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.
BACK IN STOCK!
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.BACK IN STOCK!
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*(with grey tone screens and bright yellow accents scattered throughout)
The funky hand-printing on the guts of this three-color (black, orange & green), 40-page, magazine-size comic book – wrapped in a full-color glossy cover – make it stand out from the crowd and provide an added layer of 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 the written word 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 æsthetic splendor.
This 184-page, full color, squarebound softcover looks great! But it's only just out of the box here at Copacetic and so, for now, we're going to pass the mic to Michael Fiffe, who has this to say about it:
"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."
