Spaceship #1

60 pages, Xerox with Riso cover, 8 x 10, Staple Bound

Written and edited by Ashton Carless
With art by: Ethan Means, Zack Thompson, Nora Ashwood, Ethan Kramer, Floyd Tangeman, Aneesa Razak Deji Lasi, Frankie Lo, Jade Mar and Ashton Carless.

The new disks transceiving a weirder retort from the stars than ever before, so far out and in a chain, so much life and metal working, so many little processors, wire, the neat combinations of such in pressurized globes and thinking from out there, so far out. They, in their march, hard, sappy, flippant, loving, etc. They, seeing and made so, so as to say and hear their story of ghosts and stuff lost also to us when it all fell out rom below out feet.

On Spaceship:

"It cauterizes the spasms of th soul into a pure spherical mirror, a vessel for the expanding nature of the mind… but like a marble, dislodged from your mind's eye… because what are we if not trapped inside the universes we create? but with art we have a vessel, a spaceship, to shoot like a pinball into the universe of another human being… Seek to amend the space between each other, but without losig the sublime depth of experience we come to understand in glimpses…"
-Floyd Tangeman, Dead Crow

"This is a comic you can sit down and react and interact with. Aside from being just plain beautiful and a true visual pleasure, there are ideas and phrases both hidden and in plain sight. While the emotions and language are upfront, the work required to dust them off amid the layers of visual ideas and obstruction allows the reader to feel a real sense of engagement with what is being said. You can get quite a deal out of this work the more you don't ignore the art required of you as a reader. A very special comic and a universe unto itself."
-Austin English, Domino Books

"There's a palpable air of mystery to this whole thing, as well --- but not only is it far from impenetrable or indecipherable, to the extent that things are "hidden," they're hidden in plain sight. Carless and co. are in no way disguising their intentions, much less the nuts and bolts of their proceedings --- what they ARE is intentionally obfuscating them, which only sounds like it might be the same thing, but isn't in either theory OR practice. If something's disguised, the intention is to deceive, to trick; there's no deception at play here, everything being presented --- in pictures and text --- is more or less right out in the open, but it's occluded/obufscated/ obstructed to a degree that demands no less than full engagement on the part oof the reader, both in terms of arranging/analyzing the text AND interpreting the imagery. Think of a pathway covered by leaves in the fall (I won't compare it to one covered by ice in the winter for reasons that should be obvious to regular readers here) and you're getting the right idea… but with effort comes reward, and the reward here is that of experiencing a new and innovative approach to an admittedly tried and true concept : the use of outer space as a metaphor for the human soul, the journey "out there" serving as macrocosmic reflection of a journey within.
- Ryan C's Four Color Apocalypse

Printed by Bootleg Books 2023
Published by Dead Crow 2022