Fans of New Dheli cartoonist, Bhanu Pratap's first North American collection, Dear Mother & Other Stories have been chafing at the bit awaiting more work from this unique and powerful comics maker, and now, at last it's time to release the inner reading beast so that it can gallop through 100 (mostly) full color pages of new work that fill this just released full size (9" x 11 1/2") hardcover from the Fantagraphics Underground (FU) imprint.

With maniac precision, in cold, cruel, harsh blacks, Pratap graphically brings to comics the underlying essence of "the shadow" as conceptualized by T.S. Eliot in "The Hollow Men,"  in 1925 (intriguingly, preceding by five years the emergence of the pulp character bearing that appellation).  Reading – experiencing might be a better description – these works one feels at times as if one is being attacked via the optic nerves.  Delineations of sharpness and angularity converge upon, contain and pierce soft blobby curves in ways that uncannily capture crescendoing anxieties that climax in panic before collapsing in despair.  And always, there is the deep, black shadow... of the abyss.

Cutting Season features 16 short comics pieces, ranging in length from short, mostly black & white or monochrome, 1-2 page pieces like "Star Gazing", "Anvil" and "Stuff-icked" to to longer, full color, 8 - 16 page works like, "Into Me", "Toddling Towers", and "Sediment" with the remainder falling somewhere inbetween. It feels like some of these pieces – for example, "Stuff-Icked" and "Sediment" may be from an earlier period in Pratap's development; if not, then they are simply less maniacly precise.

Each of the pieces, to varying degrees, will tug at the reader's intelligence, nagging their consciousness for a solution to the enigma that they present.  Like feeling an an itch in the brain demanding to be scratched, readers will find themselves returning to these pieces to unlock their riddles, and to sound their unfathomable depths.