Announced at Publisher’s Weekly, Josh Frankel of Zip Comics is renaming and relaunching his comic company Zip Comics to Z2 Comics after the success of the release of “Harvey Pekar’s Clevland.” Set for a big launch in April of next year, Z2 is poised to bust down every door you own with two colossal releases: a brand new and revised version of Paul Pope’s “Escapo” and the first collection of Dean Haspiel’s Billy Dogma webcomic with “Fear, My Dear.”
This is rather impossibly exciting because both those works are, well, excellent. “Escapo” is incredibly hard to find, self-published by Pope in 1999, but it’s coming back in full color with brand new material added — around 40 pages worth, including a new 10 page story according to the article. Pope is a creator whose work is positively essential in every comic collection, but so much of his bibliography is hard to come by these days; and despite promises for things like the re-release of “THB,” we seem to rarely get too many new versions of his older material (not including that excellent re-release of “One Trick Rip-Off” from Image last year). Having “Escapo” released to a wide audience is just too cool.
Meanwhile, Haspiel’s comic “Fear, My Dear” (which you can read here) is an excellent representation of the cartoonist’s talent. Haspiel is perhaps best known for the illustrated introduction to Bored to Death, but his comics are incredibly exciting, from his collaboration with Jonathan Ames on “The Alcoholic” or his collaboration with Harvey Pekar in “The Quitter.” Seeing as Billy Dogma hasn’t been put in print before and “Fear, My Dear” stands behind us on the internet back in 2008, having a print collection of this is a great way to introduce new fans to Hapsiel’s work and library in a way ostensibly more accessible than the internet (as weird as that may be to comprehend).
Either way, these two slated releases are excellent books to debut with for Frankel’s new comic company, and I for one welcome our new comic overlord.
