The Wallop #1
Comix, Matthew Springer, 20 pgs, [email protected], matthewspringer.bigcartel.com, $10
Brimming full of comics, photography and drawings, Matthew Springer’s debut of The Wallop is a frenetic one-man show of freak energy on paper. Judging by his online work and what’s available in his shop, Springer works more often in colour, but The Wallop shows what he can do in black and white, which is a lot. Springer fills every inch of his 20 pages with motion — dead space be damned. His comics are intense and densely packed, with a druggy, grotesque vibe filling each black-edged page. No surface is untextured, nobody still; humanoids, animals and, aliens vibrate through their respective, trippy worlds. The lead-off comic (the longest of the batch at three pages) features a sadistic vacuum salesman hawking his wares on the street. Later, Springer successfully squeezed nearly two dozen panels into a single zine page to tell the tale of a one-eyed creature stuck in a time loop via a predator’s stomach. Photos, graffiti-inspired drawings, and a maze game round out the content, but the comics are definitely the main show. Altogether a funny and frightening ride.