Last night, my roomies and I were sittin' around at about six p.m., staring lustfully at our new cable modem hookup and wondering where to go for dinner. We were in the mood for something hard-hitting, a massive European meal that would knock us out cold. We found it at the Jolly Inn's five dollar dinner buffet, featuring piles of beef, duck, turkey, chicken, vegetables, potato pancakes, cheese blintzes, and perhaps the finest sausages ever concieved by man. It was a feast for the taste buds packed with a seemingly endless variety of flavors.

The new Top Shelf Under the Big Top compilation is the Jolly Inn of indie comics. Spotlighting a ton of great artists, it's got flavor after flavor of sequential art delights, along with info on how to snag more stuff from your faves. Like a great new restaurant, it will expand your flavor horizons, and it also tastes pretty damn good.

Ultimately, you're gonna love this comp for completely different reasons than me--different pieces will touch you, make you laugh, piss you off. But for me, here's a few reasons why I'm damn glad I own this book:

Josh Simmons. The Big Top anthology boasts thirty-two pages of his work, and it's all great stuff. He's got a manic, curvy pencil style that suggests the grotesque just enough to make it unsettling throughout. It's also packed with detail; you'll be blown away by his visual conception of heaven, for example, full of angels and clouds twisted by his wild, flowing pencils. Thematically, he's fond of skewering the modern family structure and all the lies that reside behind its thin facade, as well as misdirected beliefs in traditional religions, which he seemingly slaughters in the short story "God is Happy!" You certainly can't argue with those motives, especially when they're represented so compellingly in his work.

Billy Dogma. Billy and his lady friend, brought to life by Dean Haspiel, are sorta like the Mad About You of superhero comics, except much more clever and funny. The story featured in Big Top, "The Y2-401-Special-K Problem!" deftly satirizes the Y2K paranoia of 1999 with the attack of a crazy villain known as the Human Barcode. Billy also fires off some pretty funny one-liners in the course of his superheroics, such as, "Honey, you know I can't eat cereal with water. That's nasty!" Funny stuff.

"Persuasive Essay." This two-page piece by Carrie Golus is one of the most disquieting eight-panel works I've ever seen. It's just a girl seated at a desk writing an essay about capital punishment. The artwork changes very little from panel to panel; that static creates a sense of disquieting calm in the visuals, which contrasts powerfully with the horrifying text. The girl suggests that "murderers should be killed in exactly the way they killed their victims," and that "a member of the victim's family should be allowed to actually put the criminals to death!!!" It's hard to decide what's most disturbing about her attitudes: that she has them at such a young age, that she's probably been programmed this way by her vicious parents, or that she will probably escape the educational system with these views intact.

Mack White. He's responsible for a surreal paranormal adventure tale entitled "Operation Blue Beam," which deals with the CIA broadcasting holographic images of Princess Diana in an effort to form Diana cults to further their nefarious goals. It is as crazily entertaining as that synopsis implies.

Those are my faves, at least, but I easily could have listed a few more--the prose of C.K. Lichenstein II, the color insert drawn from Israel's first alternative comix publisher, Actus Tragicus, and much much more. You're guaranteed to find plenty that suits your own tastes as well. The Top Shelf Under the Big Top anthology is a no-lose purchase, the kind of comix smorgasbord that will leave you belching up a storm, unbuttoning your pants and feeling plenty drowsy from fullness. Yum.