Weighing in at 40 black and white 8 1/2" x 11" pages, largely – and smartly – employing a 12-panel grid, Pure Evil is the most substantial work by Matt Seneca that we've come across, and makes for a very meaty read.  Taking a hardboiled look at the nitty gritty, capitalistic flipside of the funny book business, where financial necessity intersects with – or leads to – the sublimation of sexual drives into the creation of pen & ink realities – ultimately in place of the real thing. 

Out of the past comes an old comicstrip looking to hitch a ride with a new lease on life, but what starts out looking like a promising venture goes on a late night drive with a femme fatale that takes a detour to failure... and the sun rises on a world without men where women can lead the way.

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Faced with the abyssal yawn brought on by a sense of the ultimate meaninglessness of life, leading to a nihilistic self-abandonment to the rip tide of social animal  forces, Butterface – billed on the cover as “a kinky dating app noir” – is indeed full on Noir.

Sex as violence as sex.  So, not a comic book to be ventured into lightly (and definitely "Adults ONLY").  

It has a rough production that feels deliberately matched to the rough content.  While the glossy full color covers appear professionally printed, the black & white* guts look like they were printed guerrilla style, on an old high school offset press after hours. And, regardless of the nature of the material and the quality of presentation, this is a comic book jam packed with old school comic book storytelling

  48 digest-size pages.

 

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  *(with grey tone screens and  bright yellow accents scattered throughout)

The funky three-color (black, orange & green) hand-printing on the guts of this self-published, 40-page, magazine-size comic book – wrapped in a full-color glossy cover – provides an added layer of æsthetic frisson to this tale of the inescapable corruptions and inevitable inequities produced by the procurement of individual wealth, and the repressive violences to mind and body that are required to maintain it.

The narrative centers on a highly gendered tale contrasting a masculine solidity of (type-)written words and hand-made art with a seductive feminine immateriality of computer communications – along with their respective interactions with the capitalistic envelope of society – and incorporates a somewhat opaque morality play on Christian legacies.

Plenty of food for thought amidst the comics splendor.

 

The Infinite Prison is Matt Seneca’s most ambitious and substantial work to date.  Intricately plotted and lushly colored, this long-in-the-works 184 page full size perfect bound softcover graphic novel makes for an absorbing, powerful, and disturbing read.  Nominally science fiction – it is set in a post-apocalypse Poland (so it seems safe to assume that Stanislaw Lem is somewhere in the thematic mix here?), a number of years (fourteen?) after a nuclear war which wiped out a large chunk (perhaps most?) of humanity, where technology has, somewhat counterintuitively, continued to advance in novel ways – The Infinite Prison also incorporates into the mix aspects of superhero mythologies, particularly those involving genetic mutations leading to enhanced states of being, and their concomitant identity issues, plus a bit of (Polish-inflected) religio-nationalism in the form of a priestly agent of the nation who knits the narrative together.  So, suffice it to say: plenty going on here.

The work’s central theme is, as the title implies, that of presenting a confrontation with the sense of unending, ineluctable imprisonment, specifically that engendered by being trapped in the flesh of sexually reproducing beings – the inevitable flipside of which is a yearning for escape.  Self-annihilation – whether through nuclear armageddon or personal suicide – is one sure route… but is there another?  Seneca here posits the possibility of a path to transcendence and then goes on to chart its course.  

For those who prioritize the visual elements and find themselves intrigued – but are wholly unfamiliar with Seneca’s artistic sensibilities – we’d say by way of suggestion (but not diagnosis) that the art is something along the lines of Frank Quitely grafted onto early Michael Kaluta (again, this is just to give unfamiliar readers a sense of what to expect, not a stylistic interpretation) 

Also, fans of Anders Nilsen’s Tongues may find themselves on somewhat similar terrain – but less Greek, more Christian-adjacent, and also worth noting here:  Seneca’s themes are darker, the action is more visceral and the visuals more graphically violent and sexual.

Michel Fiffe has this to say:

"Seneca has outdone himself by surrendering to an inspired, almost maniacal vision of warring values: harsh, delicate, elegantly measured, playfully reckless. Every mark, every hue, every last sentiment crammed within points to THE INFINITE PRISON being, above all, a personal message to the world in the form of pure comics."