Black Eye is a Canadian comics publisher established by Michel Vrána in the early 90s, and soon became extremely well regarded. The books all had stylish designs and a quite literary sensibility. Two of the series published have become comic shops “staples” — Hicksville (by Dylan Horrocks) and Berlin (by Jason Lutes), which is quite an achievement for a small publisher.
But in this blog series, I started off by covering everything Tragedy Strikes Press published, because Vrána (and friends) started out there.
Once tragedy struck, Vrána quickly established Black Eye, and most of the people who had been published by Tragedy Strikes continued on with Black Eye.
The 90s was a difficult time to survive publishing comics, and like many publishers at the time, Black Eye had to close up shop. But in an unexpected twist, Vrána got back in the publishing game over two decades later and restarted Black Eye. I can’t recall any other publishers returning like this?
And that’s it. This has been a fun blog series to do, because I got to re-read some old favourites, and discovered that I had never actually read Berlin in full before. And I hope that they keep publishing stuff, because they have an impressive taste level — almost every one of these books are pretty spiffy.