Masters of the Nefarious

Series: New York Review Comics
ISBN: 9781681378343
Pages: 176
Publication Date: March 12, 2024

[Masters of the Nefarious] a beautiful, glossy-wrapped, full colour 165 page paperback, full of surrealism and silliness...characters, events, ideas and locations come and go as Chris & Montgomery, accompanied by their friend Fongor, engage with the fallout from a tsunami, giant mollusks and the appearance of what the blurb calls ‘an ominous quadrilateral UFO’, not to mention ‘a mysterious villain’ in the shadows.
—Rupert Loydell, International Times

A master of the absurd, French artist La Police delightfully defies virtually every trope and expectation in this madcap comic adventure. Take a dive into the insanity, and revel in the fact that nothing makes any sense.
—David McAllister, Prospect Magazine

Masters of the Nefarious...[is] strange and wonderful, terrifically funny, and largely unlike anything else coming out of the scene at the moment. At the price, it’s both more than worthwhile and a very quick and satisfying read thanks to the narrative line, however silly and arbitrary it actually is. Some of the panels are as transcendent as Goya and as funny as a random still from Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
—Leonard Pierce, The Comics Journal

Murderous mollusks are attacking the Maluku islands! A giant iron quadrilateral has appeared in the sky! … I really loved this strange comic, which is partially a send-up classic adventure comics and partially its own surreally stupid thing, with little echoes of Adult Swim and Far Side and even the early ZAZ comedies.
—Max Read

Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage is, as it sounds, a wonderfully funny series of digressions from a bizarre main plot; many of which eventually feed back into that prime narrative, landing with a witty gotcha moment. La Police makes use of one-page narrated panels that contradictorily can give the book a brisk reading pace and yet still ask us to dwell on the surreal silliness of individual images. Indeed, to a degree, each panel can feel like a discrete entity unto itself, inviting us into a moment of unfiltered and entrancing oddity. This is heady, intoxicating stuff.
—Andy Oliver, Broken Frontier

Masters of the Nefarious: Mollusk Rampage’s story is told in page-sized panels, each with a caption below it. La Police is very fond of making the story pivot on a dime . . . You’ll find plenty to savor here.
—Tobias Carroll, Postcards From Komiksoj

Is the sequential timing of these bizarre occurrences mere coincidence, or do they share some sinister secret connection? A crime fighting trio, comprised of mutant twin brothers Chris (who possesses the ability “to be in Uganda”) and Montgomery (capable of transforming into an enormous hulking monster at the site of glassware) and the enigmatic Fongor Fonzym, is determined to embark upon an epic quest to discover what is really going on and, if necessary, put an end to whatever that may be.
—Tom Batten, Library Journal, starred review