I’ve been meaning to say something about this comic for a couple of months–I ordered a bunch for the store right after HeroesCon, I knew they’d be gone before too long and wanted to stock up.  The Death Day mini is a preview of hot-snot artist Sam Hiti‘s next big book, which I believe will also be called “Death Day.” WEIRD. You might, if you’re lucky, be familiar with Sam’s work from his awesome Tiempos Finales (“End Times”), or his several minis or Ghoulash series of sketchbook/strip collections.  If I were going to pick my five favorite cartoonists working today, his name would certainly be on that list, he’s just got something special going on. So, a fair and balanced review of Death Day this will not be. I also encourage you to click on these images, each of which is a two-page spread from the mini, and each will look more awesome all big.

I’m not going to waste too much time talking about the plot of the book — though it comes in at over 30 pages, this is just the barest beginning to the story, which seems to involve two warring groups and a coming massive conflict. But it’s worthwhile to point out that there is nothing explained whatsoever, no captions, no expository dialogue, Sam just kind of spreads out his story like a picnic blanket and you have to figure out where the food is.

I think in a lot of cases this sort of thing can be hit or miss — it takes confidence to pull something like this off. If it works it’s great, your readers are swept up and actively engaged in the story; if it doesn’t work it creates a story that’s muddy and inscrutable.  What separates Sam from normal (lesser?) cartoonists is that his art and story are very similar in this way. Often the pages of Death Day are little more than moving patterns, from which recognizable figures and forms emerge and reveal themselves to us. If you pick up a copy of the book and flip through it, you’ll see what I mean: the opening sequence is something like 20 pages of this, as alien forms move across an alien landscape, some of which reveal themselves to be human, others which become more alien the longer you look at them.

The mini is laid out in two page spreads like this, each page a single panel. Sam takes it a step farther and uses this spread layout to create numerous images which juxtapose against one another and create further abstractions. The spread above appears after a long sequence of images as we see a massive machine receiving the signals from commandoes on the outside. What is it? Is it alive? It’s powerfully reminiscent of the giant Neo-harvesting machines from The Matrix, but as we get closer we see that it’s a network of screens and computer stations, like a giant hivemind operated by little astronaut technicians. What is the image above? There’s little introduction to it, and no explanation. Are we looking at multiple images (upside-down!) on a insect-like compound eye? The following spread does nothing to explain it either:

I finished this mini incredibly excited for the book, super interested in the answers to these questions. I love how inscrutable Sam’s comics can be, and this is the most inscrutable of them all. Too often storytellers feel compelled to hold their audience’s hand and pull them through the story, so it’s refreshing to read something by someone with the guts to allow his audience to investigate the story, to leave just a few clues here and there and allow the interaction between audience and author to coalesce slowly. 

All this is not even mentioning Sam’s gorgeous art–he’s one of the last great brush masters, a dying breed in this age of Cintiqs and digital inking–you can almost smell the black chunky ink on these pages, not to mention those ink washes! Okay I’ll calm down, but I think we have like 8 of these or something: you need to grab one of these badboys while you can. Oh, spoiler alert: the cover at the top of this post is the one I got from Sam — if you want one all sketched on like that, you’ll have to get it directly from him, if he still has any!