The Puma Blues, Vol. 1: Watch That Man

The Puma Blues #1

by Stephen Murphy, Michael Zulli (Illustrator)

Set in the year 2000, The Puma Blues describes a post-apocalyptic "future" in which special agent Gavia Immer lives in isolation at the Quabbin Reservoir in Massachusetts. His work consists of collecting pH samples and capturing mutated animals -- in this case, flying manta rays that nest at the reservoir -- for government research. Meanwhile, Gavia's free time is spent analyzing the video records of his late father, who chronicled his own descent into madness in the last years of his life.

Graphic Novel. Black & White interior artwork. Collects issues 1-12 of The Puma Blues, originally published by Aardvark One International.

Genres: Graphic Novels, Comics

275 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Stephen Murphy is an American comic book writer and editor known for his work on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. With Michael Zulli, he was co-creator of the critically acclaimed 1980s independent comic The Puma Blues.

Pseudonyms: Dean Clarrain, J.D. Vollman.

Reviews

[Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a medium awash with hidden gems, Puma Blues is one of the hiddenest, and one of the gemmiest. Published in small print runs in the 80s, the book still boasts a creative team that makes its obscurity somewhat unfathomable. Writer Stephen Murphy would go on to help shepherd a little franchise called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles through its many rises and falls in popularity over the following two decades, while Michael Zulli's art on Sandman created an instant and obsessive cult of fandom around his body of work...but that fame has still not permeated to the earliest comic in his amazing career.

Puma Blues is a dark, mysterious and genre-defying book. It's experimental and weird and its reach exceeds its grasp in all the best ways. It's about the end of the world, and the search for self in the past, present and future all at once. It begins in dystopian science fiction, extends through philosophy and existentialism, and ends in a strange montage of words and images in an atom-blasted desert.

It's understandable, given the decade in which it was released, that it was far too eccentric to find an audience in a world that had not yet glommed on to geek culture, or to niche culture.

But it is astounding and sad that it hasn't found a readership in that same world twenty years later, when its audience is tailor-made and the sense of inescapable doom that bled through its pages way back when is deeply indoctrinated in our lives today.

Puma Blues is a really beautiful work of art. I hope someday more people can find that out.

[Boots LookingLand · Rating 2 out of 5]

i'm really torn about how to rate this. it pains me to give anything with michael zulli's name attached to it anything less than at least three stars, but the truth is, i didn't really enjoy this except for looking at the pictures. the narrative is too rambly, too abstract; not good storytelling (or at least not what i want from a story). the visual narrative is incredible but the words just don't do anything to elevate it. and it's too heavy handed (maybe in its day it would not have felt so?).

honestly, were it not for the art, i can't see me getting past about 40 pages of this. while it does have surprising and creative elements, it just doesn't move well.