Paul Pope's One Trick Rip-Off / Deep Cuts

One Trick Rip-Off/Deep Cuts is a collection of comics by Paul Pope dating back to the 90's.  My capsule review?  It's currently $19 for 288 pages of Paul Pope art, so it's a no-brainer purchase.  No one's comics exude cool quite the way Pope's do.  Even taxis or chopping tomatoes looks cool when he draws them.




The writing?  As you'd expect from such a collection, some of the stories work better than others. The longest and best story, The One-Trick Rip-Off is a thriller about super powered-gang members betraying one another - - they're called the One-Tricks because they have one very special trick - - essentially Jessie Custer's voice of god from Preacher.  It's a great page turner, and could easily take place in the same slightly futuristic world as Pope's Batman: Year One Hundred and Heavy Liquid.

The rest of the book includes another strong gang thriller and several more experimental pieces, including a telling of Antigone, an autobiographical dream about disfigurement, and manga about a rather strange eating contest.




Those additional stories will probably only be enjoyed by the Paul Pope obsessive, but the rest of the book is well worth the $19 it's selling for at Amazon.