Solid Blood #17 is a really special comic; one of the few that can be enjoyed on multiple levels, and which actively encourages the reader to dig deeper, becoming part of the story in the process.
The content alone is worth getting; a pastiche to ‘90s super-hero teams, the design, artwork and colouring by Ryan Ottley and Cliff Rathburn are a deliberate throwback to Liefeld/ Lee era of X-Men stories. Even the paper is the pulpier newsprint evocative of the period, making this a tactile material experience as well as a narrative one.
Writer Robert Kirkman weaves 3 plot threads which come together at the end for a terrific cliffhanger. Interestingly, this is issue #17 in a proposed 25 issue run, but no preceeding or succeeding issues have been published. However, Kirkman cleverly drops enough hints that the reader is able to fill out the larger storyline themselves.
The real mystery though, is that neither Kirkman, Ottley or Rathburn supposedly have any memory of carrying out this work. The characters have similarities to others that the creators have discussed, or that Kirkman has used in other titles (like The Walking Dead), but no script was ever written, no artwork ever produced. Several thousand copies of Solid Blood mysteriously appeared in late 2020, and their existence is at the centre of a larger meta-narrative, which Kirkman alludes to in his cryptic video below:
Put bluntly, this issue is a comic that has appeared from another dimension. What sounds corny at first is given credibility by subtle nods to the cultural false memories (The Mandela Effect) and to the conspiracy theories behind the experiments of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. To coin a phrase, the existence of this issue represents a glitch in The Matrix, and owning this issue places the reader within this broader extra-dimensional experience.
If you’re still wondering what the point of all this is, the biggest clue is in the timing. Throughout 2020, the global pandemic hit comic shops hard; footfall of customers fell away drastically and many stores permanently closed during the lockdown(s). It’s a trend that has continued throughout 2021 and into the future unless things turn around. Through Image Comics, all copies of Solid Blood 17 were provided to comic shops for free without ordering, the cheaper paper stock allowing the publishers to carry this out at a fraction of regular cost. The unique viral marketing urges readers to come into stores, to own a physical copy and not to just stream a pirated copy online. It’s a novel and magnanimous move by Kirkman and Image; and at time of writing there are still some copies out there, so what are you waiting for?