Black Star #3
God bless Jeff Zwirek. Or whichever deity you’d like to use, I think the whole idea is a bit silly, but whatever gets you by. You see, Jeff was carving out a little niche for himself just fine. It was a tiny niche, granted, having Jack Rabbit, but he could have done it for 5 or 10 more years easy, finally giving up the whole comics thing as stupid down the road. Instead he has chosen to challenge every piece of conventional wisdom about making comics in an effort to improve himself and his work, and I think it’s resulted in his best stuff to date. OK fine, he still uses panels and does regular comic things, but it’s the idea that there has to be more out there that has me so intrigued. Plenty of artists trapped in their self-made niches could learn something from this. In here you have a continuation of the main story of the last issue, where he categorizes everybody who sells comics at small press conventions and manages to alienate everybody. Then you have a group of Presidents who have come back to take all the money with their faces out of circulation (worth it for having George Washington say “balls” alone) and a heartwarming and lovely tale about Punk Rock Prep School. Buy his comics, won’t you? I’m afraid he’s going to get to the end of this story about why he’s still doing comics and decide to chuck the whole thing, which would be a lousy thing to have happen. $2
