Posted in: Comics, Indie Comics | Tagged: black mask, black mask studios, breathless, gravetrancers, matt pizzolo
Black Mask Kicks off Spooky Season Early With Gravetrancers
Black Mask Studios has been adding to their library of trade paperbacks and graphic novels, emerging from the shutdown with the same energy that put them on the map, to begin with. The company, known for its comics that feature social commentary and political intrigue, including Matt Pizzolo's subversive Calexit and Young Terrorists, is starting Halloween early this year with a week of horror. Their series Gravetrancers and Breathless will go to trade paperback on the same day, kicking off September with macabre drama and hulking monsters.
Gravetrancers is a trippy, neon nightmare of creeping horror, written by Pirouette's M.L. Miller with art by James Michael Whynot, colors from Dee Cunniffe, and lettering from Jim Campbell. The series follows brother and sister Maribel and Anthony, who are on a mission to find the resting place of their late (and estranged) father. They end up at the creepy Malort Cemetery, which is lined with unmarked graved. While there, they run into a group of grave robbers who are creating a drug made from the bodies they've stolen. The twist is, though, that the freshest bodies yield the most potent dosage, which creates a dangerous situation for the living amongst them. The series reads like Wes Anderson took a crack at re-creating Eraserhead after being locked in a haunted house for years.
Breathless, from writer Pat Shand and artist Renzo Rodriguez, follows a cryptozoologist who discovers the cure for asthma in the corpse of a monster, becoming the target of a plot by a business mogul. Bleeding Cool covered this release earlier here, where Black Mask's 2018 series' modern-day relevance was spotlighted.
These releases come shortly after Black Mask Studios has put out long-anticipated trade paperbacks for indie series such as Last Song, Jade Street Protection Services, Devil Within, and Survival Fetish. If you've been waiting on titles from Black Mask to be collected, it looks like now's the time.