▲ THIS SIDE UP ▲
Beautiful Darkness is the kind of comics we need more of. It not only has a sustained thematic subtext, but uses the images to convey information not present in the text. Too often we default to a double dip of narrative from text and image. As readers we're taught to treat the illustrations as secondary. This album, using the full power of the medium, elucidates a story that couldn't exist in another form. Highly recommended.
his amazing piece of Alex Schomburg's airbrush art might have served as inspiration for Mr. Bender Rodriguez, but can we really believe that it will survive for another thousand years?
The reading experience is akin to listening to heavy metal as an adolescent, not the silly faux-pagan heavy metal that we see in retrospect, but the dangerous, devil-borne heavy metal we believed it to be at the time.
I've been reading comics for a long time. At first I was confused by the characters, the events, the storylines. Characters would come and go with barely a mention of a name. That confusion was the hook. My youth meant that I was comfortable with discomfort. The taste made me hungry. The hunger made me hunt.
Comic books are best when they are disposable. Not because they aren't worth keeping, but because they express a kind of immediate, present experience. When a man becomes a monster, we can and should contemplate whether he was a monster all along, but only a comic book can make you feel the change.
