Goes Like This

For almost three decades, master cartoonist Jordan Crane has put together a body of short stories that garnered him multiple Eisner and Ignatz Award nominations, via the pages of his comic book series Uptight and the influential comics anthology, Non. Yet they have never been collected until now. Featuring over a dozen short stories (spanning multiple genres) published over the past 25 years, Goes Like This is a gorgeously packaged anthology (including varying paper stocks and rounded corners) of Crane''s work. ''The Hand of Gold'' is a short but grim Weird Western, a morality play in which an accidental crime leads a criminal to a supernatural maximum security cell. ''Below the Shade of Night'' presents an anxiety that is rooted in the follies and ignorance of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. ''Vicissitude'' maps uncharted territory of graphic melancholia via a tale of infidelity. ''Trash Night'' depicts the troubled relationship of Dee and Leo, with mounting tension and mistrust that reaches a boiling point. In ''The Dark Nothing,'' a rare foray into science fiction, the three-person crew of prospecting ship Sagasu 17 attempt to harvest an asteroid, and things go horribly awry. ''The Middle Nowhere'' begins with a man waiting in a small shack. All around him is a black sand desert. The wind rises, the rain comes, and it just might be the end of everything he''s known. Also featuring additional prints and drawings from the author''s archives, Goes Like This is a tantalizing sampler of one of the most brilliant cartoonists working today.