I have only read four titles from Black Mask, but they have been among my very favorite sequential art productions ever, as well as some of the finest examples of the hidden masterpieces of the margins of the medium.
I was ignorant to the Black Mask company until I first learned of 4 Kids Walk Into A Bank:
The story is not usually something you see in comic form---four pre-teens planning to rob a bank in order to thwart their leader's father's possible relapse into a life of crime. The art and the coloring fit so well together that the muted palette dazzles somehow.
It was so good that you waited. And waited. And felt guilty that you got angry when you learned Matt Rosenberg's father had a heart attack and that had caused the delays.
Since Black Mask is pretty much one dude, Matt Pizzolo, the realities shift.
One of their next big projects publicity-wise was Calexit:
Great badguy, great map and flag background, and nice recognition of the real California. Also, the treatment of the day-to-day experience of both an occupying force and a resistance force is not forced or contrived.
It's no real SPOILER to say that Zora kills fascists, but one of my favorite memories of an experience reading a comic has to do with Zora killing fascists.
It never mattered that it took 10 months for the three issues to come out. 10? I must have been busy; it felt like 15 months.
By that time, Black Mask was responsible for two of the most important comic properties of the times for me. One day I saw Gravetrancers up at the register, and the dude behind the register nodded, "Yeah man, that's, liked, fucked up...it's awesome." Are you kidding me? SOLD:
This is all true: there's a drug produced by certain compounds found in a dead body, and the fresher the dead, the stronger the drug.This drug is also highly addictive, because, of course it is. The story writes itself. It's got everything: syringes full of psychedelic corpse drugs directly to the eyeball; a dude being thwarted from having sex with his mom by someone other than his mom; and Shovel, a boy of 40 who wears a shawl over his face because he has no lower jaw. It's now cannon in the badass-underground-horror-drug-masterpiece genre.
The next title, Young Terrorist, was actually released before the 4 Kids... series, but I picked up the collected series a few months ago, having been thumbing through for too long.
It poses as a "daughter-of-an-American-oligarch-rebels-and-joins-a-terrorist-cell" story while turning out to be closer to superhero comics at the end. That marriage is the real star and story.
These are just four of their titles. I haven't even gotten to Black yet, where black people are gaining superpowers, and they're the only people on earth who are:
Or Kim&Kim, where two chicks are interdimensional cowboy bounty hunters, one's queer and one's trans:
What about Space Riders:
While I was writing this I remembered seeing in one of the sale bins Ballistic, the collection of the four issue series, and buying it on the spot:
Butch is an air-conditioning unit repairman in an dystopian future independent floating city-island of technology mixed with DNA. He aspires to be a criminal, and has a living gun as a sidekick, a gun that spends equal time between being attached to his right hand, and chilling on couch getting loaded.
The pencil work is Darick Robertson, and who doesn't love Transmet? And at $2.99, what risk was there?
But I still haven't finished it.
Black Mask is responsible for some of the great artifacts of era in a medium, and that's pretty cool.
They've earned my continued attention.
