Thirty Days of Short Reviews #19: Cold Heat Special #10

William Cardini is a natural as a choice for a Cold Heat Special. His stripped-down, Fort Thunder style of art and Risographed color choices fit right into the aesthetic of the original series and the follow-ups. He also has a refined sense of how to put together genre concepts into an avant-garde framework, as can easily be seen in any number of his own projects (but Vortex is the best example of this).

This issue involves a woman hunting a minotaur in a labyrinth. There's a clever visual here as her sword contains a sort of GPS system that guides her through the maze and takes her to her target. The way in which Cardini alternates between pink and blue creates quite a trippy experience for the reader. His figure drawing is actually more conventional than usual here, as the figure of the woman is stripped down to a few bold brushstrokes here and there. The actual maze has that sort of wavy line he uses so much, allowing the reader to know that what they're reading is pure artifice while it's creating its own world. The comic goes into some truly wacky directions after she discovers the corpse, as spiders come out. One is cut in half, only to reveal a rare record that starts playing, starting a sort of impromptu dance party. At just twelve pages, this is the perfect length for the kind of silly weirdness on display.