Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"... Shows you. I almost half believed you.
"I don't need psychos in my life...
"... thank you very much."
Said the psycho to the person he has just forcibly overdosed on heroin and murdered...
There is a safe way to have psychos in your life, though... Read material like this from the Laphams who I am sure are completely lovely in real life and appear not remotely psychotic at all. Though I guess they have to be a little bit psycho to produce material like this, but, you know, just inside their heads...
Sure, perhaps if they weren't producing comics they'd be out roaming around America offing people for kicks (makes note to investigate disappearances versus their appearances at comic conventions...) but happily for us, and them, it's easier to write and draw about it instead. Clever psychos, you see...
Here's the rap sheet from the publisher to tell you why you shouldn't be remotely concerned associating yourself with two of the nicest people in comics who love to entertain us with deranged psychopaths and almost certainly really aren't ones themselves. Promise. Now comics retailers on the other hand...
"Guns and revenge. As American as the wicked west. Ricky Toledo is going to find the man that killed her mother, and revenge is going to be sweet. Ricky was 15 when she fell hard for a handsome drifter who rented a room in her family home. Then he killed her mother and got her father sent to prison for it.
It's three years later, and Ricky will stop at nothing to get revenge. A broken young woman and her trusty companion - a gold Smith and Wesson 45 named Golddigger - track a serial killer hiding in plain sight as a travel blogger.
It's a dark, grimy game of cat and mouse through a tangled American landscape. And, like all the best crime noir, it's a twisted love story."
It is! There's definitely a hint of Mickey and Mallory from Quentin Tarantino's Natural Born Killers about Ricky and master of disguise Dante, though there's considerably more hate to go with the lust, which is mostly of the murderous kind, anyway. Still, there's pure primal obsession at play here that is for sure.
Fans of STRAY BULLETS will know precisely what to expect from this self-contained piece of sociopathy. Even with its tight anxiety-inducing five-issue confines it manages to take the reader on a wild ride of jumping backwards and forwards in time, deliberately presenting key events in misleading fashion, confusing readers and characters alike with wilful, nay gleeful, obscurification. And disguises... Lots of disguises...
