In the first issue, we meet:

• Cosmo, owner of Fanboyz and an inexplicable ladies’ man.
• Issacs, frustrated comic writer and Cosmo’s silent business partner.
• Dave, who is convinced that Star Trek vindicates his white supremacist views.
• Botch, neither employee nor customer yet always at the store.
• Gus, a ninja-obsessed nutjob with a permanent oversized frown and a "Stick of Pain".
• Grey, an E.T. working at Fanboyz while posing as a Canadian.
• Wobert, the token Goth.
• Twitch, who is certain that God is out to ruin his life, or at least his gaming.
• Nolan, the token normal guy (aside from looking remarkably like a Watcher from Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
• CB, corpulent cheater extraordinaire.
• Buzz, gaming wino.
• Biff, gaming weightlifter.

The story involves Cosmo discovering a shapely airhead TV reporter doing an on-location story about urban decay, lumping Fanboyz in with the other tenants of the appropriately-named Dead End Plaza – a porn shop, a health code-violating pizza parlor, and a movie store specializing in subversive videos – as an example. At Isaacs’s suggestion – with help from Cosmo’s implausible charm – the reporter agrees to return another day to give the duo a chance to dispel her notions about gamers as Satanic lunatics.

Which would be a great idea, if it weren’t for the fact that a good portion of the Fanboyz clientele would reinforce such notions.

The solution? Issacs agrees to keep their most odious customers out of sight by running his homebrew RPG for them in the Pit, the store’s basement gaming room.

So, as they say in the sitcoms, does hilarity ensue?

For the most part, yes it does.

Unsurprisingly, Al Bruno is at his best showing the absurdities of gamers actually gaming. The gaming session in this issue – basically a visualization of Al's "The day I killed the entire party before the first combat encounter..." story from the Open Forum, in which the hapless GM pays the price for asserting that the players can create almost any sort of character – is sheer genius.

That makes up only a few pages of the issue, however. Elsewhere, the humor's a little more uneven, bordering on forced in places – as if inserted out of a need to keep any given action from proceeding jokeless. Frequent missing commas and periods threw off the timing of several jokes for me as well.

Al seems overeager to introduce as many characters as possible in this one issue, with half of them literally bursting onto page 3 all at once. This leaves a majority of the characters with only enough page space to display one obvious trait, putting the comic dangerously close to becoming a gamer version of Police Academy at times. The resulting cacophony of one-note jokes is amusing enough for now, but I can't imagine the same pace keeping up in future issues without growing tiresome.

On the other hand, the humorous exchanges between Cosmo and Isaacs, punctuated with dry observations from Botch, kept me entertained. And Al gets some surprising comedy mileage out of seemingly anomalous characters – the musclebrained Biff, for example, philosophizing about the relationship of games lacking alignment systems to moral relativism, then emphasizing his point with a headlock.

Jimmy Changa's art took a bit of getting used to, but his style quickly grew on me. Although his backgrounds tend to look a little rough, his skill with comical expressions is priceless.