Finally--finally--we're able to add the legendary RAW to this site! For a long while people have been telling me I've needed to add RAW, since of course the original series was produced at a 10.5 x14" size. I had always agreed, but finding issues of RAW for anything less than a fortune was impossible.

Luckily though, a few weeks ago I found this issue on ebay for a reasonable, affordable amount, so I jumped at it--not only just to finally be able to read an issue, but to be able to add it to the site.

I must admit, I'm probably not the best audience for RAW, since, as you can probably guess, my comic tastes definitey run toward the superhero and/or mainstream. But even though there was some of material here that leaves me cold--uber-ironic stuff featuring drugs, sex, really crude language, all for the point of just trying to shock, it seems--there was some really superb stuff.

One of the pieces that really grabbed me was "The Beginning of of the End", a pictorial history of the A-Bomb, written by Paul Boyer and designed by Francois Mouly. It's not comics, exactly, but it is a highly-graphic history of the development of the bomb, the world's reaction to it, and the accompanying attempts by the government to "sell" it to the citizenry. It runs twelve pages, but I could've read something ten times longer. (rollover the image to see the first page of it)

Other notable matieral this issue is the small-size Maus insert, Chapter Seven, by art spiegleman, of course. There's also a long sequence called Raw Gagz, which is a collage of one-panel "gag" cartoons by a whole slew of artists. As you can imagine, some hit, some miss, but overall a very interesting segment. I think my favorite was by Drew Friedman--you don't even need to see the art itself to appreciate the caption--"Just then it hit me...everybody in the joint had Acromegaly."

All in all, a fine issue, full of genuine laughs as well as thought-provoking stuff, which is undoubtedly one of the goals of RAW--to do comics that are more than guys in costumes punching each other.

Since RAW was of course a series, I intended to give it its own page like the other ongoing treasury-sized series. It seems a little weird doing it right now, since there's just the one issue here, but I look at this page as an ongoing concern, and I hope to add more issues of RAW as soon as I can!