One of the best things about visiting Comicpalooza is that it's a great opportunity to meet local comic creators hoping to get their name out. This past weekend I picked up five new books from our hometown heroes, and they are well worth looking into.
Weretrucker I loved Weretrucker from the moment writer and artist Kaitlin Edlund put it into my hand. For starters, she assembled it there for me from printed pages that she hand stapled. It was such an amazingly old-school zine moment that warmed my cynical old heart.
The books is about... well, a were trucker. Not a man that turns into a trucker at the full moon, but a trucker that turns into a wolf on the full moon. Yes, that should be truckerwolf, but let's not be pedantic about the whole thing.
Anyway, a trucker listening to accounts of brutal slayings along the highways pulls over and finds himself turning into a bloodthirsty monster ready to eat an accident victim. Luckily for him, he has a guardian angel in the form of his Husky, Derrick, who serves as an animal conscience for the trucker when he turns. It's a short, dark tale that has a kind of Del James brilliance about it, and it makes me very eager to read more from Edlund.
Doom Ranch 5000 Mark Nasso has compiled an amazing collection of Texas ghost tales in a single amazing volume. Anyone that grew up devouring Time Life books on the Loch Ness Monster will be instantly hooked, and Texans especially will be thankful to see some of our more interesting mythologies given life.
Each page contains a story and art by a Texas creator. Bruce Small's whimsically haunted toy shop in Galveston is a treat, and Jessica Correa's take on La Llorona is worthy of that absolutely terrifying spectre. Seriously, Correa, thanks for her even more frightening.
Of all the stories in the anthology Amanda Rogers' haunting depiction of El Muerto De Tejas stands the furthest out. A notorious cattle thief was apprehended by the Texas Rangers, and to serve as a warning to other lawbreakers he was decapitated and his body strapped to his horse to wander the plains. His severed head bounces tied to the saddle horn, and his body is marked by the bullets and arrows of those that have tried to send the headless horseman to his final rest.
Mindblowing stuff that any self-respecting appreciator of Texas ghost stories needs on their shelf.
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