When something truly unique and unexpected hits the comics world, there's always a strange silence that takes up the aftermath. Michael DeForge is sitting in that silence right now, after hitting comics like an atom bomb over the past year and a half or so. Blisteringly fast, shockingly young, and seemingly intent on making appearances in every place that matters in the medium (up to and ...

I read X'ed Out by Charles Burns at a laundromat in a torn down section of Los Angeles. Have you ever been in one of these places? Mildew in the corners of the particleboard ceiling, broken greenish lightbulbs that pop and fizz and sputter out with the sweltering condensation of the dryers, identical velvet-canvas portraits of the same hideous clown-painted gangbanger at the end of every aisle. ...