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Tales to Demolish #3 Now Available! $5

This particular page on ye olde Optical Sloth has sat idle for far, far too long. Tales to Demolish #1 and 2 were tremendous things, a joy to read for completely different reasons. Of course, this did come out a couple of years ago, meaning that it’s me who wasn’t on the ball, but the wait was worth it. This one is in full, gorgeous color (hence the jump in cover price) and has a pile of different stories. There’s the one from the cover, dealing with the eternal war between mammal and reptile (and Eric was kind enough to show us the inspirations for the cover). This takes up the first half of the book, all told from the perspective of a guy watching a show on tv, and you just can’t go wrong with punching through somebody’s head. Next up is The Gunslinger, quite possibly my new favorite comic story, with exactly the perfect mix of dialogue and violence for the subject matter. And even after all that there are still 4 more stories, dealing with a campy midnight movie about a killer tree, a neighbor, the real story of Santa Claus, and the unfortunately named Dr. Arcanus. The coloring in this book is tremendous; everything jumps off the page, and it fills me with sadness once again that the world isn’t arranged so that the vast majority of the small press books can look this good. At any rate there’s not a bad story in the bunch, and it would be nice is Eric were made rich immediately so that he could concentrate on making comics. $5

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Tales to Demolish #2 Now Available! $3

The name of the story in here is “I Killed Dan Clowes”. What, I still have to write a review? Isn’t that enough on its own to make you curious enough to buy it? Well, what am I supposed to do now? This is a short book and each surprise in it was better than the one that preceded it, so I don’t want to give anything away. It’s $3 and I’d never seen anything from this guy (that I remember anyway, maybe something in a random anthology somewhere), but now I’m sold. Does that help? His art was tremendous, perfect for this adventure story. I mean revenge story! Oops. As you can probably tell by the title on the cover, there’s plenty of mayhem, death and God. I’m not even going to tell you who else gets killed in here, or if Dan Clowes actually dies. Check out the website or send him an e-mail, I’m sure there are samples there that will tell you more than I’m willing to. Hey, what can I say, I like a good surprise, and I’m not a fan of ruining it for others. Look, even the sample isn’t going to give too much away…

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Tales to Demolish #1 Now Available! $3

This series only has two issues in it that I know of and it’s one of the best things ever. This one is all about a man (a “glaciolologist”) who discovers a giant monster in a glacier. Huge, even. The monster eventually catches up with the guy, and I’m on the verge of giving too much away. These are tiny books, but I love the one track minditude of these things. He focuses on one thing in each book and just nails it, simple concept or not. This one is $3 too, you could probably read both of these in under ten minutes, but what a ten minutes it is. Contact info is down there!