Puma Blues

The Puma Blues
Cover of The Puma Blues, number one
Publication information
Publisher	Aardvark One International, Mirage Studios, Dover Comics & Graphic Novels
Format	limited series
Publication date	1986–1989, 2015
No. of issues	23, plus one minicomic, Collected Hardcover with new conclusion
Creative team
Written by	Stephen Murphy
Artist(s)	Michael Zulli

The Puma Blues was a comic book written by Stephen Murphy and drawn by Michael Zulli. It ran from June 1986 to somewhere in the beginning of 1989, stretching over 23 regular issues and a single "half-issue" minicomic. In 2015 it was re-issued in a collected edition by Dover Comics & Graphic Novels with a new 40-page conclusion by Murphy and Zulli.

Published first by Aardvark One International and later by Mirage Studios, the story is set around the millennium. and follows Gavia Immer, a governmental fauna agent (aka game warden), as he goes through an existential dilemma while watching videos his father left for him after his death.

The comic book's detailed artwork by Michael Zulli, which focused primarily on wildlife and nature, was superposed to a loose narrative with a druggy, dreamy, new age apocalyptic atmosphere. This de-structuralizing of the main narrative increased dramatically in later issues, with the second half of the series often taking the form of illustrated prose poetry within an associative narrative.

Issue #1 begins in March of the year 2000 (fourteen years in the future, by the comic's original publication date). It is a world of space shuttle passenger service, humanoid robotic workers, fully armored taxicabs, and children in gas masks—and it is a world without the Bronx. It seems that on April 20, 1995, a white supremacist group attempted to kidnap the President during a visit to New York City. During the ensuing gunplay, a member of the group detonated a nuclear device, and five years later the Northeastern United States is still in recovery.