Back when albums were a thing, many a band or artist struggled with the so-called “difficult second album,” but such a concept applies to other mediums, as well — including, of course, comics. It’s much harder to make an impactful “splash” when people see you coming and when they, to one degree or another, sort of know what to expect. Deliver on that expectation, and you’re accused of playing it safe; deviate from it, and you’re accused of getting too big for your britches too quickly and abandoning whatever it was that made you successful in the first place. You just can’t win.

Evan Salazar, for his part, has chosen the “more of the same” route for Rodeo Comics #2, but not necessarily done in the same way : for one thing, the MICE Mini-Grant he received has gone into upping the production values of his self-published comic considerably, the…

Deep in the murky subterranean depths of your being, there are questions that can’t even be asked, much less answered. Hidden truths obfuscated by so many layers of denial and reification that the very act of keeping them hidden has become a central function of your identity. Or maybe that should be of both your identities — the one you’ve constructed for yourself, and the one you show the public. What you see is never what you get with either, of course, because you desperately want to avoid what you need to see just as desperately as you know you really should be doing no such thing. Think of those parties you went to in your twenties that you knew your ex was going to be at and there was nobody in the world you wanted to see less, and nobody in the world you wanted to see more…