In the pages of True Crime Funnies, Jim Rugg turns in page after page (24 in all; full color and B & W) of pulse pounding pencils (& inks & colors & lettering &, oh yeah, scripts) in the first issue of an all new single-creator anthology title that provides readers with ringside seats to a series of action-packed short comics stories in the pulp fiction tradition, in the process demonstrating that when seeing is believing, truth and fiction are interchangeable; two sides of the same coin.

A carefully balanced construction of actual events, hearsay, mistakes, misdirection, misrepresentations, oversights, lies and outright fabrications are all deliberately presented as one and the same, conflated in the service of forging a strong and persuasive central point of view, thus revealing – in a hidden twist that can only be intellectually grasped once by the reader once they've been released from the grasping hold of the narrative – that it is in the “Funnies” themselves that the “True" Crime has been perpetrated.  Rugg leaves various clues throughout to assist those readers – who know how to look – in solving this crime, and in the process created a meta-fable for our times of disinformation, “fake news” and “deep fakes", where the border wall between fact and fantasy has collapsed.   That's Entertainment!

The irony here is so all-pervasive here that casual comics readers – those unschooled in decoding – are at risk of missing it, and so taking the comics at face value.  That would be a mistake.

True Crime Funnies is dangerous fun; the kind that only comics can provide.