Like most people, I love a good mystery. But in my mind, mysteries tend to evoke two basic responses while experiencing them: You either ask “Who Done It?” or “What The Hell Is Going On?”.

I never wanted a robot for a best friend when I was a kid. That probably stemmed from the fact that when I was six my dad showed me The Terminator and T-2: Judgment Day back to back which taught me that robots would probably rise up to kill us all until I saw The Matrix when I was ten which taught me that technology would DEFINITELY rise up to kill us all. So…. yeah I don’t get the appeal. Anyway that weird detour into my bullshit aside what I do understand is the appeal of having an imaginary/out of the ordinary friend when you’re a kid, I’ve read Calvin and Hobbes I’m hip, and at first glance Robbie and Bobby looks like it’s going to be just that. However, as soon as I started digging into this volume it became quickly apparent that the fact that an eight-year-old boy is hanging out with a robot is the least weird thing this book has to offer.

Way back in January of 2012 I wrote a review for the first volume of Tall Tales from the Badlands and I dug it a lot. This was partly because I have a lot of affection for the Western genre, but it had a lot more to do with the fact that all the creative talent involved was obviously committed to their crafts and told some really solid stories. So when the chance to read the second volume of the book came along I was definitely interested.

For the first eighteen or so years of my life I was a big baby when it came to horror movies, to the point where my friends still remind me that I came about as close to freaking the f*** out and hiding behind a couch and screaming “I HATE HORROR MOVIES!!!” to the lightning streaked heavens while watching stuff like Lake Placid and Mars Attacks which are, respectively, a monster flick about a giant alligator and a broad, albeit violent, comedy about an alien invasion which should give you just enough of an indication of how dumb I was (they’re also both terrible but that’s neither here nor there).

I’ll admit, before reading the first issue of Dracula the Unconquered a little over a year ago, I knew I was going to like it based on the creative team alone. And their willingness to give a full length comic book away for a dollar, which I believe is the perfect price point for digital comics.

“Well, four years sure do make a difference”. That was my first thought after I finished reading issue three of Pope Hats, because if I had gotten this when issue one had come out in 2007 I would have never given this series a second thought since issue one was terrible. Actually, terrible might be [...]

My time at SPX this year might as well have had the added addendum of “SPX 2012: Patrick Smith Plays Catch Up”, because that was what it was. If you’ve seen a lot of the books I’ve reviewed up to this point, very few of them are new. The way I am with most of this stuff is that [...]

I’ve known about Tom Neely’s The Blot for a few years now, but for whatever reason I never got around to picking it up. After reading it in our hotel room the Sunday morning of SPX and now re-reading it this past week I can say with some certainty that I want to hijack a [...]

Alright I’m going to try to keep this short because I doubt any of you want to read a long review just so you can read an equally long (but far more interesting) interview so let me start by saying this: I would not be surprised at all if C. Spike Trotman and Diana Nock’s [...]

Ed Piskor’s recent body of work has interested me immensely since I first became familiar with it earlier last year. Wizzywig was a deft look at how a kid getting into trouble with a new hobby can quickly spiral out of control, especially during the dawn of cyber crime and how the law had no [...]

Before going to SPX this year, I polled a few people I knew with more of a background in alt/art/whatever-the-hell-you-wanna-call-‘em comiX to give me some recommendations for books and creators I should check out. One of those people was former Spandexless contributor Alec Berry who, among other things, told me to check out the Oily [...]

Reading comics by Benjamin Marra is an experience quite unique to anything else I’ve read up to this point, and for the last two weeks I’ve been trying to figure out if that experience was a positive or a negative one. The reason I’ve been indecisive is that when reading Marra’s comics it’s best to [...]