For this second edition of Self-Published Saturday, I want to try something different (and what better time than in the second edition ever?), talking two comics that share some common ground, rather than just spotlighting one. Part of the vision for this column is to cover as wide a breadth of the self-published comics work being made today as possible, and so, hey, why not double up when the opportunity presents itself.
And even better if that means covering two of my personal favorite cartoonists in indie comics today: Jim Mahfood and Jesse Lonergan. Although as you’ll see below, their respective self-published takes on the familiar bat-themed vigilante could not be more different.
Savage Street Vigilante
Savage Street VigilanteCartoonist: Jim Mahfood
Lettering & Book Design: Justin Stewart
Buy It Here
I met Jim Mahfood briefly at New York Comic Con to buy this book from him, and I thought he seemed like such a friendly, well-adjusted guy — then I read Savage Street Vigilante and had to reconsider. I kid, but this book is without question a volume-to-11 bat-take that is not for the faint of heart.
Armed with Mahfood’s striking, controlled-chaos cartooning, Savage Street Vigilante is a one-shot that imagines a long-tenured bat vigilante whose mind has snapped due to poison injected into him by a certain-clown coded arch nemesis. From there, the book careens at top-speed through a story covered with graphic violence, profanity, and psycho-sexual superhero relations. And it’s fantastic.
This is one of those books that for obvious reasons could only really be self-published, operating as it does with absolutely no restraint. There’s also just such a palpable sense of here of the cartoonist making every choice for maximum cool, almost from page to page. It has a narrative arc to it, almost a three act structure, but it also feels sidelined when the mood strikes so that Mahfood can maximize his awesome hyper-stylized, gritty cartooning.
This is a book where a supervillian might get chainsawed in half on one page, before Hunter S. Thompson shows up on the next. It pays homage to some familiar bat-beats, but then the sex starts (and there’s a good amount of sex) and all of a sudden that’s what the comic is about.
The word I keep coming back to with this one is unrestrained. And while it’s easy enough to strive for that when doing a superhero parody, Mahfood has the perfect, inherently over-the-top style for it. The end result is a NSFW, adult superhero skewering of the highest order, loaded with recognizable homages to familiar story beats and characters, conveyed by interesting cartooning.
We Ride at Night
We Ride at Night
Cartoonist: Jesse Longergan
Available Via: Jesse Lonergan’s Patreon
And now for something completely different. At the same NYCC I mentioned above, I also had a chance to chat with Jesse Lonergan and pick up his own bat-themed hero self-published comic, We Ride at Night. And while it’s just as idiosyncratic as Mahfood’s take on the character, that’s where the similarities stop.
We Ride at Night, which you can read digitally via Jesse’s excellent patreon (which will likely make another appearance in this column in the months to come), is a book he occasionally prints as a stapled, black-and-white almost-zine. On his website, Lonergan describes this one as a “rock-and-roll fever dream”, and that’s exactly how it reads, almost like a comics poem that intermingles snippets of songs you’ve heard with Lonergan’s high octane eye for action and occasional homages to bat-themed characters.
I have picked this one up and paged throughout it no fewer than a dozen times, sometimes with great focus (as I did for this piece) and other times sort of thoughtlessly as I work through ideas or procrastinate in the face of intimidating day job tasks. Jesse notes on his website that the aim of this piece was a logic closer to a music video or dream, and I personally think he’s hit the mark.
The lyrics, which are rendered by a set of typeface tools that Lonergan photographed for the inside cover, start to take on a musicality with repeat readings, set as they are atop panels wherein cassettes are inserted into tape decks, fingers are gliding over electric guitar strings, and cars / motorcycles are flying through the air. Personally, I read them to a melody close to The Passenger by Iggy Pop, but I imagine other readers will transpose the words in this comic over other songs of their choosing.
The point is that the musicality the book aims for made it into the comic. On top of that, it’s just an utter joy to see Lonergan, who is one of my personal favorites, getting loose with caped and cowled bat characters, whether they be juggling grenades, surfing on car hoods, or on stage belting lyrics into the mic.
This comic lives at the intersection of music and superhero storytelling and self-published comics zines with no rules, and that’s a space I have enjoyed visiting (and re-visiting).
Check out the last edition of Self-Published Saturday here
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