Espey, Eamon – Wormdye

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Wormdye

You know, this is the type of book that probably would have never been made without the new publishing group, Secret Acres. Not that I want to make this a commercial or anything, but they’re pretty new at this and have put out a few incredible books so far and I think that people should give them as much money as possible to encourage them. Take Wormdye. Maybe one of the “big” publishers would have given it a shot, maybe not (I have no idea of sales figures or whatever else those folks take into account when publishing a book), but it’s all rendered irrelevant by the fact that Secret Acres was able to do such a tremendous job on the production value. The book looks gorgeous and it’s affordable ($13 for I believe 7 collected issues). What more can you ask for? What about the contents? Well, the first few issues are reviewed below, although I seem to have been rushed for at least one of them. I didn’t remember the first part of things though, the parts involving a cat, a microwave, and a confused teen girl in a bathroom, nor do I remember the man who pretended he was dead so he could go have the time of his life. Also, in case I didn’t make it clear enough in the earlier reviews: the bit with the power mad Pope and the ten virgins to be sacrificed was delightful. Next up are a couple of silent pieces, all with full pages layouts, that I’m not even going to try and review. I’ll just say that it looks like most of the images from Cremation of Care and Giants in Heat are up on his website and mention that these are the sorts of drawings that deserve to be blown up and studied, the sorts of things that you could randomly open a book and turn to at any moment and discover something that you missed completely the first time around. This all brings you to the biggest story of the book, The Blood is the Cow. A two part story, this tale involves milking, two brothers, a secret conspiracy (although that’s probably the only kind of conspiracy), slavery, sacrifice and an old man trapped down a well. This would all be fantastic enough if some yokel was drawing it, as these stories are completely unique in their own right. Luckily for the reader Eamon is in a class by himself when it comes to the drawing business, with an uncanny knack of finding just the right expression for the humans and able to plumb some serious depths of imagination when it comes to everything else. A guided tour through his brain would probably do you some serious damage, but you’d also come away a lot wiser. Great stuff, in other words, and here’s hoping that new publishing company ends up taking over the world. $13