With the punk phenomenon so often romanticized in popular culture, it can be easy to skew or forget the realities of the time. Not for Lust, though, who chronicles even the most unsavory details of a road trip she and unstable companion Enid took along the fringes of European society in 1984. Originally released almost a decade ago in German to international acclaim, this sprawling bildungsroman follows the duo on their haphazard trek from the streets of Vienna to the Italian sea. Along the way they panhandle, hitch rides, and crash with total strangers, many of whom expect their hospitality to be reciprocated with sexual favors. Rendered with lithe and spontaneous forms washed in appropriately sickly green, Lust surveys issues of personal identity and sexuality through her various encounters with the local demimonde, as well as her frustration with a faceless and indifferent public. Her recollections willfully expose the dark side of an anarchic lifestyle, yet are void of any didactic embellishment, and instead form a genuine and nonjudgmental look at aimless youth and rebellion. And what’s truer to punk than that? (June)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

From January 31, 2008, to October 30, 2012, the St. Louis Riverfront Times carried a weekly strip that gave new meaning to trivia. The strip’s host, the bespectacled nerd Leon Beyond, enthusiastically guides readers through a wide-ranging world of trivia, some real and some clearly very, very false. Zettwoch and Huizenga’s flagrant disregard for the truth makes each strip a fresh exercise in trying to decipher what is real and what is not. Topics are numerous and delightful, including spotlights on the Museum of Leftover Masterpieces, the Secret History of Dogs as Weapons, and an account of a Jesuit missionary in China who fused the art of kung fu and the Bible into a single gospel. The majority of the strips are not confined to panels, and Zettwoch and Huizenga exploit this, loading each one with vivid illustrations and intricate detail. Taken as a whole collection, the over-the-top format can be overwhelming, meaning the reader may have to spend more time with it. But since this is a book to be savored, that’s not a bad thing. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink

Bullets fly and bodies splatter in this collection of writer Mills and artist O'Neill's (League of Ex-traordinary Gentlemen) late-1980s satiric cult series, which does Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 inversion (the fireman who starts fires) one better with the title character being not a hero but a hero-hunter. The setting of an earthquake-ravaged and gang-infested future San Francisco (now called San Futuro), crawling with butchers and psychopaths, will be familiar to fans of contemporary urban dystopias like Frank Miller's Ronin and Judge Dredd, the latter of which both Mills and O'Neill worked on. Law himself is a sarcastic dispenser of deadly justice, which really just boils down to one thing: he hates superheroes. There's a lot of tongue-in-cheek psychoanalysis here, with Law's bondage-style outfit played against the sadomasochistic traumas of the heroes he now hunts down. Like Law, the "surps" were engineered creatures bred to fight a savage war in South America, now cashiered out and wreak-ing havoc. While Mills's anti-imperialist edge and highly specific deconstruction of the psychotic na-ture of many DC heroes is welcome, the grinding ultraviolence becomes wearisome and, by the end of its exhausted run, verging on hypocritical. (May)

Reviewed on 05/17/2013 | Details & Permalink