Though it is customarily served cold, revenge is a surprisingly versatile dish. Take, for example, Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows’s THE RIBBON QUEEN (194 pp., AWA Studios, $19.99), a grisly crime/horror hybrid with a lot on its mind. Our heroine, Amy Sun, is a detective for the New York Police Department and a reluctant investigator into the suspicious suicide of a young woman who had recently been rescued by the chauvinist leader of a decorated tactical unit.
It’s a setup one might expect from a Tana French novel, but Ennis and Burrows, who love to test their readers’ tolerances for viscera, are headed into far wilder territory. The pair has worked together often, sometimes on Marvel’s “Punisher” comics and sometimes on their own eye-wateringly gory zombie series, “Crossed,” but here they are concerned with subjects that fit comfortably in neither venue: the problem of misogyny, and the danger of police corruption in the aftermath of the widespread anti-brutality protests in 2020. Into this volatile mix, Ennis and Burrows thrust Bella Rhinebeck, a murder victim, and her posthumous patron, a monstrous being that can’t be easily described, not even after seeing it in action in the book. The dialogue throughout “The Ribbon Queen” is sharp and contemporary, and Burrows’s renderings are carefully detailed and realistic. The book’s jolting supernatural scares are that much more frightening for the contrast.
What does it mean to live independently, or even to live well? Those are the questions that animate Sig Burwash’s VERA BUSHWACK (236 pp., D&Q, $29.95), a remarkable new graphic novel about a young logger named Drew who lives a rich fantasy life as a chain saw-wielding cowpoke while dealing with the logistical demands unique to a woman who wants to live by herself, in the woods, with her dog, Pony, and no one else. (Vera is the name on the side of Drew’s motorcycle, which transforms into an orange horse in her daydreams.)
Burwash, who uses they/she pronouns, gives the book’s art a lovely personality. It is surprisingly plastic; sometimes their renderings of Drew and her environs are simple contours, sometimes the images are drawn from such a height that they’re almost maps of the forest where Drew lives, and sometimes a few pages will look deliberately cartoony.
The meat of this book is Burwash’s juxtaposition of building plans and tool-care guides with the nuts and bolts of living in a young woman’s body in a world dominated by men with designs on it. Drew doesn’t want to live under the thumb of these ubiquitous little tyrants, all of whom want to lecture her about how to use a chain saw. Carving out a place in the world — in every sense — requires a focused devotion to craft, something Burwash, too, demonstrates.
Two-wheeled conveyances and personal independence are also the subjects of ALL MY BICYCLES, by Powerpaola (108 pp., Fantagraphics, $19.99), an elliptical and funny memoir that at first seems to be about the Colombian-Ecuadorean artist’s romantic relationships and then finds its way to a more focused self-examination. Powerpaola draws the book in limited color — there are spare flashes of yellow and red at important moments — and she structures the book with admirable precision. A surrealist sequence, showing the author-narrator wearing a yellow necklace as she peers into a manhole with an alligator at the bottom, suggests that the images shared across the rest of the book’s vignettes may change meaning as the story advances.
As we collect those images, Powerpaola finds new ways to surprise us. Her narrator’s opening line is “I’m not sure how to end this comic,” but the book ends on a note of such perfect serendipity that this seems impossible. She could be lying to us; this could also simply be what life, sometimes, wonderfully, is like.
Even if one dismisses the idea that generative A.I. will take work away from inimitable geniuses, what will become of our precious hacks? THE COMPLETE WEB OF HORROR, edited by Dana Marie Andra (Fantagraphics, 260pp., $49.99), makes this question all the more urgent. Web of Horror was a down-market black-and-white scary-stories comics anthology magazine published by Robert C. Sproul’s Major Magazines in 1969. In one of this reprint collection’s introductory essays, the magazine’s co-creator, Clark Dimond, says the book annoyed James Warren, who had adapted the E.C. Comics horror anthology formula to magazines after a board of censors with congressional backing made horror comics functionally illegal in the 1950s. What right had Sproul to rip off a formula he had ripped off fair and square? Given the quality of the art here, we should all be grateful that he did.
“The Complete Web of Horror” is distinguished not by its format or its subject matter, but by the eye for talent displayed by Dimond and his editor, the brilliant sci-fi short story author Terry Bisson, who died in January. The stories are firmly in the E.C. tradition — occasionally verbose, enjoyably gruesome, often surprisingly clever — but the art is new and surprising, leaping out at you like the very best boogeymen do.