"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - March 2o26

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

These left an imprint.

The cover copy for volume 1 of this 7-volume library, repackaged & published in the early 2000s, sez "Classics and little-seen stories from the legendary series".  Which is a little funny, because by the time these books were published, the Dark Horse imprint Legend was exactly one decade in the rearview.

Yesterday I found out Mike Richardson has been pushed entirely out of Dark Horse, and the publisher has been eaten by another of the ever-circling bigger fish.  Some leviathan or other will munch them all, eventually.  To me, it won't matter much, because the big money can't buy my love.  And I quite loved--  still quite love  --Concrete.

Last month the annotations were sweetly silent for ya'll, so if you'll pardon the digression, I'ma go down a rabbithole into the world below: memory.

Concrete was one of a holy trinity, no, quartet...  Maybe quintet?  of comic books that I cared enough about to discover for myself.  I was already a little hooked on Cerebus, in the late 80s, early 90s--  I was a high schooler, what d'you want? --and I was definitely addicted to Eastman & Laird's Turtles--  even though it was something of a chore to find the Real Turtles, and not the TV Turtles, on account of living in Dogwater Alabama, where all the commercial world could be found if only you ventured a county or so over to the nearest Wal-Mart, where Spawn & Youngblood were being packaged up in heat-sealed plastic bundles; god help your degenerate bones if you wanted an actual comic book SHOPPE --and some dumb how I'd even wound up addicted to Bob Burden's The Flaming Carrot-- of all the damn books --but the easiest "indie" comic in the world to find and stumble into, at that precise moment in my narrative, was Concrete.

What would the fifth wheel have been?  The Tick, prob'ly.

(Sometimes I call my narrative My Troubles With Comics, in homage to R. Crumb.)

((My Troubles With Comics was a sub-serial of autobio comix within a webcomic I used to do, titled 'Welcome To Crooked Corner'.  It chronicled the first and only time I was suspended from school, for "trafficking pornography", which meant I'd loaned the H.P. Lovecraft issue of Heavy Metal to a friend in art class and his mom found it and narc'd me out to the school.  The comic contained t&a, you see, to say nothing of Alberto Breccia and other adult horrors...  But none of this had happened yet.  And we are still figuring out how many b&w comic books I was hooked on in 199_, so selah.))

Concrete used to be one of the more popular, and marketable, black & white comics of my adolescence.  That sounds weird to say today, but back when advertising was more complex and difficult AND expensive to create, Concrete had risen to the top of a developing boom in publishing.  It was a black & white book created by one guy (give or take the letterer) and had survived the indie glut of the late 80s by dint of being pretty much the mascot of DH's premier anthology, Dark Horse Presents.  Which was reason #1 for Con's popularity, in a nutshell: its fungibility.

Concrete was a full-length comic, an ongoing series, but Concrete was also a VAST, seemingly bottomless well of short stories & whimsical riffs-- within Concrete's own series there was a sub-serial called 'A Sea of Heads' that showed up as much as the 'crete stuff  --and the character was iconic enough to be a toyetic mascot for its main publisher, acting as much as a pitchman for Dark Horse's stable of properties as for DHP.  And Concrete was everywhere.  You could find Paul Chadwick's bouncing baby at any major comics convention; Concrete was in Wizard, and The Comics Journal, and The Comics Reporter, and Comics Insider...

But why did I like it?  Pop prevalence notwithstanding.  It's all very well to be addicted to pop culture trash.  I grew up hooked on the Beatles, for chrissakes, listening to tales of record pyres; you can get hooked on a thing purely for its cultural cachet and not GET it, y'know.  Like, everyone was "into" the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles...  But how many people actually *read* the o.g. Turtles, and Grokked It?  Significantly less than you'd think.  Comix people read Thee Turtles, whereas TMNT were everywhere for the casuals.  The Turtles made a certain kind of pop sense because it emerged from a stew of influence whose top notes were martial arts and anthropomorphic funny animals.

Concrete, in contrast, was a book about...  a disembodied political speechwriter with an affinity for environmentalism.  A comic containing only one Fantastic element, an alien abduction, which never recurs.  Concrete was a book about figuring out how to be human, in a culture that didn't value humanity.  And it was--  to me, at least  --an art comic.  It was a comic you read for the art.

