The task facing Josh Bayer’s new Tinto Press comic, Black Star, is both twofold and daunting : to add depth, texture, and significance to the “main work” it refers back to and, in a very real sense, occurs within — that being the just-reviewed Theth : Tomorrow Forever  — and to justify its own existence as an individual, self-contained work.

Which, for the record, it isn’t — but that needn’t necessarily prevent it from functioning as one. If you’re confused by this review right about now, that’s okay — if you’re confused by the comic itself, considerably less so.

Adapted from the classic Dick Briefer Frankenstein story “The Faceless Monster,” this richly-drawn (and even more richly-colored) book is also a “book-within-a-book,” a meta-textual narrative sprung from the mind of Theth “himself” metaphorically, his creator literally — and one that calls into question to an even greater degree the separation…