Vondruska, Greg – Tread #1

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Tread #1

One of the quotes on the back of #1 talked about the lyrical quality of his writing, and that sums it up as good as anything. He actually puts lyrics in #1, maybe he’s a musician, I don’t know. If he’s not he should think about writing songs. What about the comics? His strength lies in his longer stories, at least that’s what I’ve been able to tell from the stuff I’ve seen so far. A Token and Two Bucks (you can see half of it here, by the way) is fantastic, although it doesn’t come close to The Death of the Reader. Was that one ever nominated for anything? Anybody? I know it’s an older piece, but that should have been a comic exclamation point right there. It’s the story of a man who has given up on painting, which was the only thing he ever wanted to do, had a job that he hated and was recently divorced. Then he spots a mysterious book store that he had never noticed before and I kind of thought it was going to degenerate into a “mysterious shop” story. You know, the kind where the shop appears out of nowhere, our hero goes in and gets something, usually for free, and when he goes back to ask about this item he finds that the shop is gone. Not the case, as the shop owner charges a whole lot for the book that he gets, which has these strange symbols on every page… If you want to know more than that, buy the first issue. That’s the stronger of the two in my opinion, which almost isn’t fair because it’s so much bigger than #2.