Comic book series : The Wipeout

One of the brightest lights of modern Italian comics, Francesca Ghermandi combines a gorgeous full-color palette of ultra-stylized graphics with a decidedly hardboiled, but very funny, story sensibility. Jo Tartaglia, who works for a global cleaning-products company, is putting the finishing touches on a revolutionary new fluid that would clean everything at once - the only drawback being that, when mixed with milk, it becomes a deadly poison. Nagged nearly to death by his wife, he falls in with the lovely Virgin Prune, a lady with a shady past who enlists him to get her out from under a villainous loan shark. In typical film-noir style, there are plots within plots, not everyone ends up alive at the end of the story, and those who are dead aren't necessarily dead for good.