by how you kick; who creates poison copies of any fruit he eats; who rides a dinosaur with machine-gun arms; and who encounters the likes of Abraham Lincoln: Explosion God is merely to say that Ethan successfully channels the phantasmagoric surrealism and psychotic violence of a little boy's imagination into readable form. Concurrently, his classically exaggerated style lends a sense of satirical gravity to the impossibly absurd proceedings that is absolutely vital to its humor. Although it works best in short, stupefying blasts (as in the "Ask Axe Cop" sections), there are moments of sublime hilarity unapproachable by the work of mature brains producing formally "understandable" narratives. This explains why it's become a full-fledged webcomic phenomenon and now, in its collected form, belongs in every graphic-novel collection.