Sammy Harkham CRICKETS #4
Chapter 2 of Blood of the Virgin, a long-winder about America, making exploitation movies in 1971 Los Angeles. Also: weightlifting cartoonists.
48 pages. 2 colors. 8.5 x 11
“It’s a bit of an odd distinction, but Sammy Harkham may be the cartoonist who puts out the least work relative to the size of his presence on the scene. Part of that is no doubt due to the effort he spends in arenas outside the actual placement of ink on paper -- at this point Kramers Ergot has got him on the list of all-time great comics anthology editors with Kurtzman, Crumb, and Spiegelman (and not in last place, either), and his comic shop Family is on the short list for best in the business as well. But mostly it’s that Sammy, like John Pham and Adrian Tomine and the Hernandez brothers, just has making comics in this day and age figured out. There are plenty of younger (and older) cartoonists whose attempts to keep their production rates at 320 kbps have thrust them a lot further into the limelight than the guys and gals who methodically carve away at their pages unseen for a few years before dropping a new thing, but as the internet cheapens “content” past any low it’s ever sunk to previously, comics with nice slow production schedules seem to matter a lot more when they drop. A new Sammy Harkham comic, basically, is an event -- both according to the laws of supply and demand, and because it’s clear from reading his pages that slow and steady wins the race.” Matt Seneca www.tcj.com