It was a comic I read for the art.  Concrete was an Art Comic.  The black and white was my life's blood.  There were a LOT of b&w books to be found, in my youth, veritable oceans of content left over from the boom & implosion of the marketplace in the wake of the Turtles finding a foothold.  But there weren't that many books that looked as Sharp, or as Pop-Influenced, in their black & white rigor.

I'm pouring out a 40 in pure verbiage here because you wouldn't think it to look around, now, but Paul Chadwick did a little to change the indie comix landscape in North America--  as much as Barry Windsor-Smith, or Dave Sim, or Los Bros Hernandez, or those terrible turtle boys.

Let's pause here for an admission.  A confession, truly:  I wanted so bad to rip it off.

I probably spent as much time trying to imitate Paul Chadwick's clarity of line & control of feathering as I did practicing my Frank Miller dropshadows.  Saturdays were spent at my aunt's house, poring over comics bellydown on the hardwood floor and tracing off my fucked-up pencils onto typing paper for inking.  It was Saturdays when I could convince my aunt to drive me to one of two comic shops, where doubtless satan was waiting to sell me magazines designed for single-handed enjoyment, and god smile on her bitter christian soul, she did, with little reluctance.  I guess if the options were godless rock'n'roll and heathen lit, well, at least the comix shops didn't have Perry Farrel's obscene poster of Ritual de lo Habitual hanging over the cash register.

If I had to pin down the exact moment I fell in Love with 'Crete enough to want to steal its main conceit, it was probably when my aunt was having her hair done.  There was a hobby shop at the entrance to the shopping plaza where her stylists worked, so whenever I got bored of leafing through Details magazine and trying to piece together the Wild Palms comic, I'd wander up.  The hobby shop had only a handful of comics, all trade paperback collections--  The One, by Rick Veitch (who?) and Snarfquest by Larry Elmore, and (maybe?) a Sandman like 'The Doll's House'.  But then there were these two issues of 'Concrete', singles, totally out of place amidst the lead figurines and Dragonlance novels.  'Concrete: Eclectica'.  I didn't know what they were, besides issues of my favourite book.

See, what they were?  Was colour.

Concrete, as I said, was a b&w book.  Black & white was why I lived & breathed.  I'd gotten 100% hooked on 'Crete the same way I got hooked on Cerebus--  I bought an issue in the middle of everything with no context for any of it.  My first Cerebus was a Flaming Carrot crossover, at the ass-end of Church & State book II.  My first Concrete was issue #9, the one where he grows horns.  It's a weird as fuck book, if you don't know the characters.  It spends almost the entire issue indoors, with the titular character bound to a chair, starving himself & tripping out.  If you're entering it context free, it's a bizarre In to a world of near-infinite potential, and reward.  So that's what hooked me.  It looked goddamned amazing, and it didn't do what comix had taught me to expect.  The story is very static, containing barely any action worth mentioning.  It's almost entirely an intellectual exercise, as a story.

The 'Eclectica' pieces?  I'm going to be honest, I don't remember them, today.  The essentials have evaporated.  All I remember is the shock of seeing Concrete in full colour for the first time--  if one disregards the cover art for everything Chadwick had drawn, or all the DH house ads, or the luxuriantly gardened painted posters of Concrete that had started to show up in shops.  It wasn't just 'Crete in colour, it was Concrete in computer colour, then still an innovation.  The stories were oddments, stuff Chadwick had dashed off for one project or another that didn't fit in, precisely chronologically, with the greater series which was--  then  --only beginning to be collected.

I do remember there was something luminous and uncanny about seeing 'Crete in colour, and that led me to scribbling my own ideas for a rip-off series.  Something I wouldn't attempt for years, and when I did attempt it, saw as only grotesque & misconceived.  But it got me started on Making, and not just Consuming, comix.  Chadwick, like Byrne, Sim, BWS, Moebius and all the others, got me started.

The aborted rip-off comic?  'A Lunar Body'.  Like, even the title is a bit of a stylistic lift from Chadwick--  he liked to title the individual issues subdued stuff like "A Remarkable Life" or "A Stone Among Stones".  My thing was going to be kind of a Carter of Mars riff where a dude goes to sleep and wakes up in a weird new body, in outer space, and has to re-orient himself in order to survive.  Not spectacularly well-conceieved, my concept guttered out after a few pages of TOO MANY narrative captions.  There was no-where to go with it because my core character was, of course, me.

