Throw in the Towel. The duplicitous Alvin Crabshack finds himself slipping into mysterious adventure, even as he pretends to ignore it. Biology meets folklore in a subterranean kitchen, where a shirtless, bearded man fires his only employee before the job has begun. Will the goat outpace man in the evolutionary marathon? Boring parties and annoyed girlfriends are no match for the vacuum of the future. Masked agents are forcing the final heat wave into faked perspective and vice versa, while a stranger rides a patchwork donkey. Can you give me a ride? What next?
“There's been a lot of talk in recent years about comics - what they are, what they aren't: "literary", "Art", etc etc. That's all fine, but sometimes we get books like "The Heavy Hand" by cartoonists like Chris Cilla, and all of that talk is rendered moot - this book is a ridiculously potent distillation of Cilla's singular comic book worldview: strange, dark, thick, big-nosed, slightly nightmarish and totally immersive -- this is PURE COMICS, the real deal. I've long suspected that Chris Cilla is one of the best cartoonists around, and now the proof is here, for all to see. I know I will not read a better comic this year (and maybe not this decade). 'The Heavy Hand' is a triumph." -- Zak Sally, Recidivist, Sammy the Mouse
"I really enjoyed The Heavy Hand. There is a level of high strangeness throughout the book. Chris Cilla is a serious artist who happens to draw funny, and his work has a comic intensity that is most appealing. It's an all-around great effort." -- Gerald Jablonski
108 pages. Black and white with color covers. Sparkplug Books, 2010
