One-shot Comics Are Wonderful
Celebrating recent short comics gems, including Kieron Gillen's Closer, Mark Russell's Polis, & manosphere-noir one-shot Pick-Up.
Here at Weird City, we're huge fans of not only long, detailed graphic novels, but also short comics. You might have missed it, but we even produced two of our own just this month: The Launch Comic and Social Media Funeral. To me, there is nothing more satisfying than being able to tell a powerful, infectiously emotional story that's completed in a few pages.
In keeping with that sentiment, this week's newsletter is dedicated to short comics, self-contained anthologies, and one-shots worth your time. That includes the creator of our featured art, Taylor C Adams, one of my favorite sequential artists more people should know about.
Kinship (shown above) is a one-page comic he created about finding and raising a dinosaur warrior from hatchling to adulthood. A boldly colorful screen-printed version of it is framed on my wall next to the almighty Weird City Library, with shelves filled with books from Moebius, John Cassaday, and Peter Kuper. (Exactly where it belongs.) You can and should check out more of his pieces here, which feature plenty of wildly detailed illustrations that deserve their own comics. For now, I'll settle for prettying up my office.
And now onto the newsletter...
One-Shot Wonderful: Closer, Polis, & Pick-Up
While you might be acquainted with his hit Image series DIE & Die: Loaded, Kieron Gillen is a man with range. One who demonstrates his mastery of the short form perfectly in the one-shot Closer (2025), which is likely still floating around local comic shops (and always available digitally).
"...that its taken this long into my career to do a standalone comic like this may imply something. It's not really a format the industry has traditionally been interested in supporting."
