The Exec #1
31 pgs. & $3.95
Comics Conspiracy
Story: Doug Miers
Pencils: Carlos Paul
www.ComicsConspiracy.com

Jack Pierce is an executive in a sterile, emotionless world run by gigantic corporations that survive and grow through murder. Jack Pierce is a murderer.

Indeed, everyone is a murderer. In the first issue of The Exec, more than twenty-five men and women are graphically slaughtered in gouts of blood and gore. Jack's receptionist kills three men. It is so excessive that it suggests satire. There is no satire.

There is, however, excellent art and visual story telling enhanced by outstanding coloring. The art is reality based and powerful. Both the dramatic art and over-the-top coloring add to the unusual style of The Exec and its unrealistic setting. Although it is never so stated, this is not the Earth we know.

There is also a very stylized, tight plot and wholly unnatural dialog. Everyone speaks impeccable English.

When style so impregnates a story that it becomes obvious, however, said story will either be loved or hated by its intended audience. As example, Clint Eastwood's Italian Western movies were STYLE and then some.

I like style. I just like story better.

Peculia/#12.95 & 102 pgs., Fantagraphics Books/written and drawn by Richard Sala/sold at comics shops and www.fantagraphics.com.

A wildly imaginative nightmare, Peculia is that rare comics commodity, original.

Bare-footed and pursued in a black mini-skirt through an outré world of monsters, young Ms. Peculia is beset by the primitive fears of death, cannibalism, and sexual confusion that haunt our darkest dreams. Among her would-be abductors are Obscurus, bandaged and goggled like the Invisible Man, and Justine, a spandexed super-heroine.

Her pen-and-ink, claustrophobic world is a medieval woodcut of stark blacks and whites that approaches the look of photographic negatives.

These marvelous stories were first serialized in Evil Eye Comics #s 1-9. Because of partial nudity and surreal violence, Peculia is only lauded for adults.
MV.

Shudder at Vance's Light's End horror short stories narrated by actor William Windom at www.plan9.org.
Questions? Comment? E-Mail Suspended Animation at vance@digitalwebbing.com

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