Anyroad.  Concrete:  it's what my foundations were set in.

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1945-47, vol. 10 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1947-48, vol. 11 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

the contrary girl strikes, & gutters

youtube is more fun than bowling sober

blogger doesn't like these posts, and who can blame them

OM (or OtM)

My childhood PTSD has led to me being largely unable to remember my very brief time involved in Olympics of the Mind.  It would have been 1982 or 1983, when I was attending Cedar Springs Elementary.  Why was I selected?  Dunno.  I had taken an IQ test, and then a scant month later the school funneled my neurodivergent ass into this program.  It made me miserable because none of my friends were there.

(Mm.  This isn't entirely true.  Jay Phillips was in that class.  Jay was a bright kid, and had extraordinary skill as an artist.  He could draw comics better than anybody my age.  I liked Jay-- but he was the only kid I knew, and he was more plugged into what was happening in that group than I would ever be; he Fit In and the other kids were really into him, whereas I was a weird-shaped peg.)

Anyway I phased myself out.  The organizers didn't ask too hard what was up.  They just shrugged and gave me a certificate.  Which still has Olympics of the Mind printed on it, so my participation must have been before OM had its legal squabble with the Olympics Committee...

I've always looked at this blip in my school history and asked myself what it was about.  But maybe it was simply that the school didn't know what to do with me.  I was pretty boggled and could barely function, some days.  And then I managed to get into some fights, and the school pushed my parents to move me to another district.  Anyhoo.  All that's really sure is I have a piece of paper, and memories of cinderblock rooms without windows, with no rows of desks, and not fitting in even amongst outsiders.

dream - o21626: escapes & avalanches, in no particular order

The dullgreen fluroescent throb of artificial light as I cross the transom.  Every upstairs is a further level.  A whisper of air kisses the arch of my bare foot and I bend to slip free slats of hardwood, revealing yet another stair.  This access narrower and even less lit than the last.  The passage littered with aged newsprint.  Headlines from forgotten papers fluttering like agitated birds in the subgreen.  I hear a rustle, a granular grating of stone against stone, and step backward from the secret passage.  A bricksize rhomboid clatters, redounding off shelving overhead like a pachinko pellet, setting off other avalanches, wrecking surfaces, wrenching brackets free, the whole storage system collapsing in fits of tumbling slats, dust rising and boobytraps raining all 'round.  Looking on the collapsed egress, I sigh.  Siegfried sighs.

"At least we aren't climbing down that."

dream - o2o626: mask off

Traveling with Siegfried through Japan.  Intimate rooms, golden light sprawling into partitioned shadow, across tatami, spilling through ricepaper all the colours of stained glass.  The other guests don't trust my face, and it's easy to see why:  streaming tears, eyes strained by rictus of repression, gasping for breath.  I feel my self-control slipping.  Begin slapping myself.  The blows don't land with any force-- because you can't combat yourself.  I can't, at any rate, the schizoid impulse to destroy my own reflection stutters, dims, all wind going out of the internal storm.  All that's left is sorrow at humiliating Sig, who has to account for my strange behavior in a stranger's home.  The scene recedes in my mind as I wake, shaken.

Walk to Montrose bird sanctuary, thinking the whole thing over.  When I get there, a finch is on a branch, peering at me.  I raise my hand and it flits to light on my fingertips.  Flies off.  Return home feeling better.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - February 2o26

And so we return and begin again.

Maybe less annotations & notes this month?

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 49-52 (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Beast of Chicago (2oo3) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Black Dahlia (2o18) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 57-60 (1957) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Total THB vol. 1 (1994-95) - written & illustrated by Paul Pope

Evita (2oo2) - written by Héctor Osterheld, illustrated by Alberto & Enrique Breccia 

Dick Tracy Weekly #s 96-99 (1963) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

A Treasury of XXth Century Murder compendium I: containing 'The Lindbergh Child', 'The Terrible Ax-Man of New Orleans', & 'The Madison Square Tragedy' (2oo8 / '1o / '13) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Fatal Bullet: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield (1999) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Dick Tracy: The Complete Dailies & Sundays 1931-33, vol. 1 - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

Children of the Voyager #s 1-4 (1993) - written by Nick Abdzis & illustrated by Paul Johnson

