Tiny Pages Made of Ashes is Comics Bulletin's roundup of small press comics reviews.

 

Elsewhere on Comics Bulletin:

  • Singles Going Steady has two comics with the word "Dream" in the title, some other stuff.
  • Digital Ash covered two comics you can buy digitally: Moth City and Task Force Rad Squad.

 

Heart of Stone

(Stefano Cardoselli, David Sandoval, Craig Cilliland; N.A.S. Studios)

 

 

When you think small press comics, you rarely think of blood soaked cowboy tales telling of the Devil's Vengeance, do you? Well, thank goodness Stefano Cardoselli is here to fill that niche and scratch that itch — and he does it balls-out, head-exploding, six-guns blazing, BANG!!! with his new book from N.A.S Studios, Heart of Stone — and whooo doggie, this book is so over the top you either have to love it or burn it as part of some sort of purification ritual.

Me? I loved it. Then again, I always prefer my over the top to be really, really over the top.

 

 

The premise of Heart of Stone is that there is this town under siege from a gang of perverts, deviants, and psychopaths led by Kat "2 Guns" McSea, a rootin' tootin' badass lady gunslinger who has Love tattooed on one tit and Hate tattooed on the other. The town leaders need a plan to extricate themselves from their situation. "Yeah, and bringing back to life a dead piece-of-shit, gambling, drunk, gunslinger is an obvious solution." Makes sense to me. They must be Republicans.

A fellow called Travis is the piece-of-shit they are referencing and when we first meet him, he's hanging dead and rotting from a tree while some sexy succubus is chatting up his corpse, talking revenge. The city elders engage the services of some random voodoo priest who inserts a Heart of Stone into Travis' corpse, thus reanimating him (of course). From here on out, as one might expect, this comic descends into some serious bloodshed where nobody is sparred.

And it's awesome, all kinds of awesome. Really, though, I mean if you think about it too much, the plot of this comic is kinda weak, the characters are kinda two-dimensional, and the dialogue is kinda wooden. But still — KAR-BOOM SPLAKT SPLUT SPLAKT BOOM! It's insane, relentless, bloody, and so, so over the top.

 

 

What makes it so great is, of course, the wicked combination of Cardoselli's scratchy, inky art and colorist Cilliland's profusion of ochers and oranges and the deep heavy crimson of blood. There is nothing subtle about these pages — they are as violent as the action the depict and it is the perfect blend of art and intent. If this comic had a scent, it would be of hot, putrid, rotting meat. 

While reading Heart of Stone, it's hard not to sense the glee Cardoselli was feeling as he was creating these pages. It pops off the pages like fired from a revolver, and it's infectious as all get out. 

 

 

Heart of Stone may be the least politically sensitive book I've come across in years. It's probably somewhat offensive to just about everyone, yet somehow Cardoselli is able to pull this off without the slightest twinge of ill-intent or meanness. This comic is dark, it's misogynistic, it's awash in gore and blood and splatter, but it's fun and really, sometimes this kind of fun engenders a cathartic joy. 

So, if over the top is how you like your violence and you're particularly partial to it being served Western style, Heart of Stone is your book. 

It's certainly mine. 

– Daniel Elkin

 

You kind find out more about Heart of Stone at the N.A.S Studios website.

 

Other Worlds #4

(Justin Zimmerman, Matt Grigsby, Russ Brown, Mike Lawrence)

 

 

One day a young man, on a trip to the Grand Canyon, hits a deer. The deer and man are both fine, but his car is totaled. The man stumbles to a diner a mile away, where he finds an empathetic waitress to tell about his accident. Suddenly older guy, looking emotionally beat all to shit, wanders into the diner, leaves an envelope with our main character, then immediately crashes his car. What is inside the envelope? You'll have to read this comic to find out.

 

 

In the six-page back-up tale, we witness a holocaust of international nuclear war — but you wouldn't believe the real forces behind the nuclear destruction.

Other Worlds has been an ongoing science fiction anthology comic by the omni-creative Justin Zimmerman, but the lead story in this issue has no science fiction elements to it. Instead the piece reads like a never filmed short subject, a quick, eventful burst that is affecting, powerful and quickly over.

 

 

Matt Grigsby's art does a fine job of telling Zimmerman's short story. The more I looked at Grigsby's pages, the more I respected the way that he delivered smart scene-setting detail to the art that added atmosphere to the piece. Though his style is somewhat overly broad with emotion in his work — the final pages edge more too much towards over-sentimentality for my taste — Grigsby has a good sense of the wide open spaces and incredible vastness of the American West.

I don't really understand why "Knowing" was published in a collection that nominally is devoted to presenting sci-fi yarns, but I really appreciated the humanity of this story.

 

 

The second story, passionately drawn by Russ Brown, is definitely a sci-fi tale, the kind of yarn that you might have seen in an EC Comics imitator back in the day. The twist ending is a bit of a goof, but Brown's art has an intense bleakness in places that gives "The Contemptibles" a much-needed touch of grit.

I enjoyed my trip to Other Worlds. The humanistic feeling of the first strip made me feel empathy while the second strip made me feel very pleasant disgust.

– Jason Sacks

 

For more information on Other Worlds, go to Bricker-Down Productions.