Cold Heat Special #4

Frank Santoro & Jim Rugg
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This was a treat. I loved Cold Heat Special #1 from last year (it was one of my favorite comics of the year), so it's no surprise that I enjoyed this one as well. Like with the first special, Cold Heat creator Frank Santoro teams up with a different artist to tell a story surrounding protagonist Castle, in the strange world she lives in. This time around, Jim Rugg co-writes the story and illustrates the issue for a fantastic final product. This special comes in a newspaper-style black-and-white comic with big panels to showcase the fantastic art. It's chalk-full of disturbing and bizarre images in a dream-like story that has Castle moving between a fast food diner during a rainstorm and a beautiful landscape of farmland and lazy hills. It's a pretty short story, but it became one of those books that I read really slowly to savor the atmosphere and art. What I'm trying to say here is Cold Heat Special #4 is immensely enjoyable and I highly recommend it. One certainly doesn't have to read the specials before this or any issues of the regular Cold Heat comic to understand it, as this serves as a great introduction to the sensibility of Santoro's world, and the specials are all self-contained from what I saw. After having devoured these specials to such satisfying results, I'm really looking forward to the Cold Heat collection coming this fall. It should be 240 pages of awesomeness. But this will tide me over until then, and I believe I saw a Cold Heat Special #5 at Comic-Con too...

Comments

Frank Santoro said…
Jim Rugg really is the most under-appreciated motherfucker of a cartoonist out there these days. He kicks EVERYONE'S ass. Thanks for this review, this Special has been flying under the radar and I think it's Jim's best work to date. I'm thrilled that he took time out of his crazy schedule to collaborate with me on this... I didn't do much, just got out of his way!

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