Strange Days #s 1-3 (1984) - written & drawn by a murderer's row of punker Brits, including but not limited to Peter Milligan, Brendan McCarthy, Brett Ewins, and whoever else was passing that godlike bomber 'round.  these are not comix for sober people

Paradax: Remix (1987) - written by Peter Milligan & illustrated / re-painted by Brendan McCarthy

The Lives of Sacco & Vincente (2011) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

The Mystery of Mary Rogers (2001) - written & illustrated by Rick Geary

Annihilator: Rainbow of Death vol. 1 (2026) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons

Dream of the Bat (2007-26) - written & illustrated by Josh Simmons & Patrick Keck

Concrete, vols. 1-3 (1986-1994) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

dream - o2o226: line to the moon

My grandparents' house, the living room.  Empty except for myself.  The faux-western ornamentation on the shelves heavy with their absence.  The edges of the collected Zane Gray gone papyrus.  The cut glass candy dishes dim with accumulated dust.  The rotary phone by granddad's chair rings, a jangled robot exclamation of alarm.  My grandmother's voice on the other end-- a voice out of darkness, out of naked space, distant as the moon.  They don't believe their son could have acted the way I describe.

"He couldn't have done those things," she says, and using a damp washcloth I carefully wipe between the rows of exposed nail ends protruding from where the padded headrest was.  Busying myself with cleaning, dusting granddad's favourite recliner, I listen patiently to the denials, only occasionally asserting the abuse that became my birthright.  In my mind I trace the call, visualizing from whence grandma's voice originates:  a faint blue line describing an orbital trajectory, overlaid on infinite black.

Observing the lunar surface around me.  Pitted ash underfoot, inverted cones & craters in the hundreds of thousands, fine as the dirt floor of a barn and as suggestive of antlions, the vista assumes primacy and the "reality" of my grandparents' room falls away, except for the dull weight of the plastic reciever in my hand, against my ear.  Without any energy I protest, anger dead and suffocated, wondering why no-one ever believed me.  Imagining the moon in its arc, circling in sync with the denials of my dead family.

There:  center of the coal-gray plain I'm standing on, a singular light, a miniature moon, phosphorescent as the soul's own glow.  I study it, no longer truly listening, feeling hollow, ageless, indifferent.  Wondering why I am trying to make my case, when there is no jury to agree, no justice seated on high, no opinion to court.  Grandmother's voice fading as I permit my receiver hand to drop.  Tracing paths through the vacuum with my mind's eye.  Lit by the brittle sphere of imagination. Waiting in wonder.

dream - o12426: the rotted synagogue

There is dark, the dark of gables two stories high overhead.  A blackish poodle runs through the incense-scented ruin, pulling a chain of dust behind him, sewing discord through the pews, encircling the bimah with his rough little whoops of alarm.  The dog is as unknown to me as their owner, but I follow anyway, thinking perhaps to gather the little noisemaker into my arms.  He eludes me and the urge to escort him out fades.  Lit by faraway dusk leaking through boarded-over twin windows, a bundled crew of parkour athletes lift a scroll from within the sundered ark, laying it cattycorner atop the reading table, knocking free charred fragments of fir, the char bouncing with a glassy clatter between the traceurs' feet.  The young men carefully unspool the scroll, "reading" the red line of the EKG as it charts the events that led us here.

I am the only other person here, besides these young men in their military surplus, and do not recognize them beyond their profession.  Their voices do not form words so much as an atmosphere of forgotten song, and it draws me in:  I stand below the railing of the bimah, peering at the end of the scroll as they spool it, scrying the QRS complexes for signs one might identify with sound.  Meaning eludes me.

Did I arrive with these men?  It feels like I arrived after, or independently, and we only converged here by chance.  They do not acknowledge me; in fact I might well not exist, were it not for the evidence of my smudged hands and the bounce of my tread through the boards in this sundered place.  The disturbance of the dog fades, perhaps having found a way out, leaving me behind.  Wordless chanting descends all around like constellated motes in a sunbeam.

THE KILL HOUSE - script to pencil (1)

The name of the game is problem solving.

The script, as I found it--  because my brain is broken, yes, I literally found a script in a drawer  --is very minimal.  I assume the minimalism was the point.  There are no stage directions.  The text is internal monologue, and from it I must infer the location, the sets, the wardrobe & the action.

