El Borbah
Taking the opposite tack of Charles Addams or Edward Gorey, Charles Burns draws his goulish characters with creepy precision, using lots of rich black areas and careful brush strokes. The effect is stunning, and instantly recognizable. Interestingly, I read an interview with Burns where he said his lettering skills were poor, and that his wife does all the lettering in his comics. (Fortunately for him, his wife lettering is as good as it gets.)
El Borbah is an oversize, 96-page black and white book that collects several stories starring one of Burns' most memorable characters, a morbidly obese private detective who wears a Mexican wrestling costume on the job. It sounds silly, but the stories are anything but -- they are excellent noir fiction with suspense and twists along the entire ride. Burns would make a hell of a novelist, but I'm glad he's sticking to comics. $11.53 on Amazon
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Man, I used to really dig el Borbah. This was back when Heavy Metal was good, and actually published more than violent or soft-porn adolescent dreams. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll look for this in my local comic shop.
The biggest, meanest chain-smoking, cheap take-out eating, booze guzzling, thug busting, mexican wrestler mask wearing crime fighter to ever hit the funny books.
The lines he spouts as he snaps the arms of underworld twerps are pure gold.
This stuff stands up to repeated rereads.