A few years ago, I took a look at the first couple issue of Emma Kubert and Rusty Gladd’s new series from Image, Inkblot. I talked about legacy and fantasy storytelling and how those have combined to create a unique series that feels like it’s a long-forgotten cult classic from the 70s. Since then, it’s been a little under three years and I had thought, with its last issue published in January of 2022, that the series had come to its conclusion and I could go through what made this such a fun series. Well.

Inkblot is a story told in smaller stories. It’s the showcase of the comic arc theory: the full series arc, the trade paperback arc, and the issue arc. It hits those arc beats like a conductor throughout these fifteen issues as we’re introduced to the titular inkblot of a mysterious magical cat, The Seeker, and her extended family as we tumble through various planes of reality and all manner of bastard mischief a cat can get into across twenty pages. But it’s in those small arcs that we get glimpses of the larger arc happening throughout—the realms falling apart, previous power structures coming to a head, and the Void slowly strangling every land it can infiltrate. And those small glimpses of chaos that we’re given throughout the series build up to the larger issue of the Seeker’s family no longer being in control, at least not to the extent that they had been in the past. 

But then where does all of this go? In fifteen issues we’ve had this building up of tears in the world and in the Seeker’s family as well as the appearance of horrors from within the Void. The problem is, we don’t know where it goes. We may never actually know where it goes since the sixteenth issue was pulled from solicitation and hasn’t been put up again. Inkblot shares another thing in common with cult-favorites from the seventies: a premature ending and a bundle of loose threads still in our hands. But then that’s how comics work sometimes. A larger series is planned but only a few issues are able to come out and we get as much of the story as we can from those. It’s a part of the business, but at the very least were able to get a fun adventure out of it while we could, even if we could only get a glimpse of what could have been. 

Comics will try to break your heart, but there’s still something good to glean from them regardless. Even if we don’t get to see a conclusion to the Seeker’s story, the world she lives in, or the little inky cat that traipses through time and space, we at least got to see what a cat would do with that power: act a shit. And sometimes getting to see a cat cause time-space problems is a fun time on its own. 

Get excited. Get that damn cat.

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Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.