Easy enough, right?

Chapter Zero--  because I always start things off with a Page Zero, or a Chapter None  --is three quarters of a page.  Terse dialogue, very clippy stuff.  I guess the chapter is set on a boat.  I guess Cray is airdropping into water, then boarding the boat.

So then the task becomes drawing it.  Cray's in full gear-- no visible face, no exposed skin.  Weapons?  No.  I don't want to draw guns in general, much less on page one.  So he's empty handed until he gets in the water.  The first page should be a full-page splash, because Comix!  And I figure it should be action.  Get those blank page jitters out of the way.

So begins the problem solving.  What pose should I use?  The reference stack of comix on the desk is all Image drek, early years:  Deathblow 0, 1 & 2 by Jim Lee, Team 7 #1-4 by Aron Wiesenfeld, and the Deathblow / Barbarian story from Wildstorm! 1 & 2 by Aron Wiesenfeld..  The Team 7 stuff has all the best figurework, so I start scanning those.  Pages 1, 2 & 3 all have good figurework on Cray, so those wind up being the basis for the first two pages of my riff.  There's a deceptive amount of choreography in Wiesenfeld's layouts; I say deceptive because it's all smartly done, but gets obscured by the OCD detail bullshit.  My mission becomes, then, freeing the figures from the web of fiddly inking.

All the 90s pouches & bandoliers have to fucking go.

The tactical gear is crap, so I throw together my own.  It doesn't have to be full-on detail because the art should be superheavy on shadow.  The scenario is easy:  Cray jumps out of a helicopter, the huey banks and draws fire away, Cray dives into the water, latches onto the hull, sets up a charge.  That's the first three pages.  Page one is a fullpage splash, so one panel, no borders:  that should transition smoothly to page two, which is a montage of shots with no defined borders.  We go from looking up into the air to panning down to the water, to level with the ship.  Nice and smooth.  The only boxiness on these pages should be dialogue boxes, which is a conversation I need to have with myself shortly...

Jim Lee's Deathblow couldn't make up its mind on text boxes or dialogue format.  Issue #1 has lowercase font in the narration, slightly italicized, which doesn't match up with issue #0 or issue #2.  Both 0 & 2 are all caps block lettering.  None of which feels very appropriate.  And the boxes themselves have hand-drawn borders; for the italic lowercase font the borders are all nib-thin, whereas the other issues do the narrative boxes with thick lines.

Who fucking cares.  I'll come back to the text boxes.  My main goal is placement, at the moment.  I scribble everything out to make sure it fits cleanly.  Briefly consider doing the boxes as wholly separate from the text, the way FM often does in Sin City, off in a column of its own.  But I want all the real estate I can take, so no separate column.  Not for this chapter.  Maybe I'll do that in later chapters.

The first two pages resolved, I move from air to water.  Cray beneath the waves, affixing a charge to the boat hull.  That's the third page, three panels.  I start to separate the panels with borders, by the base of the page, so as to carry the border style over onto pages 4 & on.  Everything is nice and sharp, and the action is quick.  I decide to skip showing how Cray climbs up, because Action is the point here.

Page four gives me some pause.  If I'm skipping showing how Cray climbs up, maybe I should be even more elliptical with the action.  Part of the point of these pages is establishing character-- and how better to establish the character of your badass than by showing what Kind of badass he is?  So instead of a bunch of little panels establishing details I decide the entire scenario can be done in two.  Setup two guards looking at pooled water on the deck, completely unprepared for Cray, who's leaping to attack from behind: a nice frozen moment, action in media res.  Cut to panel two, a view from just off the ship's bow, knees-down of Cray as he tosses the ragdoll bodies of the guards over.

Boom.  Four pages, and I'm halfway through the text for chapter one, in layouts.

I go back to the beginning and start working out spotting blacks.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - January 2o26

Hello there.  New one.  Read along.

I try to keep a list.  One per month, ideally, although during holiday season posting tends to slip.  Anything new, anything old: if it's words + pictures, it gets noted.  (Datestamps) indicate year of creation / serialization / collection, as accurately as possible.  I should track publisher info in these...  But I haven't been, as that's not a principle creative / creator-specific element.  Sometimes I note colourists or letterers, but by & large if I mention those aspects it goes in the body of the "review".  As each month advances, the list gets updated but does not get bumped to the top; if you're tracking these you'll either have to scroll through my boring blah-di-blah to find it, OR bookmark the entry.  I recommend bookmarking, because things slip my mind.

Girls' Last Tour vols. 1-6 (2o14-18) - written & illustrated by Tsukumizu

An excellent series.  Cunningly staged dérive.  Scribblecore sci-fi heartbreaker.

Flex Mentallo (remastered colour) (1996) - written by Grant Morrison & illustrated by Frank Quitely

Didn't get more 1996 than this.  In many ways the perfect GM / FQ project.  All-Star Superman had low points, weak issues.  No dogpaddling bollocks here, just 4 issues of peak performance, superdense, maximum effort from all involved.  Only wish it was in the '96 colours, instead of the 2o12 sadfilter remix, plainly inspired by the insipid Incal job.  What the fuck was up with desaturation being the mark of the twentyteens, hunh? 

Wolf vol. 1 (2015) - written by Ales Kot & illustrated by Ricardo López Ortiz

Library filler, waiting between books.  Not what I come to Kot for.  It's genre bluffing.  The watered down take is it's an exmilitary Constantine in L.A.  It could have maybe been more.  Its biggest sin is it isn't a substitute for Desolation Jones.  Doesn't work too hard to compel me.  Ortiz's backgrounds are beautifully executed digital creations; I only wished I liked how the artist handles faces.  Their Zero issue was pretty cool.  I was less into this.

Hellboy In Mexico (2016) - written by Mike Mignola & illustrated by Richard Corben

Already read these, last December.  Demanded a re-visit.

The Best of The Spirit (194o-5o) - written & illustrated by Will Eisner & paid art assistants

More than a character:  The Spirit is a time & space I return to.  The eternal city, with its logotecture & Eisnershpritz, its bountiful substratum of caper & crime:  it's a space I like to haunt along with Danny Colt.  The way Eisner draws eyes, the way he folded and draped fabric, the easy clarity with which he captured light through a window....  A timeless style and a style out of time: the Spirit of an ageless age.

More Weight: a Salem story (2o25) - written & illustrated by Ben Wickey

Easy to see why this made so many best of lists.  It's been the best of this year.  Began it last night and have been dashing alongside, a little winded by now, but it's one of those days that started off negative one and the windchill has the general temp well below that, so I've all the isolation & reserves of quiet one needs to make this kind of sprint.

This book put me much in mind of my mother as it does the present moment.  I'll bore you with explanations of neither.  Suffice it to say this is a most Applicable book about the american experiment and what the test results look like, from our weird, diminished vantage point here, at the end of this thing.  It's a crushing book.  If you lay down with your chin upon your chest and the book staring you in the eye like one of Fuseli's demons, you'll rise with a righteous dent in your heart.

More Weight is a fucking banger.  A lot of people set out to imitate Alan Moore.  This book does the rarest of tricks:  it exceeds and excels at Moore's game, which was never exclusively Moore's-- it excels at literature.  It's as clever as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Pynchon, with twice the feeling of them both combined.  And let's not neglect the art:  Ben Wickey is one of the Greats, moving between styles and palettes with sublime confidence.  The cartooning is deft and the colours are Alive and between them and the keen intelligence guiding the production it's so self-assured I'd call Wickey's work "olympian", if not for the humility and wry humour radiating throughout.  The author doesn't see himself Above Things, does not attempt to act holier-than-thou or contemptuous of the subject.

A very humane, human work, in addition to being a king hell opening act on the stage of this dread year 2026.

The Giant: Orson Welles, The Artist & The Shadow (2o25) - written & illustrated by Youssef Daoudi

Perfectly serviceable.  Enjoyable if you appreciate Welles.  Maybe not what I wanted out of a bio-comic, having just emerged from 'More Weird'.  It reads... light.  Sincerely wish Welles' adaptation of 'The Trial' got more mention than a bloody reduced reproduction poster.  I would've liked to have seen Youssef Daoudi's version of Anthony Perkins.  Anyroad.  Good caricatures.  Fun linework.  Feels more like a DVD documentary than a graphic novel.  If I say any more I'll just start flaying the corpse.

Dick Tracy (1955) - written & illustrated by Chester Gould

The Blackthorne reprints!  Coming soon!